Ethan Zuckerman, my Berkman Center colleague, writes:
Increasingly, it strikes me that there are three types of netizens I want to hear from:
– folks who are in the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time: the commuter in the London underground when the bombs go off; Gnarlkitty, as she visits demonstrations surrounding the coup in Thailand.
– folks who have an insight or perspective I can’t easily find in mainstream media: TheMalau writing about Congolese politics; Russell Southwood writing about African telecoms; Roland Soong writing about, well, almost anything.
– folks who make themselves part of a distributed effort to create new knowledge: the researchers who pick apart records of Congressional pay for the Sunlight Foundation, the bloggers who cover the Kenyan parliament for Mzalendo.