VITAMEDIAS
Tech Turns Users Into Mobile News Makers: A young college student in Singapore is being berated by the teacher for unacceptable work. In a fit of rage, the teacher tears up the hapless student's paper in front of the whole class.
It's something that normally would have gone unnoticed outside the classroom. But since early July, it has become the talk of Singapore, sparking questions and concerns over the state of student-teacher relations in the country's education system.
But the teacher's sudden infamy wasn't the result of complaints from the shamed student, or your usual news account.
Rather, the fuss came about because a tech-savvy fellow classmate clandestinely captured photos of the questionable chastisement — and instantly published them on the Web using just his cell phone. [...]
Indeed, some say that moblogging can greatly affect how "news" and information — such as the Singaporean student's situation — is gathered and disseminated in the digital age.
"Once it becomes more ubiquitous, it can have great impact in terms of journalism," says Steve Outing, a senior editor with the Poynter Institute, a journalism teaching and research organization in St. Petersburg, Fla. "When you have big events happening, there will be people on the scene reporting and taking photos when there's no one else there." [...]
And some doubt moblogging will ever take off on a massive scale in the United States because they believe most Americans are still information consumers rather than producers.
Denise Garcia, analyst with the Gartner G2 research group in Stamford, Conn., says there are already plenty of easy-to-use software tools that allow anyone to set up a Web site or standard blog. Yet not many are using them.
According to Garcia's research, less than three-tenths of a percent of all U.S. Internet users are also bloggers.
"People can self-publish now on the Web, but there simply is no incentive to do so," says Garcia. "People will still want to go to news sites where [the content] has been put through all the filters."