Some fantastic experimentation going on at Sky News, with reporter Derek Tedder microblogging from the Heathrow climate change camp. He’s sending a steady stream of concise updates via an account at Twitter, with photos being uploaded to a Sky News account at Flickr. It looks like he’s using a Nokia N73 cameraphone, and twittering via IM.
This is precisely the kind of innovation Sky should be doing: free to do, using widely available tools, and on a story which (for now) won’t have any major impact on anything or anyone. If/when it all kicks off, presumably at the weekend when ‘direct action’ is threatened, it could really come into its own.
Oh, and incidentally… I note the Flickr account has been active for ages; and until now, appears largely to have consisted of uncredited viewer-submitted photos of the recent flooding. Which is as clear a breach of the Flickr community guidelines as I can imagine:
Don’t upload anything that isn’t yours.
This includes other people’s photographs and/or stuff that you’ve collected from around the Internet. Accounts that consist primarily of such collections may be terminated at any time.
At the present time, with 36 of the 37 pages being other people’s flood photos, I’d say that qualified as ‘primarily’. Danger, danger.