Bloggers beat wires in Asian disaster

BLOGGERS have been leading the traditional newswire with first-hand reports of the Asian earthquake disaster.

Top Blog news source BoingBoing has a report on some of the top bloggers, whilst other blogs are coming to the INQs attention via word of mouth.

Weblogs have been a phenomenon in 2004, and have been credited with bringing a voice that can be heard to anyone that wants to say something. Many professional journalists have criticised the no-holds-barred style of weblog news, saying that the writers often have little comprehension of journalistic ethics. Cyberjournalist refers to the practice as 'participatory journalism'.

One of the most controversial, not to mention popular, political blogs - the Drudge Report - is running several sensationalist stories about the disaster in its typical style. The top headline at the time of writing, questions whether or not there has been a dead animal coverup in Sri Lanka. The blog's owner, Matt Drudge, came under fire during polling day for the US Presidential Election for running Exit Poll data live on the site, a practice usually eschewed by real-time news sources.

Closer to the grass roots blogging style is this LiveJournal, which is an example of how a blog can end up giving everyone in a community a say. One small story about the quake has led to tens of comments by fellow bloggers that are actually on the ground and are seeing the tradgedy for themselves, first-hand. Chaps like Fred are uploading photos of the disaster so that readers can get a handle on what the situation is like, without having their news filtered through traditional channels. Fred's blog is, quite worthily we think, up for Best Photo Blog at the Asian Blog Awards.

With so many blogs on the net, however, reading the occasional decent post on each one could get incredibly time consuming. The blogging phenomenon has led to what are, effectively, a new wave of content aggragators. Project Petaling Street is one such aggregator, bringing together top blog posts from across Malaysia. The Project is getting hundreds of thousands of hits this week as readers log on to get the latest updates from the area.

Blog writers were quick to start uploading information on the events in Asia. This posting points out how writers were on the reporting ball far quicker than local Asian newspapers, who were comparatively slow to get to work covering the disaster.

The advantages of up-to-the-minute web publishing have been discussed on these pages before, but it really is interesting to see how the web can enable interested parties to get news directly from the people that are affected by it. Whilst news outlets will have their on-scene reporters who may spend a minute interviewing those affected in the context of a pre-written report, in a world where reality TV is increasingly popular, it is arguably more appropriate that we spend out time hearing directly from those people.

Jimmy Orr, the White House internet director, coined the term 'blogsphere' to encompass the world of individual postings that find their way around the internet. With the spectacular coverage of this latest world news event, we may find that popular characters in the 'blogosphere' swiftly enter the stratosphere of popularity. µ