Murdok anchor Abby Prince-Johnson was present for the “Microjournalism: Breaking news in 140 words or less” session at BlogWorld on Saturday. This one featured Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, and Laura Fitton.
(Murdok spent the weekend in Vegas at the BlogWorld Expo and chatted up the brightest minds in the blogging business. Stay tuned to Murdok and Murdok Video for updates.)
For a little background, Robert Scoble is most famous for his blog Scobleizer, and is also currently a video blogger for Fast Company. Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and one of the world’s best-known bloggers. Laura Fitton is the CEO of Pistachio Consulting Inc., the first social media agency dedicated to business use of microblogging.
Scoble discussed Twitter as a news-stream. Mobile devices make it possible to have news anywhere, as he noted, but this doesn’t mean that Twitter should be the news. It just shows the impact, he says. Fitton says that some traditional media outlets are starting to “get it.”
“Your friends are your content on theses sites,” she says. “RSS micro widgets are going to dramatically change how the news is going to be delivered.” Searls then discussed the static web vs. the live web (sites like Twitter).
Fitton believes that “citizen journalism” is not defined properly, and that it should be more like “citizen observation” or something. Of course, Searls and Scoble disagree with this notion because they believe journalists misrepresent interviews anyway. For example, they might represent a two-hour interview with a 10 second clip. A Q&A session took place next, but this was mostly just people asking Scoble if he would put them on his site.
One final note came from Fitton, who says that a society that has been based on control and privacy is going to have to change. It’s hard to disagree with that has everything seems to become more transparent by the day.
Murdok anchor Abby Prince-Johnson contributed to this article.
