The Power of Point of View

The recent tsunami disaster in the east was so horrific that it riveted the world. People scrambled to see — from others point of view — any news, photos or videos. Anything to try to make sense and understand the magnitude of what had happened. Blogs were a medium of immediacy that allowed global dissemination of information quickly. This was most evidenced as photos and videos of the tsunami disaster began to proliferate around the Web — led by bloggers posting them — and people around the world had a point of view from those that were there.

If you don’t think things are changing with communications, then you’re unaware of the groundswell of activity in blogging, audioblogging, podcasting, video or ‘v’ blogging. This activity has been enabled by the power of personal production environments (iMovie, Garageband, etc.) and the proliferation of tools for blogging to name just two. Here are just a few directories or ways to find them:

• Video blogs, searches and feeds: Last Minute Blog, Me-TV, Yahoo Video Search, Google Video Search, Feedster.
• Podcasting (also sometimes called audioblogging): Podcast Alley, Podcast.net, Penguin Radio, Podcast Directory, Digital Podcast.

All of this together is taking the points of view of the masses and allowing them to be instantly available worldwide. Some believe that it is leading to Grassroots Journalism that is changing the face of news, information and eventually human communication itself by accelerating the transference of memes from person-to-person (or culture-to-culture, country-to-country) at internet speeds.