Blogs, blogging and the tsunami are news. I taught on Tuesday and Thursday of this week and basically went over what Steve talks about in this article. My students looked at Sumankumar's yak pad entries from December 23rd and 24th, where he was talking about what he ate the night before and showing funny pictures of Santa. The abrupt shift in his 12/26/05 entry, where he turned his blog into one of the first eyewitness aggregators and used it to help the rescue efforts get organized fascinated my students. I trust it got them thinking, too, about their future work as journalists. What Steve Outing is talking about are the simple ways that mainstream media (legacy media?) might treat blogging information as news, and package it up for viewer/users. The viewer/user, rather than the passive "reader" or "audience" underlies the problem Steve details where the citizen blogger posts newsworthy video which becomes the "meme" of the day and the number of hits close down their hosting service, or at least their site. Mainstream media, with its resources, could mirror these sites to help with the rush of v/users that is so characteristic of Internet news stories. Read on, his ideas are all very good. I just wish he had written this on Monday so I could have used it in class, instead of having to grab all my own links for class. Poynter Online - Taking Tsunami Coverage into Their Own Hands