The Evolving Newsroom

Damn this fast-paced changing world we live in. No sooner do I reorganise my bookmarks with tags that make sense now, as opposed to tags that made sense 12 months ago, than another parcel of new terms come along.

There I was dithering over where citizen journalism overlaps with community and ugc (user generated content), and where wiki journalism fits in, when up pops pro-am (here's an interesting case study that I'd like to spend some more time on) and crowdsourcing. I'd just got the hang of blogs/forums/wikis when along came curation.

Before I had bookmarks, now social bookmarks. There were social networks, now networks. I used to tag things with online, web, online journalism, new media and the like - how quaint! Now, everything's presumed to be online/web unless otherwise specified.

Organising information and links is of growing need and interest to me. Not just me, surely. It's becoming a daily necessity for most of us - how to bookmark those great sites we've stumbled upon or StumbleUpon-ed (and actually find them later), aggregate those brilliant blogs we love to read, file away those little gems of interest - a quote here, a link there, a brilliant idea here and here and there.

I use Jumptags at the moment for bookmarking sites, although I maintain my Del.icio.us account and bookmark there too, and I use StumbleUpon bookmarks, YouTube favourites, Bloglines for aggregating, Notepad for brilliant ideas, my inbox for copious email updates and, increasingly, TiddlyWikis for ideas, research notes, magpie collections and much, much more.

I'd like to think I'm fairly well organised. But truth be told I often just career about the place on whims. See a link, follow it. See another, follow that. Where was I? Oh yeah, I was supposed to be cleaning up my inbox. Back I go. See a link, follow it. See another, follow that. Where was I? Oh yeah, reading up on wikis/networks/business models for content delivery/curation.....

Is anyone getting any work done anymore?