YouTube Unveils Tool to Connect News Organizations with Citizen Journalists

MediaPost reports: Google is unveiling a tool Tuesday that enables traditional television and online news agencies to create a platform to manage a bureau of citizen journalists. These mavericks capture life-changing events on camera and upload them to YouTube. It allows media organizations to request, review and rebroadcast these clips directly from YouTube-member pages.

Connecting Citizens and Journalists with YouTube Direct

Every day, people with video cameras are changing the ways we get our news. We see it during elections. We see it during earthquakes, fires and other natural disasters. We see it on our freeways, in our schools and in our public spaces. Almost any event that takes place today has a chance of being captured on camera. As YouTube has become a global platform for sharing the news, media organizations have been looking for a good way to connect directly with citizen reporters on our site so they can broadcast this footage and bring it to a larger audience.

Enlisting the Web in the Redestricting Wars

Redistricting isn’t sexy: it involves numbers and maps, it’s wonky, and just thinking about it makes voters go to sleep. Which is immensely helpful to the politicians redrawing the lines every few years, because they know that almost no one outside of hardcore politicos is actually paying attention.

But redistricting is where the rubber meets the road in politics, since setting district boundaries is all about power: who has it, who keeps it, and who has a chance to get it in the future. And as the state-level victors of 2010 redraw legislative and congressional districts across the country, they’ll also be establishing the boundaries of power in Congress and 50 different statehouses.

You(r)Tube: Now You Too Can Collaborate, Curate

Say you have in interest in having regular folks whip out their video cameras or cell phones and create wonderful video content for your organization, advocacy group, or news enterprise. There's a great deal of appeal (especially given news and non-profit budgets these days). Your most passionate supporters have a way of channeling their energy and creativity towards advancing your work, and you get free material to work with. Win-win! Alas, there are downsides. Lots of people, frankly, create a lot of junk. And when your fans upload their stuff to YouTube, it gets lost in a sea of tangential response videos and clips of cats doing admittedly hilarious, but off-topic, tricks and stunts.

Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media

It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the printing press in 1440.  

Last week at the Google I/O conference (Google Developers Conference) they unveiled a new communication platform that will push the standard of HTML 5. This new communication tool is perfectly named, 'Google Wave'

So, what is Google Wave. From their website "Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web." It is that simple, a new communication tool. One of the special features is this platform is housed on the web and can be accessed the same from your desktop or mobile device. With the use of developer extensions (think FireFox Extensions) this new tool can collaborate, update, and access any third party service all from your desktop computer or mobile device. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the coolest feature of all, it does it all in REAL TIME!!

After watching the keynote my mind was racing on new innovative ways political campaigns and organizations would be able to take advantage of this new product. Seeing how I took 3 pages of notes I am going to divide the highlights into two sections: Constituent Communication & Staff Collaboration. 

Constituent Communication

• Real Time Communication: If you are posting a blog, video, or pictures you can have real time communication with your web visitors. For example, if you have just posted your latest web video you will be able to see the comments come in on the entry in real time (character for character). No more waiting for feedback - you get instant real time feedback on what you are posting.
• In Line Communication: When responding to your constituents right now on your blog, you have to state "#comment 53: Thank you for the kind words, #comment 32: Do you have any facts to back up your accusation" all from one response. With this new tool you respond to a comment directly below it in conversation mode. And remember, its in Real Time.
• Third Party Integration: One of the most talked about features of Google Wave is that it is Open Source. This will allow anyone to develop extensions for the product. From the demo, they showed how you can post an entry (w/ pictures and videos) from the tool instantly. This will eliminate the need for you to visit your website (or social media tool) to provide updates. Instead, you can post it all from Google Wave, in real time.

Staff Collaboration

• Press Release Editing: Anyone who has worked on the communication side of a campaign or organization knows the pain in getting a press release together, edited, and approved. With Google Wave everyone (yes everyone) can collaborate/edit/comment at the same time on the same document in real time. This will allow a candidate driving to an event to login with his iPhone and make changes while at the same time the campaign manager is sitting down for lunch making his changes. Once everything is done, the Press Secretary can either watch live or playback all of the changes being made. No more waiting on people to check their emails on a computer to make the changes.
• Instant Messaging: Currently campaigns utilize instant messaging via text messages, BlackBerry Messenger, or with a Web Client (GTALK, AOL, YAHOO). With Google Wave there is no longer a need for a separate system. It has built in real time chat that is archived. This allows the conversations to be tagged and searched in the future. You are also not limited to those in your Google Wave system, you can bring other people in from a completely separate Google Wave installation. The key feature here is that this is all done in the same tool and in real time!
• Moderation: When you open this product up to your staff, volunteers, and constituents you will want to provide some type of moderation. Be it picture/video captions, comments on your latest press release, or even comments to a new platform issue everyone will have the ability to provide moderation. No longer are you relying on the judgment of one person to moderate comments on a blog entry; or waiting on your volunteer to update captions of pictures; now everyone can do it together in real time!

You can see the endless features of this product and with it being open source the development community will work tirelessly I am sure to provide great third party integration.

The product is still in closed beta (only those in attendance of the conference get access now) but it should be opening up soon.