Blog off?

Charles Arthur on how the long tail of blogging is dying....

Certainly that seems to be true. It's much easier to tweet than commit to a blog unless you've got something that has to be said in depth. 

Meanwhile John Naughton is more optimistic for print journalists.....

Twitter vs CNN

Interesting piece from the Telegraph looking at news out of Iran and the pluses/minuses of citizen journalism...

Gordon Brown: the internet is changing foreign policy

In an interview with the Guardian, the PM says that foreign policy can no longer be down to a few elites as the Twitter revolution in Iran has shown over the past few days....

In regards to humanitarian crises he claims:

"You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken.

"Foreign policy can no longer be the province of just a few elites."

I'll be interested to see if that is correct; the cynical would say Sri Lanka, Darfur etc have still happened despite the growth of the world wide web.

In other news Google and Facebook are rolling out Farsi services in the aftermath of Iran

The revolution will not be televised....

it will be coming to you via YouTube, Flickr and mobile phones....

See BBC story here

Plus see Guardian story here

Iran cont'd

Today reports on the importance of blogging/Twitter/Facebook in the Iranian election aftermath....Turi Munthe points out the second language on the web is Farsi.....points out that we are only hearing a self-selecting constituency - Western

It takes a few days for social networks to be up and running he points out.

Follow the hashtag #iranelection as the best on Twitter

Also some pictures out of Iran - thanks once again to Richard Sambrook....

PS The US state dept gets involved- although at time of writing Twitter appears to be down for maintenance

Iran and the media

Just been watching the extraordinary scenes in Iran - amazing stuff. On C4 News as Charlie Beckett points out, Lindsay Hilsum had to have her track voiced by someone else although she later managed to do a live with Jon Snow. On Twitter Stephen Fry has been listing functional proxies.

There are striking pictures here  - although Getty and AP not UGC...

Putting it all together...

Thanks to Richard Sambrook for linking to this on Twitter - this is Mashable's guide to tracking the Iran election with social media....just what I've been looking for for the next piece of research I'm thinking of doing.....(if the link doesnt work then try http://mashable.com/2009/06/14/new-media-iran/)