More social media experiments
Lots happening with social media — or citizen journalism or open-source media, or whatever you want to call it. The BBC has a couple of ventures under way to take advantage of content produced by viewers, or “the people formerly known as the audience” as Dan Gillmor calls them. One of the latest was recently launched by BBC News 24, which is experimenting with a program called Your News.
According to the Media Guardian, the program will feature the best of the videos, photos and stories sent in by viewers to the BBC every day, and also some of the best user-generated content from around the Internet. The story says that the BBC gets around 10,000 emails a day with story suggestions, comments and pictures.
The Beeb’s Newsnight program is also experimenting with user-submitted videos, in something it’s calling Oh My Newsnight (a tribute to the Korean citizen journalism site Oh My News). A hat tip goes to Cybersoc for making note of that one. Viewers are asked to upload short video clips to YouTube or Google Video and then send the link to the BBC. One wonders why they wouldn’t just get people to tag their videos at del.icio.us so the BBC could find them automatically, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Meanwhile, ABC News has teamed up with Vancouver-based social media site NowPublic to gather opinion on what the U.S. should do about Iraq (thanks to BBC Radio’s Pods and Blogs for that one). NowPublic says that in addition to showing up on the site, “there’s a chance your video may appear on ABC’s Be Seen, Be Heard online news segment, as well as on flagship network news shows like Good Morning America and World News Tonight.”
