Microblogging vs. Hyperlocal News

August 22, 2008 – 10:51 by Mikko Hämäläinen

Once again, Steve Outing had a thought provoking article about local news. Pretty much the same idea has been lingering in my mind for a while, not least because I’m an active user of Jaiku. The things I think play in favor of microblogging against local news are quite simple: microblogging is a natural web medium whereas local news is not. The differences, I think, are both technical and mental. Now for a quick list of issues first came to my mind:

  • Mobile, location aware, microblogging: systems like Jaiku automatically know from where you’re blogging. Your presence stream by definition is hyper-local. Multiply the amount of users in a given territory 24/7 and you have more local representatives able to publish events, realtime, than any news organization
  • Flickr & YouTube: with current mobile handsets it is dead easy to upload videos and images to 3rd party services. You can attach these to your presence stream effectively becoming a multimedia reporter on the go. While the quality might not be as good as for professional reporters, at least I’d rather see events unfolding in realtime, not after all the interesting has happened.
  • Technology investment: none. Just use existing services.
  • Aggregating a local news portal: use Yahoo Pipes for regional filtering and a piece of PHP to put the RSS streams together and you have a graigslist of local news. With virtually zero investment.
I could go on and on, but you should get the point: while traditional media organizations tend to build everything themselves, with upfront investments, large staff and slow time-to-market, we who have been doing web services, even before last bubble, would do it differently.
Also, notice the focus on mobile. I bet that mobile will be the next web 2.0 during coming 2 to 4 years. The reason is simply the flexibility of new smartphones with good web browsers, GPS, 3G/HSDPA and the like. In fact the future is already here, but people don’t pay attention as we still lack the services and the existing ones are still a bit hard to use.
PS. An excellent (IMHO) example of building hyperlocal news service the microblogging way is Finnish news service called Vartti (part of SanomaWSOY corporation which is also my place of employment).
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