Wearing technology on your sleeve

You think the switch from typewriter to computer was a revolution? The next stage could see many of us interacting with computers inserted into our very clothes. A new project is exploring a range of applications where wearable technology could significantly improve productivity and even help save lives.

Assimilate, assimilate!” You trekkies out there will recognise the Borg mantra for the bloodcurdling ‘assimilation’ of humans by machines. On the other side of the sci-fi divide, many may recall Star Wars’ recently revived Darth Vader, the half-man, half-machine dark lord of intergalactic evil.

From science fiction to science fact, the pairing of man and machine has always been at the forefront of our fears of what the technological future might have in store. But it has also been the basis of many of our conceptions for dealing with the challenges of the future: efficient multi-medial communications, improved ecologically friendly transport and revolutionary medical applications. After all, for every space villain there is a light sabre ready to be used to chop his head off.

Today’s instances of the association between man and technology are perhaps not as impressive to the jaded cinemagoer, but just as ambitious for the impact they could have on our daily lives. The focus, though, is perhaps not so much on assimilation as it is on integration and usability European researchers have been carrying out wide-ranging testing of new wearable technology with applications in a variety of fields and with the potential of protecting and even saving lives. The vital innovation is that the technology facilitates a new form of human-computer interaction comprising small, easily accessible body-worn computers that are always on and always responsive.

If you have a desktop application, then there is always a screen, a keyboard and a computer unit, but if you have a wearable computing solution, then it can be completely different,” says Michael Lawo, technical manager of the wearIT(at)work project. “You can have speech control in one instance, gesture control in another, though the application should always be the same,” he says. The Open Wearable Computing Framework being developed essentially comprises a central, easily wearable and hardware-independent computing unit which gives access to an ICT environment. Some of the basic components include wireless communication, positioning systems, speech recognition, interface devices, and low-level software platforms or toolboxes allowing these features to work together.

New paradigm
The pattern of this EU-funded project is woven as much out of applications as it is technology. It uses a number of commercial, off-the-shelf components and brings them together to create a new tool with the potential to revolutionise the way we work.

“Wearable computing is a completely new working paradigm,” says Lawo. “It is a technology which can support you in a particular environment. Instead of working at the computer, you are directly supported by the technology, a bit like when you are driving a car and you get information from the navigation system supporting you in your primary tasks.”

WearIT(at)work, the largest civilian wearable computing effort worldwide, is currently being tested in four different fields. These include aircraft maintenance, emergency response, car production and healthcare. Pilot projects in the areas of bush-fire prevention, e-inclusion and cultural heritage have also recently been launched.

In most cases, the technology is being applied to people who are not accustomed to using computers at the workplace, such as blue-collar workers. “The basic idea was to make the technology available to the workers and directly improve productivity,” says Lawo.

“We address fields where there are no similar applications today. Take the example of an aircraft technician. There is a person doing paperwork who has to find the relevant documentation on a computer. He has to find the aircraft maintenance manual and the parts manual, and produce a printout. These documents are handed over to the technician who then goes to the aircraft to do his work. He then has to write a report on a sheet of paper. And that is the way things work today. What we are doing is giving the worker support and direct access to the ICT system from the workplace. We get rid of the paper.”

Working with fire

With a considerable number of applications potentially possible, perhaps the most challenging test case for the project is the one involving emergency response teams, in collaboration with the Paris Fire Brigade. The technology helps support the communication, collaboration and information processes of rescue forces.

The efficiency and safety of firemen can be considerably improved by a number of light, easy-to-use and resistant devices, such as biosensors monitoring their physiological condition and improved localisation of hazards, personnel and retreat paths.

The technology has largely been well received by workers. “They recognise that this is a new technology where you can monitor working activities, but they do not hesitate to use it, and they see the advantage of it,” says Lawo.

Difficulties might nonetheless emerge in the future. “As soon as you come to the actual introduction of the technology and start negotiating with the unions, privacy will undoubtedly be an issue,” says Lawo.

WearIT(at)work already has some 42 partners, including IT giants Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Siemens, but Lawo says the project is always on the lookout for new ventures.

“Research will continue for components or for positioning systems. There is a lot of further research that can be carried out, but you can basically already do quite a lot with the application and with the technology that already exist,” he confirms.

Testing is due to continue until mid-2008 and will be followed by an initial 12-month period where the focus will shift to exploitation. “What we really want to do is introduce the system into everyday working methods,” says Lawo.

Transparency is the Third Principle of Citizen Journalism

What skin do you have in the game? Bloggers consider transparency one of the guiding principles they live by. Citizen journalists, too, should follow this simple rule: Disclose, disclose, disclose. Reveal your motives, your background, your financial interests in writing about a subject.
While no one can plausibly argue with the idea that journalists need to disclose certain things, such as financial conflicts of interest, a reasonable question is how much we need to disclose. Should journalists of all kinds be expected to make their lives open books? How open?
Personal biases, even unconscious ones, affect the journalist as well. Example: An American from a middle-class background is brought up in with certain beliefs that many folks in other lands (and some in the United States) flatly reject. We need to be aware of the things we take for granted.
Another way to be transparent is how we present a story. We should link to source material as much as possible, bolstering what we tell people with close-to-the-ground facts and data

The People Formerly Known as the Audience

The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about.

Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak— to the world, as it were.

Now we understand that met with ringing statements like these many media people want to cry out in the name of reason herself: If all would speak who shall be left to listen? Can you at least tell us that?
The people formerly known as the audience do not believe this problem—too many speakers!—is our problem. Now for anyone in your circle still wondering who we are, a formal definition might go like this:
The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.
Once they were your printing presses; now that humble device, the blog, has given the press to us. That’s why blogs have been called little First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of the press to more actors.
Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting, gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did.
Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the user’s hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the Web.
You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages.
A highly centralized media system had connected people “up” to big social agencies and centers of power but not “across” to each other. Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical one.
The “former audience” is Dan Gillmor’s term for us. (He’s one of our discoverers and champions.) It refers to the owners and operators of tools that were one exclusively used by media people to capture and hold their attention.
Jeff Jarvis, a former media executive, has written a law about us. “Give the people control of media, they will use it. The corollary: Don’t give the people control of media, and you will lose. Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will.”
Look, media people. We are still perfectly content to listen to our radios while driving, sit passively in the darkness of the local multiplex, watch TV while motionless and glassy-eyed in bed, and read silently to ourselves as we always have.
Should we attend the theatre, we are unlikely to storm the stage for purposes of putting on our own production. We feel there is nothing wrong with old style, one-way, top-down media consumption. Big Media pleasures will not be denied us. You provide them, we’ll consume them and you can have yourselves a nice little business.
But we’re not on your clock any more. Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press, has explained this to his people. “The users are deciding what the point of their engagement will be — what application, what device, what time, what place.”
We graduate from wanting media when we want it, to wanting it without the filler, to wanting media to be way better than it is, to publishing and broadcasting ourselves when it meets a need or sounds like fun.
Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, has a term for us: The Active Audience (“who doesn’t want to just sit there but to take part, debate, create, communicate, share.”)
Another of your big shots, Rupert Murdoch, told American newspaper editors about us: “They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.”
Dave Winer, one of the founders of blogging, said it back in 1994: “Once the users take control, they never give it back.”
Online, we tend to form user communities around our favorite spaces. Tom Glocer, head of your Reuters, recognized it: “If you want to attract a community around you, you must offer them something original and of a quality that they can react to and incorporate in their creative work.”
We think you’re getting the idea, media people. If not from us, then from your own kind describing the same shifts.
The people formerly known as the audience would like to say a special word to those working in the media who, in the intensity of their commercial vision, had taken to calling us “eyeballs,” as in: “There is always a new challenge coming along for the eyeballs of our customers.” (John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners in the U.S.)
Or: “We already own the eyeballs on the television screen. We want to make sure we own the eyeballs on the computer screen.” (Ann Kirschner, vice president for programming and media development for the National Football League.)
Fithian, Kirschner and company should know that such fantastic delusions (“we own the eyeballs…”) were the historical products of a media system that gave its operators an exaggerated sense of their own power and mastery over others. New media is undoing all that, which makes us smile.
You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.
The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here.
After Matter: Notes, reactions & links
I have been using the phrase, the people formerly known as the audience, for a while. But I had never tried to define it. This post came out of reflections after BloggerCon IV (June 23-24, “empowering the users”) and in anticipation of the Media Giraffe conference (June 28-July 1, “Sharing News & Information in a Connected World”) but also in the course of writing Web Users Open the Gates (Washingtonpost.com, June 19).
“Guys, citizen’s media isn’t fairy dust that you can sprinkle on an existing program and make it magically interactive, bloggy and web 2.0 compliant.” Ethan Zuckerman is talking to American Public Media’s “Marketplace” on how not to approach the former audience:
So let’s get this straight - Marketplace isn’t able to answer email from listeners, even when those listeners are offering to help them work on getting a former contributor out of prison. But Marketplace is interested in having me fill out a 19-field form so they can contact me via email and, if neccesary, call me for a quick soundbyte on an upcoming story.
Dave Winer gets lyrical at Scripting News (July 1):
We live in the age that Emerson predicted, self-reliance. Make your own music and your own products. Everyone gets to be creative. The brains are in what we used to call the audience. No more looking up to the ivory tower for all fulfillment. Thank god we don’t all have to be as beautiful as Farah Fawcett and Christopher Reeve. Everyone gets to sing. Users and developers party together.
Amy Gahran at Poynter about TPFKATA: “Seriously: News pros should be watching and joining this conversation.” Amy also points to a BlogPulse tool for tracking the ripples outward from this post.
Ripple: At the Associated Press Managing Editors website, Mark Briggs of the (Tacoma, WA) News Tribune says to fellow editors:
You need to read the post – and the comments – to understand what is happening “out there.” The audience is off the sidelines and in the game and is going to play. It’s up to you to play with it in a way that benefits everyone.
They used to be our most loyal customers. Fine Young Journalist, commenting on this study by a Harvard master’s student (“Emerging Collaborative News Models and the Future of News”) says about the users of Digg.com, Slashdot.org and other wisdom-of-the-crowd sites… “These aren’t just the people formerly known as the audience, they’re the people formerly known as our audience.”
Should you be in the immediate vicinity, I will be performing this post on Nantucket Island, July 26 at Nantucket Antheneum (8:00-9:30 pm, Great Hall) as part of the Geschke Lecture Series. If you are a blogger and want to attend, e-mail me.
Doc Searls is right that power “shifting,” while crudely accurate, is less than apt for my case. Power is expanding and dispersing because broader participation makes for a “bigger” press. Doc:
The expansion of authorship from few to many is a postive-sum development. So is the expansion of authority and influence that naturally grows in a market constantly enlarged by broader participation, and not merely by a growing choice of “content.”
There are lots of ways for “old” media to adapt to the new system. “Unfortunately, few or none of them are in the toolboxes of the old system.” Read his response to TPFKATA. And Doc returns to the subject here.
Ripples… Stowe Boyd: “Once power migrates to the edge, the edglings are unlikely to give it back.”
Jeremie at Temporally Relevant likes the term: “To be an edgling is to share and participate with your peers through open technology.”
Stowe Boyd’s follow-up post, Edglings: A Well-Ordered Humanism and The Future Of Everything (July 11).
Personally, I favor the term Edgling because I want to move away from media metaphors, and use economic or sociological ones. This is not about who is “producing content” and who is “consuming” it: which is the basic paradigm of media thinking. Instead, it is about control moving from the central, large, mass-market organizations — which includes media companies, but also other large organizations, like government, religious organizations, and so on — out to the individuals — we, the people — at the edge.
As power moves from the center to the edge the “Centroids” — those that hold with the centralized power of an industrial era — will scream about all the negatives that they perceive in the out-of-control future that threatens the basis of their worldview. But the Edglings will find it liberating to get out of the stranglehold on information, communication, and the marketplace that centralized organizations attempt to impose.
The Edglings vs. the Centroids. I like it.
“The concept of audience remains valid.” At First Draft, Tim Porter responds to this post:
We are all each other’s audience. A good listener is an audience. So is a critic. Or someone who clicks on someone else’s Flickr photo. The publisher-audience relationship remains, but today it is a loop, not a pipe.
I agree with Tim. The audience hasn’t “gone away.” Porter: “The ‘audience’ is out there. Journalists need to be out there, too.”
Here’s the link to a French translation of this post: Le peuple jadis connu sous le nom d’audience. And here’s a response in French to the French translation.
Other reactions of note:
Ulises Ali Mejias of Teachers College at Columbia University: “Are we really talking about a community of producers, or a mass of producers? Put differently: Is production the new consumption? My argument is that TPFKATA function as a mass of producers…” (And see this Doc Searls reply to Mejias.)
Young PR professional Jeffrey Team at Inside the Cubicle: “Well Jay, the demise of the audience is not confined to journalism, it is pervasive in all communications…I am on a personal crusade to get the public relations industry to move away from the term target audience and instead think about communities of interest.”
Independent journalist Dave LaFontaine: “I can’t help but notice that when it comes to the actual, hard data on what sites people spend the majority of their time at … well, folks, it’s the Usual Suspects. Big media.”
Dave Cormier at his Education blog: “The revolution, if there is ever to be one, is going to take years of concerted effort. I applaud Mr. Rosen for his manifesto, I worry that too many people think we have already won.”
Andrew Cline at Rhetorica: “Exactly who are these people? It seems to me they are not the majority that makes up the semi-fictional ‘mass’ audience or the thing called ‘the public’ that so interested John Dewey and Walter Lippmann.”
Tom Matrullo at IMproPRieTies: “There is much to be said for the repeating of a theme or set of key ideas, encoded in such a way as both to pique attention and to convey to the already clued-in that a certain set of assumptions about speaking, writing, community formation, were in play, harboring large shifts in power, control, and dominance.”
Jon Husband at Wierarchy: “I notice two things …1 … the antibodies and immune system are really big, and are spread out everywhere; 2 … in addition to rejecting the foreign substance/bodies/players, the extant system is also trying to swallow ‘it’ … eat it so that the fever will be killed.”
Scott Walters asks how this post connects to the world of theatre, while elearnspace says, “I’m waiting for a similar announcement from learners in corporate and higher education,” and this blog (“advocacy strategy for the age of connectivity”) says “Rosen’s riff on the Audience is directly related to the way advocacy and organizing groups think about members and supporters.”
J-school student Ryan Sholin imagines a career path in journalism starting with “the community editor’s position.”
Wherein it’s my job to bootstrap the newspaper’s online connections to local bloggers and community members, launch hyperlocal sites comprised mostly of stories written by The People Formerly Known As The Audience, and manage them. This means learning some more web design and coding to modify some existing open source software, but the hard part is getting the community (and the editors) to see your newspaper as a place for participation.
From the incomparable Cursor, Media Patrol column, June 27 edition:
A new hire by Sen. Hillary Clinton, “to help improve [her] image among liberal bloggers,” is called “a major coup.”
Whereas to Billmon’s eye, ‘The Swiftboating of Kos’ is “starting to look more and more like a coordinated effort,” Ralph Nader finds that “after a while a chronically humorous way of looking at politics becomes a distraction,” as the nation’s political life assumes the binary position year after year.
A Texas governor’s race poll finds incumbent Gov. Rick Perry leading the pack — and Independent candidate Kinky Friedman in second place.
As Fox News employees are allowed to hear the whip cracking, ‘The People Formerly Known as the Audience’ proclaim “a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve heard about.”
The Economist in April 2006:
Almost everywhere, download speeds (from the internet to the user) are many times faster than upload speeds (from user to network). This is because the corporate giants that built these pipes assumed that the internet would simply be another distribution pipe for themselves or their partners in the media industry. Even today, they can barely conceive of a scenario in which users might put as much into the network as they take out.
Exactly this, however, is starting to happen.
Seth Finkelstein dissents in the comments at Dan Gillmor’s blog:
Dan, we’re still the audience. If you don’t like my comment, you can personally attack me to a number of readers that is orders of magnitude more than I could realistically reach myself. I have no effective way to reply. That’s “audience”.
If I do volunteer journalism, but it is not propagated by A-list gatekeepers, and not appealing enough for the popular sites, it’ll be ignored. That’s “audience”.
And what happens if the professional journalist just doesn’t care if he or she gets it wrong, as long as it brings in the crowd? That’s “audience”.
Like the news media, Seth is an inflater of the balloons he pops. He refutes propositions I haven’t made: that the audience is no more, that media power has been equalized.
As I wrote in the comments to another poster:
The post I wrote does not say “the people” have the power now, and the media lost theirs. It says there’s been a shift in power. (And there has, but only a partial one.) It also speaks of a new “balance of power,” which is another way of talking about a limited change.
I’m not claiming that the power shift is total, or even decisive. Only that it’s signficant, and changes the equation.
Exclusive influence, monopoly position, the right to dictate terms, dynastic continuity, priestly authority, guild conditions for limiting competition— these have been lost, not the entrenched media’s social and market power, which as you say remain considerable.

Transparency is the Basis of Citizen Journalism

What skin do you have in the game? Bloggers consider transparency one of the guiding principles they live by. Citizen journalists, too, should follow this simple rule: Disclose, disclose, disclose. Reveal your motives, your background, your financial interests in writing about a subject.

While no one can plausibly argue with the idea that journalists need to disclose certain things, such as financial conflicts of interest, a reasonable question is how much we need to disclose. Should journalists of all kinds be expected to make their lives open books? How open?

Personal biases, even unconscious ones, affect the journalist as well. Example: An American from a middle-class background is brought up in with certain beliefs that many folks in other lands (and some in the United States) flatly reject. We need to be aware of the things we take for granted.
Another way to be transparent is how we present a story. We should link to source material as much as possible, bolstering what we tell people with close-to-the-ground facts and data.

Citizen Journalism

Fairness in citizen Journalism makes it tool to social development

Fairness is a must for all good citizen journalism. Whether you are presenting a balanced story or arguing from a point of view, your readers will feel cheated if you slant the facts or present opposing opinions disingenuously. This section offers guidance on how to play fair.

Fairness is also about letting people respond when they believe you are wrong, even if you do not agree. It also means listening to different viewpoints and incorporating them into the citizen journalism. It does not mean parroting lies or distortions to achieve that lazy equivalence that leads some journalists to get opposing quotes when the facts overwhelmingly support one side.

Ultimately, fairness emerges from a state of mind. We should be aware of what drives us, and always be willing to listen to those who disagree. The first rule of having a conversation is to listen — we can learn more from people who think we're wrong than from those who agree with what we've said.

Citizen journalism: Inside information vs. outside perspective

Type the words citizen journalism into Google, and you'll get roughly 17 million results. And each will have a different definition for the term.

The discussion of the topic generally centres around blogs. Now, blogs are sort of online diary, right? Sometimes that means you're talking about just how cute your toy poodle is -- day after day after day. Entry 3368: "Toy poodle still cute! Click for video!" But sometimes a blog is a hard-hitting political report. Entry 665: "Congressman found with cute poodle!" Or it's a discussion of physics. "Entry 3.14: MA=Poodles." Or maybe it's even breaking news before the big news giants report it. "Breaking: Poodle joke stretched too far!"

Today's blog is yesterday's newspaper
So this has people all up in arms. How do you tell the "real" journalists from the amateurs if everyone can publish with pretty layouts and impressive typefaces? Whom can you trust? This debate doesn't seem much different from the kerfuffle around newspapers and broadsheets at their birth. Journalism today is much different than it's been throughout most of its history.

You see, big newspapers grew from citizens with printing presses into big companies. The same will happen -- no, is happening -- to blogs. In fact, it's happening at an accelerated rate. It already happened to Web sites as the term was used in, say, 1994. In 1994, a Web site was a very academic or possibly personal thing to have. By 1999, it was a business venture. (By 2001, it was out of business, but you get the idea.) The blog is just a very special kind of Web site.

Insiders vs. outsiders
By accelerating the process of involvement and innovation in publishing, the Web brings into focus a cycle that I think bears directly on the idea of citizen journalism. You see, journalists are citizens. What I think people mean by citizen journalism is regular Joes with Web sites, as opposed to folks who are employed by big media companies. There are insiders, and there are outsiders. Outsiders eventually can become insiders, and less often, insiders fall to become outsiders again.

Outsiders aren't in the know. They don't necessarily have contacts, but maybe they're smart and they're observant. These are the ones mainstream media fear and deride. They don't have qualifications. They often don't have all the facts. What they do have is perspective. They aren't disproportionately swayed by the events of the things they discuss. An outsider often points out simple contradictions that insiders can't see or perhaps can see but defend irrationally. On the other hand, outsiders can also be barking lunatics.

An insider is in the know. An insider has contacts and knows the facts. An insider greets the outsider's criticisms with a smile and a somewhat condescending "Well, it's not that simple." Insiders aren't just inside the industry, they're often top journalists. They have the inside info, they know the rumours, they understand how things really work and they can explain away the seeming contradictions pointed out by the naive outsider. They often lack perspective, too. They can be affected by whatever it is they cover to the point of becoming unable to spot all the flaws or see through bad arguments and specious justifications.

Blogs are just tools
It's worth pointing out that these days many of the insiders have blogs. Writing a blog doesn't make you an insider or an outsider, as much as some insiders would like it to work that way. It's just a tool of expression that tends to be used more often by the outsiders at this point.

The joy of free expression and the great creative product of a free society is the interplay between the insiders and the outsiders. The outsiders cry foul and expose great hidden truths and often have the effect of keeping things honest. The insiders protect the system against excesses of the outsiders' ignorance or misunderstanding. It's a natural system of checks and balances that the Web helps along by levelling the playing field a little more. The insiders aren't the only ones with printing presses anymore.

When printing began, the monarchies feared it greatly because the printers were outsiders at the time. They weren't priests or rulers. They were tinkerers. It was a new technology implemented by a class that could potentially expose abuses. Quickly the establishment learned to use it to its own ends. Now the newspapers, while still employing a few outsiders, have become insiders of the establishment themselves and logically fear the outsider bloggers.

The cycle repeats
Blogs are already becoming mainstream and will eventually become the province of the insiders. But the ease of publishing will leave plenty of room for outsider blogs. They'll end up in a situation similar to that of Web sites in general. A collection of big Web sites dominate the traffic, but cool new ideas do break through from small operators. In the future, a few big blogs will gather most of the attention, but smaller blogs will still be able to bust into the pack every so often. In the process, though, blogs will no longer be cool tools for outsiders, just because they're blogs. They will also be the tools of the insiders.

But it won't end there. In fact, all this crazy Web 2.0 talk probably has the seeds of the next wave. We'll see a new technology/model/tool arrive that the outsider will dominate at first. The insiders, bloggers or not, will fear it, and the whole cycle will repeat. And it's a good thing that it will. The world gets a little bit better and a little bit more open every time it does,

Citizen journalism' battles the Chinese censors

n the strictly controlled media world of communist China, "citizen journalism" is beating a way through censorship, breaking taboos and offering a pressure valve for social tensions.

In one striking example this month, the Internet was largely responsible for breaking open a slave scandal in two Chinese provinces that some local authorities had been complicit in.

A letter posted on the Internet by 400 parents of children working as slaves in brickyards was the trigger for the national press to finally report on the scandal that some rights groups say had been going on for years.

The parents' Internet posting was part of a growing phenomenon for marginalised people in China who can not otherwise have their complaints addressed by the traditional, government-controlled press.

"The phenomenon of 'citizen journalism' suddenly arrived several years ago," said Beijing-based dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was one of the student leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests.

"Since the appearance of blogs in particular, every blog is a new platform for the spread of information."

He cited the example of a couple in the southwestern city of Chongqing who became known as the "Stubborn Nails" in April because they refused to leave their home until they received adequate compensation from the property developer who wanted them out.

They quickly became household names in China -- and symbols of resistance against greedy land developers and corrupt local authorities -- mainly thanks to Internet postings.

"That case was first revealed through blogs," Liu said.

Also in Chongqing, parts of the city were this month set on fire following the beating of flower sellers by the "chengguan", city police charged with "cleaning up" the city's roads.

Witnesses to the beatings had appealed to local television journalists, but nothing was broadcast.

The incident only became known outside the city thanks to photos and stories published on the Internet, sparking anger among China's netizens.

"It's fascism," said one, while another mocked: "The inhabitants of Chongqing are truly naive, the Chinese media is all controlled by the Communist Party, they decide what people know."

Several days later, another blunder by the "chengguan" -- this time in Zhengzhou in central Henan province, again targeted at a street seller -- provoked further riots.

The image of protesters surrounding a police car, captured by a mobile phone, made its way round the world, after being posted on Chinese movie sharing site Tudou, then reposted on YouTube.

Elsewhere across China, protesters often seek to post photos or videos of unrest on the Internet to counter the versions from the state-run press and local authorities, who usually downplay or deny the events.

Recognising the threat of China's growing online community, Chinese President Hu Jintao called in January for the Internet to be "purified", and the government has since launched a number of online crackdowns.

"The department of propaganda has sent out regulations to try and control the opinions being spread on the Internet, but every citizen has the right to criticise or to take part in public affairs on the Internet," said Zhu Dake, a professor at Shanghai Tongji University.

"The government has to accept the criticisms of the people, it can no longer react crudely like in the past."

Julien Pain, who monitors Internet freedom issues for Reporters Without Borders, is less optimistic.

"One cannot truly say that the Internet in China is becoming more and more free, because at the same time as the development of citizen journalists, the government finds ways of blocking or censoring content," Pain said.

Reporters Without Borders, which labels the Chinese government an "enemy of the Internet," says about 50 cyber dissidents are currently behind bars in China.