News sources…

One of the guys at work asked about an hour ago if we’d
heard anything about the bomb blasts in London. My immediate reaction was
to go to Google
News, which was ok, but a bit difficult to find details quickly. My
colleague however went to WikiPedia and got the news from there… I soon followed and
WOW, the news coverage was cool. People had links to various
articles and while it was a bit disorganised it got the basics across
quickly and linked to relevant news articles. At some point I ended up at
WikiNews -
their article was a lot better formatted, more journalistic sounding, but it was
just as “grassroots”. They had an image from some guy’s moblog which he
took while in one of the trains that was trapped by the explosions. How’s
that for news directly from the middle of the issue.

I wonder how the “old media” will deal with all this “new media”. Its
pretty cool (even if its a bit geeky at the moment). I’m definately not
someone who should comment on any of this – I don’t really know much about
journalism or other similar topics. But in this case I definately
prefer reading news that’s *NOW* not 30 minutes old, as was the case with a
number of the local sites. I have a feeling that there’s something big
that can happen with all these “grassroots-y” applications, community networks,
mobile access to the internet, and all this “always connected” stuff.

Even here in good old South Africa we’re getting a taste of it and I (the
geek) want more. I’m sure there will be privacy and other personal
problems involved, but right now I’m looking at the good potential and I’m very
excited.