|mind-gloaming.net|

This article on Grinding.be on Zannel’s upcoming new feature set forced me to finally have a look at the service and give it a test run. I have to say it’s valuable simply for it’s ability to quickly get photographs off my phone and up someplace. This service seems to be a first step toward a live-blogging of nearly everything, you take a picture anywhere (anywhere with cellphone service, so essentially everywhere.) and it’s uploaded and everyone in your network knows about it. Lets say you’ve recorded some abusive behavior by the police on your camera phone, you can now have that distributed to everyone you know before the cop can come over and tell you to put your phone away (or arrest you for breaking a wiretapping statute in the state of Massachusetts). This kind of instantaneous activism can, I’d guess, continue a steady shift away from traditional news outlets for live on the ground coverage of events as they happen. You’ll probably feel that you can trust a participant with a camera phone covering an Anonymous protest against Scientology, for instance, than you will a media outlets skewed and under-researched coverage of events a full 24 hours after they happen. (an article that leans toward discrediting anonymous from a newspaper whose main viture is ready insulation for homeless persons during a cold-snap. Here, other Boston area coverage by my school paper that leans the other direction.)

Anyway, I digress.
Zannel and similar services allow something like Feedsite The Hole from Ellis’s Transmetropolitan to exist in the not too distant future, editors of a news organization could filter all the publically available feeds across Zannel, twitter, etc. to show only information relevant to, say, coverage of a large media confrence or press event. Imagine watching the reaction to something like Steve Jobs’s Macworld Keynote not from macrumors.com or engadget or CNN but from 15 different people at the same time, all live, all unedited, all coming straight to you. Can’t see what the screen says from that angle? simply switch feeds to the camera of the person sitting 3 rows up and 8 seats to the left and you can see it just fine. There’s no reason, even less reason than ever, to get your news or information from just one source and increasingly, to get it from any official outlet whatsoever. Would you rather see the progress of an engagement in Iraq straight from the US Military’s press office or from soldiers on the front lines who’re risking their careers to get the public information live and unfiltered. This sort of thing I think will, after hard-fought legal battles become something that will eventually fall under free speech, where it doesn’t damage the safety or strategic capacities of the service people on the ground.

I’m very excited to watch the possibilities these sorts of services open up in the dissemination and creation of unique timely and interesting content by (most) anyone, anywhere. This is giving citizen journalists the power and reach (potentially) of the whole aparatus of a major newspaper. Newspapers need to get wind of this sort of thing and adapt unless we want to see the New York Times a 15 dollar weekly broadside mailed to a thousand people with a staff of 10. We could well be left with fewer and fewer traditional media outlets in the wake of this sort of innovation. People might pronounce the newspaper and institutions like the New York or London Times sinking ships with their sails on fire before there’s more than true hairsbreadth crack in the hull or a match has been struck above decks. What I’m wondering here is, is whether the the content we’re capable of producing being produced? Is Blogosphere coverage as good as a traditional outlets? We know it’s more ubiquitous. This is an open, ongoing, and vibrant debate. (See also: interview on Kottke.org with Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks a deadtree and electronic [this links to chapter PDFs, the html version is in comic fucking sans *retch*] book on the subject) So, Zannell could well be a step toward increasing the multimedia richness of blog coverage, upping it’s quality.