Tech Turns Users Into Mobile News Makers
from the mainstream-press-discovers-moblogging dept
The mainstream press is catching on to moblogging. ABC News has an article looking at the rapidly growing phenomenon of people using their camera phones to snap pictures and quickly upload them to a photo blog. These have been around for a while, so that's nothing new. What's more interesting is that ABC News is acknowledging that these mobloggers are likely to create and influence news stories in the future. They point to an example in Singapore where a professor tore up a students paper in front of the class while yelling at him. One student recorded the event and it's created a storm of controversy over student-teacher relations in the country. It makes sense - though, for all the hype about camera phones when they first came out, not many people seemed to think this was how they would be used. The camera phone makes it so that many more people have a cheap camera in their possession at all times, and the blog aspect makes it easy to publish any such photo. It's this combination that makes the whole package so powerful. The article also mentions that the various wireless carriers have all realized this is bigger than they expected, and are all investigating ways to offer their own moblogging services. Yet another example of why the "killer app" for wireless isn't about downloaded content - but about user-created content.
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