In the European Web 2.0 Pipeline

Posted on August 23, 2006
Filed Under What's New, European Web 2.0, European Web 2.0 pipeline |

Citizen media to the average net-adept person means Joe Average going out and making movies to upload in the hope of being spotted as a future film maker or it means mobile phone movies that might get picked up on the nightly news, or it’s something that’s going on in the Bay area. But it is not Citizen-Media.

Citizen-Media is a huge ($18 million) project to create the next generation user generated facilities. It’s a “collaborative audio-visual systems research project designed to enable multiple non-professional users to co-create networked applications based on their own user-generated content.”

That means it is a step up from facilitating the upload of content to facilitating applications. The difference is this:

TripAdvisor, Yellow Arrow and Hotel Chatter are applications that allow users to upload content. Citizen media would do the same as far as allowing users, say, to upload mobile phone video of a destination. But it would then take another step.

If users, again for example, want to specify functionality for the site that hosts the video, Citizen media will provide the means to do so in the ubiquitous drag and drop manner.

It’s an Alcatel-led project, out of Antwerp, Belgium, but it has partners from across Europe, including France Telecom, Telekom Austria, and Telefonica of Spain.

The sight of so many Telcos might get the sceptical tongue wagging. But what telcos are looking for in the medium term are ways that local communities can create not just content but applications. That is what, they believe, will power new revenues for IPTV and broadband, communites taking over media once they can specify and build applications with a mouse click. Commercial applications are expected to trial in 2007/8.


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