Barack Obama's election victory named top news story of 2008 in Associated Press' annual poll, voted for by US editors and news directors.
Oil prices, the Beijing Olympics and Mumbai terror attacks all feature in the list. Full story...
"As Twitter use becomes more widespread, so it becomes increasingly difficult to pinpoint the type of information you are looking for," writes Daniel Bennett.
"A vast of sea of tweets with #Mumbai quickly developed, and if you were a journalist trying to find eyewitness accounts you found yourself painstakingly wading through them all. Those who did probably found it was time well spent, but is there a better way?" Bennett asks. Full story...
Dina, who blogs at Mumbaihelp.blogspot.com and on her own site and Vinu, whose photographs have been viewed by nearly 100,000 (at time of writing) on Flickr, speaking on CNN.
One of the few on-the-ground user-generated content examples, Vinu’s Flickr stream (screen grab above). Slide show below:
How it has been reported:
NDTV looks at the way it unfolded on the net and promotes its own forums. “Citizens of the World Wide Web have connected to terror-stricken Mumbai in a way never seen before,” it reports. One eyewitness, Dinesh Kumar, used a forum on NDTV.com to share his experiences as he tried to make his way back home from work, the article says.
The Wikipedia current event page is almost filling role of a blog or news service, with its extremely quick updates.
Photography:
Flickr users such as Vinu, have uploaded pictures from the scene (images: all rights reserved).
A Flickr search such as this one, brings up images from Mumbai, although many are reproduced from a few sources. People have also taken pictures of the television news coverage.
But before you re-publish your finds beware: an advanced search which filters pictures by copyright and only shows up images opened up under Creative Commons, limits the results.
Blogs:
Bloggers, such as Gaurav Mishra are tracking it live, and point out useful links. He has also collected together relevant Tweets.
This Roomatic page brings together Twitter updates in chatroom format: makes it very easy to follow and updates quicked than you can read.
Lloyd Shepherd blogged that Mumbai ‘tweets’ appear to have been restrained, seemingly by the Indian authorities. (update: however, seems quite unlikely… Anyone know if any truth in this?) Check out Amy Gahran’s post here, which raises some good points about the danger of Twitter rumours…
Gaurav Mishra writes, “so far, micro-blogging service Twitter seems to be the best source for real time citizen news on the Mumbai terrorist attacks, and “Mumbai” & “#Mumbai” are both on Twitter trending topics now.”
The Google video seach is here. YouTube videos are mainly limited to broadcast footage, with one user even filming the TV reports, for those without access to live television coverage. YouTube videos seem to be all second-hand broadcasts from mainstream media.
(J.co.uk update)Read Amy Gahran's skepticism about this particular rumour on her blog. It seems unlikely, but as blogged and recorded by @Lloydshep (follow link at end): "The awful stuff coming out of Mumbai is one thing, but here’s another: the Indian government asking for live Twitter updates to cease to protect their operations. For all sorts of reasons, this seems to be significant." Full story...
NaiDunia Media has launched a national edition of its daily newspaper, NaiDunia, and will launch a weekly newspaper and magazine combo, Sunday NaiDunia, in nine state capitals. Full story...
The Musalman, which is handwritten by Islamic calligraphers, is surviving despite the onslaught of mass and multimedia publishing in India. Full story...
In a new letter to its shareholders on Wednesday, Yahoo once again explained why a search advertising deal between Yahoo and Google is far superior to an alternate proposal that Microsoft had made to buy Yahoo’s search business.
Further to my posting about a Californian newspaper testing the subbing facilities provided in India, here’s a much more significant example of US newspapers outsourcing to the sub-continent.
Seven editors-in-chief from Wegener, Netherlands’ largest publisher of regional papers, have written a furious letter to Mecom chairman David Montgomery expressing their “grave concern” about the future of their titles a year after they were bought by his