Qatar's Media Connected Conference

Techies, journalists and techie journalists got to enjoy the Media Connected conference at the Sharq Village and Spa yesterday, which featured an array of speakers from the Economist, The BBC, Al Jazeera, The Arab Advisory and Now Public.

The talk that grabbed everyone's attention was by Leonard Brody, the co-founder and CEO of Now Public. Now Public is pioneering the use of citizen journalism: the aggregation of news from the public.

Crowd reporting, argued Cody, was a better term for what they were doing: journalism being a craft which required skill and analysis which the average amateur was unable to provide. What they did provide, however, was the ability to cover more places and in more depth than ever before.

Gaza was on everybody's mind, and one journalist from the audience asked why there was no mention of Gaza on the front page of Now Public today. The front page was utterly unimportant, replied Cody, with only 1.1% of users coming to stories via the front page. Nevertheless, it was interesting that Gaza featured heavily on the front page of Now Public today.

Crowd reporting was not limited to Now Public. Al Jazeera were making extensive use of amateur reporters in Gaza and were also providing training for these volunteers.

All the speakers were making use of social bookmarking services, although Al Jazeera, with their dedicated Twitter and You Tube channels, were the most proactive here. In addition, Al Jazeera are experimenting with the use of a Creative Commons licence for their broadcasting materials from Gaza, although this is currently so new they were unable to provide any statistics for it.

The Arab Advisor group also made a short presentation, providing some statistics on internet penetration in the Middle East. Qatar had one of the highest penetration in the regions, with 70% of its population using the internet compared to just 30% in Saudi Arabia.

What was clear from several of the talks, however, is that mobile phone penetration is far higher than internet penetration throughout the world. More and more mobile phones are capable of connecting to the internet, and the next generation of phones are likely to have faster connections than computer. As a result, making websites more mobile-phone friendly is going to have to be a priority for webmasters in the future.

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