Iran, SNS, and the Social Web XG

Hello,

Having caught the pig flu, and as a result cancelling my holiday to  
Iran (a lonely tear trickles down my cheek), I have been giving some  
thought to how the recent events surrounding the #IranElections  
(sorry) could help educate the Social Web XG.

I would be interested to hear how reporters from news agencies which  
use user generated content taken from SNSs actually go about selecting  
information which they then propagate as news. The BBC's world service  
has an Iranian (Persian) [4] division and one of the producers talked  
about the this on the BBC worldservice's digital planet podcast [1]  
(should be accessible from outside the UK - shout if it is not). Clay  
Skirky also gave a TED talk entitled "How social media can make  
history" [5], which touches on similar topics.

Danbri blogged about extracting reliable narratives from the  
IranElection noise at the time [2]. And was a whole break session at a  
conference about Iran [3] at SOAS [4] in London recently, where by  
people discussed the role of SNS in Iran (I didn't attend, but have  
been told via a friend of a friend).

Perhaps by chatting to someone which collates news based on user- 
generated content we could get closer to defining some more use cases  
e.g. around how to add provenance information to content when posting  
to a SNS.

Would people on the XG find it interesting to hear from someone at BBC  
Persian on how they attempt to collate and use user-generated content  
to be broadcasted as news? If so I am sure I could find someone from  
BBC persian which is willing to talk about this stuff, and take  
questions from the XG.

Just a thought ...

Regards,

Mischa *wishes he was in Tehran ....

[1] http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/digitalp/digitalp_20090728-1036a.mp3
[2] http://danbri.org/words/2009/06/16/415
[3] http://www.soas.ac.uk/centresoffice/events/iranian-revolution/thirty-years-on-the-social-and-cultural-impacts-of-the-iranian-revolution-conference-programme.html
[4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/
[5] http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html



_________________________________
Mischa Tuffield
Homepage -http:/mmt.me.uk/
FOAF - http://mmt.me.uk/foaf.rdf#mischa