[Foundation-l] London 7/7, and Wikinews

Fri Jul 8 14:03:20 UTC 2005

Erik Moeller (erik_moeller at gmx.de) [050708 22:43]:

> The Korean version did a bit better, but of course I can't judge the 
> quality of the content. The blogosphere did what it usually does in 
> situations like this: hyperlink frantically and add uninformed opinions 
> ;-). It is very much possible that the most significant grass-roots 
> "competition" in providing reliable information came from Wikipedia 
> itself. But Wikipedia could not, unlike Wikinews, include original 
> reporting directly from people in London, and its format is very different.

Don't forget that the blogosphere is in two pieces, with roughly comparable
numbers of active blogs: Livejournal and not-Livejournal. I was glued to
Livejournal yesterday as my primary news source. (Of course, I have
somewhere upward of 700 on my friends list, which is close to the limit of
750 ...) The people I saw were doing their best to keep their info and
rumours straight. The london_070705 community was a great one for this.
(User:Arkady was on two screens from 9am to 2am distributing the best
information she could find on that community and other journals.)

We tried watching BBC News 24 for a bit, but it just annoyed us. Too much
repetition to fill space even by 11:30am. The BBC websites were fantastic
though.

- d.