One of the main advantages of the digital age is that there are tools available, which facilitate the collaboration of thoughts, opinion and promote discussion at all levels and on various platforms. Many organizations are doing and have done great innovative things in this field.

OhMynews is one of the pioneer media organizations, which opened its doors to the new-media journalists. NowPublic, Wikinews, Guerilla, Bayoshere follow suit and did their best in bringing citizen journalists onto the homepage. Blogging no doubt is the most important tool in the inventory of a citizen journalist, but one thing it misses out on, to some extent, is collaboration with other people to work on the same news. Comments always extend the opinions expressed in the post, but still, real collaboration to produce a news article is missing. Wikipedia has done a great job in bringing more than a handful of people into a single article and do the job of writing, editing and managing the content. Digg, Del.icio.us and other social networking sites have been successful in gathering the crowd to promote the best stories on the homepage.

Wired’s Assignment Zero has created a lot of buzz in last few days, and I would be very glad to see that things get to the next level in citizen journalism through their effort. However, where it comes to news collaboration, it is quiet different from many people collaborating to produce a single article. Naveen has spelt is out in Internet 2.0 that every news has a shelf life. A particular piece of news, which might be the most important article today would surely loose out its value within a few days. The 9/11 terrorist strike was the top news for many many days in a row, but if someone today suggests to cover the subject as the top current news, doubts exist whether many people would give it the top news rating. However, there is no doubt that as an article it will continue to hold value for a long time.

We at Instablogs are gearing up for the battle ahead. We are experimenting with our Newsroom to get people, independent of nationality, age and sex, to collaborate on the same news but within a fixed allotted time. Time here is going to play a crucial role. Like I agree with Naveen that every news has a shelf value, so we have to workout a system which can take care of the complexities of time allotment, news submission, news gathering, crowd-sourcing and yet remain accessible for use by everyone. We also need to keep the newsroom updated so that it can accommodate as many citizen Journalists as possible. There are many other challenges before us, but the most encouraging aspect is that we are getting over 150 submissions of quality articles from our newsroom each day. Putting our growth rate in perspective, we used to get only 15 submissions per day, a few weeks ago.

In the coming days we will also be incorporating regional news into our Newsroom, and that is going to be one of the biggest challenge. It will be very interesting to read insider stories from someone who actually based in Congo, Sudan, Nepal, Argentina, and a host of other countries.