Crowdsourcing Video News
Photo owned by axel kramer (cc)
So, Youtube has just set up a new channel called ‘citizennews‘ dedicated to ‘highlighting some of the best news content on YouTube’. At first blush, I love the idea. Imagine standing in the rice riots of Vietnam, bearing witness to happenings world within hours. Isn’t that the what democratising the web is about? People-powered media.
Here’s the ‘citizennews’ editor, Olivia, introducing the service:
Viewers are encouraged to contact the ‘citizennews’ editor, highlighting videos they believe newsworthy, and the editorial process will sift out the videos of the moment. User-generated content and crowdsourcing for popularity, very Web 2.0. Editorial yea and nay, a bit old news don’t you think?
Perhaps ‘citizennews’ is a little like Frankenstein’s monster? Count the number of times ‘citizen journalism’ is inserted in the video. It’s nice, cheap way for Youtube and Google to source on the ground video from people in the thick of breaking news, circumventing the large news conglomerates. Cutting out the middle-man so to speak.
So Paper Nerds Inherit the Earth?
Youtubers aren’t interested in what the school paper nerds deem interesting, they like same kind of content that their friends are into. Let’s face it, slap any cool, ‘awesome’ intro you like onto a crowdsourced channel, the editorial voice is still that paper nerd for the average Youtuber. Going down this route would lead to a disconnect with the yoof viewership. They are the lifeblood of Youtube, the real viewers that Google/Youtube would love to serve ads to.
So, instead of adding editorial layers on videos, wouldn’t it be nice to think of video news laterally? It’s pretty obvious that Youtube’s citizen journalist experiment is going this way, anyway.
Meshing Your Video
Imagine this, I’m out and about town. By chance, I spy someone stencil spray-painting on the side of a building. I’m a big Banksy fan, this looks like something he’d do. I pull out my mobile phone and start videoing the event. I want my friends to see this video, because they’d get a kick out off seeing it live. I could be using an application like Qik (or maybe Android will have something similar) to stream video from my phone up to the Internet. Just to make sure that know what the clip is about, I add a description to my video “Looks like a Banksy”.
As my video is streaming on the web, a message is sent to my friends on different social networks telling them that I’m streaming live, giving them a link to view the video stream and my Banksy description. My video is tagged with the description and keywords I gave it. If they are offline when I stream, the link will redirect to my saved video.
Wouldn’t it also be nice if the video were peer-ranked too. My friends could rate the video and this number combined with the number of independent views outside my circle of friends would yield a popularity ranking. Perhaps they could swap, share and embed my video on their blogs. The more times it’s posted or shared, the more votes it gets.
Geotag the video with exact earth coordinates where it was taken and you have a distributed network of crowdsourced videos that editorialised by the public. A mesh of people-powered video. Make the most popular/recent/hot videos just icons on a map like Google Maps or Local Live and you have a simple, intuitive way to browse through those videos.
Agendas, Agendas
Agenda is, and always will be lock, stock and barrel of the news business be it sitting in the noisy presses or in binary. Youtube’s ‘citizennews’ or any other media outlet does this. Soliciting votes in a news channel may not uncover those hidden gem stories, but the most fitting way to sift through crowdsourced videos appears to be crowdsourcing thumbs ups too.