fooWare!

An interesting side effect of the connected world, the emergence of the citizen journalist. I’m not the first one to make this observation; consider the reporting of the US invasion of Baghdad as reported by Salam Pax in his blog Where is Raed?. Blogs have allowed anyone to report “the news” as they see it, in their corner of the world, from their perspective.

But this morning I came across another interesting angle on this, the citizen meteorologist.  New England Cable News was only able to provide weather readings from a small number of reporting stations due to widespread power outages caused by an ice storm.  These power outages had lasted long enough to wipe out the battery backups on their reporting stations.  However, they were still able to report the approximate location of the freezing line based on viewer observations.  People at home were calling in to fill in the gaps!  And in most cases, they didn’t have any sophisticated weather tools at home, they just had a thermometer outside their kitchen window and could make a visual observation of the weather.

There are other cases of this as well.  People phoning in about traffic conditions.  Massachusetts, sadly, did away with the *1 connection to SmartTraveler. But back in the day, that was an easy way for anyone to give an instant on-the-spot traffic report.  You don’t need traffic cameras every mile if you have an army of citizen observers reporting the conditions they are traveling in. You just need to make it easy for them. [Note, pilots have been doing this for years with PIREPS]

Another good example is gaspricewatch.com, which enables people to report gas prices to a central website.  I drive 2 hours to work (not every day, thank goodness) each way, and it is nice to check along the route and see where the best price is for gas.  I’m even able to make a judgement as to the accuracy based on the last time a reporting was made for a particular gas station.

These are examples of social media.  People coming together online for a common purpose to share their observations.  And the power behind social media is the openness, allowing for an army of citizen journalists (or meteorologists or traffic reporters) to contribute for the common purpose.  More information flowing into the system. 

But can you trust all the information you see?  Citizen journalism can lead people wrong.  A fake story about Steve Jobs having a heart attack was picked up by major news sources and widely spread before it was verified.  The false rumor, spreading through reputable channels, had a measurable effect on Apple’s stock price.  The message, caveat lector – let the reader beware.  But the hope is that the communities, each and every community, can police itself and ensure that the community members are distributing the best information around.