Recent big events have certainly shown one thing - Google Maps are taking citizen journalism to the extreme. I have not known a time before when there was BETTER coverage by amateurs on the web than the professionals, but that happened when bombers struck London on July 7th.

A Google Maps mashup plotted the blast locations on a map, while citizen-uploaded photographs were streamed into a box on the same page from photo-sharing site Flickr. Multiple official news feeds from sources such as BBC News and Yahoo, and an incredibly-detailed timeline of events from Wikipedia, were also available, all streamed to the same page with deceptive ease. You can see the website in question here.

The Wikipedia article, just as every other piece of information on the self-described “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”, was mashed together by hundreds of different sources. Those sources were not all scraped from news reports or taken from the papers. They were collected by individuals - factory workers, IT technicians on their lunch break.

And the same can be said of the Flickr photostream, all of the pictures having been taken by regular Joe Bloggs on his way back from work, caught up in the chaos. A photograph can be sent to Flickr within seconds of it being taken.

This is citizen journalism at it’s height - but where does this leave the media? Of course, the BBC themselves served an astonishing 1 billion hits to their official website on the 7th July, but compared to ten years ago, a lot more people branched out and followed different coverage than years gone by. Personally I kept one eye on Sky News on TV, and one eye on some of the incredibly detailed news blogs out there. The constantly updated Going Underground clubbed together many official sources on the day of the events to keep the site an excellent start-point for people wondering what was going on.

My point to the BBC, to Sky News, to all the others, is to embrace the technology. It wouldn’t take much for the Beeb themselves to plot their latest stories on a Google map, would it? It wouldn’t take much to stream citizen-taken photographs. It’s not really to my interest as to whether they do or not, as I will always use the best source of news, wherever it is, but it will certainly be in their interests in the future if they want to keep up with the public.

Tags: google maps