E-Media Tidbits

A good example of how geocoded photo-sharing Web sites offer venues for citizen journalists can be found at Woophy.com. From "WOrld Of PHotographY," Woophy was founded by a group of Dutch Web designers who do a nice job of physically representing the location of all its members' amateur photos on a global map -- compared, for instance, to the U.S.-only photo map found on Mappr.com, mentioned in an Aug. 15, 2005 Tidbits posting by Monique Van Dusseldorf.

Woophy also highlights and encourages a nice model of citizen photographer storytelling -- something Steve Outing discussed here, here and here.

Woophy brings the citizen journalism promise to life, for example, with an amateur photographer named Zerega, who in the last couple of weeks posted an amusing tale of a group of flying butchers in Bolivia, who transport pork to the world's highest ski area. The story is told via a dozen or so images, along with captioned text. (One false note is the admittedly faked final image. Another complaint is that you can't view the images in a slideshow). An earlier example tells of a visit to a slum outside the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka that unexpectedly found the photographers in the middle of a deadly fire that razed the entire community.

I also liked how the site encourages citizen journalists with a contest that asks photographers to shoot with a particular theme in mind, such as environmental pollution, or people's homes.

For more on how Woophy came about, check out this Wall St. Journal writeup (PDF) in online on March 6. (Thanks to Nick Gould's CoFactors blog at Catalyst Group Design for the tip about Woophy.)