Stanford Fellow Imagines Every Cell Phone as Citizen Media Outlet

Mark Glaser at MediaShift PBS met me some time ago and we spoke on the subject of citizen media and the future of it. I truly believe cell phones are the right way to go here. Combine this with the proper business model. I would describe the features of such. Shortly I will reveal the first site using the technology in a more general atmosphere.

Key quote from article:
"The key here is that the media organizations need to realize they are losing control. They can't really control [the news] now because people are posting this stuff to other blogs. I think it would be better to merge traditional reporting with citizen media rather than have a [totally] new media.

To take the best of the old fashioned news organizations and bring in the power of the bloggers, because you have so many people investigating. Mix them and you have an extremely good organization and you'll have content that's really important in finding out the truth." -- Erik Sundelof, Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University

The interview is found here: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/07/digging_deeperstanford_fellow.html

Shortly on my project here at Stanford. The idea is to provide a simple, cheap and easy maintainable tool so that users that cannot connect to the internet still are able to do so with as simple techniques as possible. Thus my architecture will allow people 'in the field' to report news stories (or any other types of content for that matter) to the web using just a cell phone, but is developed in such a way as to be extremely extensible. As such one can basically push any piece of information - text, audio, graphic, picture, video from any cell phone to the web. It is the natural extension to citizen journalism as it creates the vehicle for people without internet being able to get their voices heard on the internet.

If you would like to try it out yourself the very simple showcase is found here - http://inthefieldonline.net/showcase. Step by step instructions is as below.
0. Click on Right now or use the direct link http://inthefieldonline.net/showcase/dynamic.php
1. Take a picture, audio and/or video clip.
2. Choose to send that via a Picture Message/Multimedia Message/MMS (or email if you would prefer that) 3. Send this message to show@inthefieldonline.net (of course short-codes are supported.) 4. Just watch the screen and you will see it pop up on its own.

The simplicity also exist for SMS:s and it has been tested in most continents.