Robert Scoble set the theme of his keynote at the 2008 Online News Association conference in Washington by doing something that had not been possible a year earlier: streaming the talk live from a mobile phone. That changes journalism, he argued, because the audience can send questions while an interview is still happening. The audience, he added, is smarter, richer and better educated than anyone on the stage, so a reporter can put “the crowd smarts” to work in framing the questions.
The rest was a tour of the tools. On Twitter he described learning about the China earthquake through TwitterVision before it was reported. Friendfeed he presented as a way of finding out what the web was reporting and of holding a deeper conversation than had been possible a few years before. Seesmic extended that past text into video conversations and video comments on stories, though the talk did not address whether people actually want to hold conversations that way. Google Reader he used for media-snacking, with 500 contacts feeding him material each Monday that he would otherwise never have come across.
The connections between the examples were left to the audience to make, and the through-line was simply that gathering and exchanging information had become possible in ways unknown a couple of years earlier, along with the tools needed to navigate the resulting volume. The most telling part of the session was the Twitter backchannel running alongside it, which was itself a working demonstration of the crowd smarts Scoble had opened with.