This Yahoo/Reuters News article discusses how mobile phone users are becoming the new wave of citizen journalism. The photo that has been used by many news sources comes from moblog.co.uk and was taken by Adam Stacey.

Social software such as flickr and del.icio.us are coming of age. If you read the accompanying threads on moblog, it is amazing how quickly the news organizations distributed the photograph through the world and how people became aware of the unfolding events via their computer. Wikipedia has an excellent summary of the day’s events.

Caterina Fake, who co-founded the popular online photo community http://www.Flickr.com, was not surprised to see her site’s traffic more than double within hours of the news breaking.

“We’ve seen an amazing eruption of citizen journalism stories since we launched Flickr,” she said. “It’s a confluence of trends: The distribution of camera phones to regular people and the means to immediately e-mail their photos from their phones is a big development. Also, many people are on broadband, so they’re able to experience the news more fluidly than ever before.”

Fake said the Flickr office had its own moment of convergence in the early hours. Staff members were upgrading their storage capabilities when two people simultaneously were made aware of the London explosions — one saw a professional news agency’s online report, while the other saw photos being posted by a Flickr user.

“It’s all about experiencing things live online, as they’re happening, along with the people who are there,” Fake said. “The immediacy of the experience is part of the magic.”

Relevance: This ties into ideas about the web being transformed into a sharing space as mobile and social technologies are used to connect people and provide a sense of presence. The collective power of ordinary people is discussed in The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.

[update]: The BBC has provided a place where citizen personally involved in the day’s events can share their experiences and photos.