Patrick’s idea is simple. Get iReporters in the field (you and i + a mobile app).  CNN then push a button and get well positioned iReporters to snap some images of a particular event.

History is a draft and has been for a while now. Data is collected from different sources, put into context with the help of meta data and fit into a predefined architecture. The architecture can be a wiki, a blog, an archive, a wall…

Twitter and FB have become the new electricity. If empowered users will always converse, speak, shout. Nothing new here. What is new is the fact that the recording/broadcast button seems to be always on. Buttons constantly being pushed by an apparently random succession of daily events: life. This leads me to believe that the button Patrick refers to is just a pro-active geo based filter. I am a cnn reporter, push a button, get all those with an iReporter app to take pictures for me of an event near by them.

Forget big brother, the enternainment potential for this idea is magnificent. All those movies with dormant killers who are awakened to perform a suicide mission upon hearing a specific keyword…

I think media has not yet reached its limits of manipulative power. It needs to be even more manipulative, which leads me on to the reality of editors.

For a while [my innocent period] I thought the new editors, of this new world i inhabit, would become a simple combination of user generated metadata and the architectures that accommodate the content itself . The wikis, the chronologicaly driven blogs, the photo gallery organized by colours… the new editors of this planet would be ourselves + a little algorithmic intelligence to help us sort through all the available data + little visual beauty to help display that very data.

Yes we produce a lot of content as we produce a lot of garbage. Who/what sorts it? Who are the editors?
1. Other individuals.
2. Professional editors (who make a living  within the media sector).
3. Machines.

For far too long now have we, speaks a media mogul, watched the twitter noise produced by all these so called journalists. It’s time we reverse the stream of data. It’s time we, professional editors, regain control. Remember when folks sat down in front of a box at 9 o’clock for the news because we wanted them to?

Pushing a button and activating ‘iReporters’  is not crowd sourcing. That’s crowd manipulation, which leads me on to my idea:  What about an app that leverages some sort of celebrity effect, and gets those who own the mobile app, to perform all sorts of interesting acts and broadcast them?

Mob Manipulator: simple commands would create news. More powerful than waiting around and going through all the hash noise produced by twitting crowds. Manipulate the mob but do it blatantly.

More soon on the Mob Manipulator app.

[Patrick's project spawned this train of though. I find his project meritorious and in no way have I tried to undermine it with these words. ]

Image by Chris O’shea.