Youtube Direct – A great platform to power-up citizen video journalism

Although citizen journalism has been growing by leaps and bounds empowered by sites like Digg, Twitter, Wikipedia, Youtube and others. Youtube’s focussed entry into this space could be potentially game changing. Today Google announced the launch of Youtube Direct, a service primarily targeted towards Google’s existing news media partners, but which can potentially become a platform to launch and support citizen journalists. Currently, the service comes with a simple workflow to moderate uploaded content and also to directly upload videos to Youtube (without having to leave the web-site in question). Currently, the offering is primarily targeted towards Google’s existing news partners and as such does not provide a comprehensive framework for citizen reporting, just yet. However, Google has made the framework open-source in the hopes of having developers contribute and enrich the product.

In order to build a robust work-flow for citizen reporting the moderation tool must be extended beyond its current scope. It must support two forms of moderation – 1) a decentralized one where others users on one’s site can rank and categorize videos and 2) a centralized one, like the one they provide now but extended further to support large number of file uploads. Additionally, it will also be great if the search capability for videos is narrowed to search within a specific site’s content. Finally, Youtube must support much faster uploads from cameras phone (see offerings from Elemental Technologies).

With these extensions in place, Youtube can look to become the platform that will launch and support the next generation of news media sites.

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