Topix lets citizen post local news online

Topix is one of a growing number of new aggregators that has began to let citizens upload local stories giving readers the opportunity to search for stories of a small town written and produced by the people who live there.

Seizing on growing interest in Internet-based "citizen journalists" — stories and images posted by the public — news site Topix.com will introduce an area where anyone can post or edit reports, commentary and photos about local happenings.

Site visitors can find the items about their locality by entering a ZIP code or town name into the site's search engine.

The users' material will supplement Topix' current service that collects and posts news from 50,000 traditional newspapers and blogs.

If you look at the page for Chicago you will see that the page is also edited by citizen journalists from Chicago. While many of the stories are just short blog entries with links to local newspaper articles this site has created forms where people can edit, update and point out related news in new ways. Now every story can be reported on by a thousands of citizens on connected by the Internet. This is the evolution of the news story. From a dead article in a newspaper filed by the reporting of one person to a living story with several contributors that can be debated in a public forum for the world to see.

Topix laid out its plan of attack on April 1st. The center for Citizen Media has created a informed page on the principles of how to be good citizen journalists.

The University of Maryland has ten new projects in community community news such as :

New Castle News Forum. To create a weekly cyber newspaper built from citizen-generated content for the Chappaqua area in Westchester County, N.Y., which has lost its local newspaper. The project is spearheaded by local volunteers under the auspices of the Friends of the Chappaqua Library.







Who needs mapping software when you have My Maps. Google just create a new feature that lets you add place marks and lines to their maps.