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AgoraVox – “citizen journalism”

Agoravox English edition ! – AgoraVox – le journal citoyen

AgoraVox is an important initiative, since I belive that their model could lead to higher quality grass-roots journalism and other content, by combining weblogging with a tradtional editorial process.

Below is a quote from the English AgoraVox Website.

AgoraVox puts together one of the first large-scale European initiatives for a totally free of charge “citizen journalism”. Our initial standpoint is simple: thanks to the effective democratization of multimedia and information technologies (IT), each citizen has the ability to potentialy become a “reporter” who can identify and offer high added-value information. With means of a simple phone, a computer, a camera or a a digital video camera, thousands of internet users or bloggers are now able to perform an incredible local work that no media, no organization, no association could ever accomplish.


This could really move weblogging into the mainstream. According to one of the founders of AgoraVox, Joel De Rosnay, who stated in a BBC Interview that it’s all about the “flow and the buzz” – the flow is the immense amount of free information that is available on the Internet, and the buzz is the services, like Google, that build a business offering personalised “views” into the flow, that people are so happy with, that they buzz it to other people.

Interesting indeed. With all this talk about a new “new economy”, I find myself crying .com bubble, but Google, and others, are indeed making real money from the flow, and to say that Google is being buzzed is the understatement of the last couple of years. And as I reported earlier, Google get so much free press in Denmark that it’s unbelievable.

I think that other services that build on the flow, like Wikipedia would benefit from adapting a traditional editorial process. Even though it will severely hurt the dynamics of these services, I think that the benefits are high, and as it was demonstrated in late 2005 with the Wikipedia controversy, the buzz can turn on you overnight.

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