Last Sunday, citizen journalism guru Dan Gillmor was in Belgium for the Blogboat 1.0 event organized by Chips vzw. In the afternoon there was a discussion with bloggers, citizen journalists and media professionals. I made a some pictures and videos which you may find interesting.



Gillmor explained how new initiatives can be started on the internet without big investments or costs, e.g. Dopplr.com where he is an investor.



And he explained the principles and process steps of innovation on the internet:





He also talked about anonymity on the internet and defended Sarah Palin against anonymous attacks, see my earlier blogpost.

After Gillmor's presentation, an interesting discussion started. Clo Willaerts from Sanoma said that the really influential players on the internet are not the bloggers, but the "embedded publishers", i.e. corporations, organizations, associations that publish their news directly on the internet without the intervention of newspapers, magazines or publishing companies.



Rudy Raymaekers from Concentra told how the internet editors and the newspaper editors are not cooperating with each other, but instead working independently:



This brought an interesting discussion between Clo and Rudy on the issue:



Evi Werkers of K.U.Leuven and ICRI gave a presentation on the ethical aspects of citizen journalism:



And Ike Picone from VUB had in interesting vision on who the "citizen journalists" are: not only the bloggers and the internet publishers, but the commenters and members of social networks like Facebook and Twitter too. He calls them "prosumers".