social media explorer

I was able to catch up with Kathy Jacobs of AllVoices.com at Blog World Expo Saturday. She is the community guru for the site, which is a news content effort totally driven by user submitted news — a citizen journalism lab of sorts. Kathy and I both learned of the bombing in Islamabad from a breaking news item submitted on the site by one if its users, so I knew right away that even though the community is relatively small at this point, it’s efficient.

Since citizen journalism, specifically having the traditional media embrace and use it, is one of the topics I’m speaking on at Blog World Expo, and is a subject matter of keen interest to me and, I assume, some of you, I thought we would devote some time to AllVoices.com on an episode of SME-TV.

I love what AllVoices is doing and I think for crowdsourcing and citizen journalism fans out there, it will serve as a powerful and fulfilling site to bookmark and participate in. I have concerns about citizen journalism being fully embraced by the mainstream but hope we can all point traditional media and citizen journalism folks the same, collaborative direction so that the future of our newsgathering organizations has a healthy mix of wide spread contributors without sacrificing accuracy or standards.

What are your thoughts on how the two can blend? If you’ve checked out AllVoices.com, tell us what you think about it.

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