Mobile Media Toolkit

Background: Sharing Mobile Content on the Web

What does this section cover?

This Mobile Media Toolkit section covers the topic of sharing mobile content (content created on mobile phones) on the web. The section focuses mainly on online tools because many mobile phones are already connected to the Internet, and there are many online publishing platforms that require little to no setup. For sharing content from mobile phones without using the web, see our tools in the article on user-generated content from mobile phones. Articles in this section will focus on sharing content using microblogs, blogs, and various online sites that host multimedia content. The goal of this section is to provide citizen journalists and reporters the tools and techniques needed to share mobile content on the web, and on other platforms that utilize the web as an intermediate step.

Who is this section for?

This section is for citizen journalists and reporters who use mobile phones to create content and want to share that content with an online audience (to publish that content online, so to speak). It is also for organizations and individuals who want to set up citizen media platforms, where users (whether it be audience or staff) can easily upload content using their mobile phones, although more on that is in the Toolkit section on engaging citizens in journalism. While we primarily focus on online publishing, those publishing on other kinds of platforms will find useful and relevant tools in this section as well. For example, many organizations use e-mail in their pre-production communications, and can take advantage of the sections on blogging using email. Organizations like Grocott's Mail (which uses Drupal as the content-management system for their print publication), will find the discussions about content-management systems helpful despite publishing on a different medium.

Why should you share mobile content on the web?

This article is intended for citizen journalists and reporters who create content on their mobile phones. After creating content, one of the best ways to create an audience for that content is simply to publish it online. There are many online platforms which will let you self-publish content and build an audience for that content. Web publishing can be quick, easy, and supports all kinds of information that can be uploaded from mobiles (including audio, video, photo, and location information).

There are many reasons to know about and create platforms for publishing mobile content.

• If you are creating news content on your phone, you will need a platform to publish your content. For multimedia content such as text, audio, videos, or photos, online is often the best publication medium.
• Most people carry their mobile phones with them everywhere. By making it easy for the general public to upload content captured on their phones, you can increase the reach of content, speed of coverage, as well as diversity of the content you showcase.
• News consumers, especially on mobile phones, are becoming increasingly participatory. Letting users participate on their mobile phones is the next step, as it makes participation easier and more accessible to a wider audience.
• Not only can user-generated content drastically increase the amount of content you have, examples show that more people may seek to access this user-generated content as well.
• These platforms can work with a variety of publishing platforms (like online publishing, the radio, or mobile phones), and in some cases, can plug in directly to your current infrastructure.

Description: Sharing Mobile Content on the Web

In this Mobile Media Toolkit section: Content platforms that let mobile phone users (including trained journalists, untrained content producers, or even "readers") easily upload content to various mediums. This section also looks at blogging, microblogging, and uploading multimedia.

How to Share Mobile Content on the Web

There are many platforms which allow for easy publishing from mobile phones. They are drastically different based on the medium (among other things), so we will organize this section with articles on Mobile Publishing for Radio, Mobile Publishing for Print, and then various articles on Mobile Publishing for the Web and Mobile. The web and mobile publications are divided into Microblogging from Mobiles, Hosted Blogging, Self-Hosted Blogging, and Map-based Content Production.

Limitations of Sharing Mobile Content on the Web

Sharing content created on mobile phones online does have some drawbacks and limitations.

• Self-publishing tools provide little privacy, in general. While this can be a good thing in some contexts, it does raise issues of security and privacy and is something to keep in mind when publishing.
• Your contributions may make you a subject to surveillance. Depending on the environment, one may face danger depending on what kind of content they submit. It is important to make users aware of the risks and to look for platforms to minimize such risks.
• User-generated content generally has a verifiability problem: how do you verify that information a user submits is accurate? Some verifiability systems exist, but citizen journalists who upload content need to be aware of this issue.
• When creating a collaborative platform for uploading content, such as a multi-user website for uploading content, the content you solicit is prone to certain weaknesses. This includes: relevance, authoritativeness, accuracy, and more. See the article on asking audiences to participate in content creation for more on this topic.