Yesterday, Kim was out registering voters at the Milford Oyster festival. I stopped by and ran into Tessa Marquis and had an interesting talk about citizen journalism and I’d like to illustrate a few different points of this from recent events.

First, I’m no expert on journalism, so if what I’m suggesting doesn’t make sense, I apologize. However, it seems to me that there are three key aspects to any journalism endeavor. First, there is the gathering of information. Then, there is the ‘sense making’, finding a story line or narrative that is compelling, and then there is the distribution.

This gets to a key problem that live bloggers run into. Too often they are trying to gather information and make sense of what is going on all at the same time. This can draw them out of the moment, and they can miss important information.

So, when I am live blogging, or doing various forms of mobile social media, I try to simply gather information and get it distributed as quickly as possible. Then, when I get back home from an event, I can try to make sense, and write up a longer, more narratively interesting entry. What is nice about this approach is also the collaborative aspect. If people see my comments, photographs or listen to my audio posts, they can grab and do their own sense making out of it, even if the sense they make ends up much different than the sense I eventually make out of it.

My blog post yesterday is a good example of that. Local Politics is a picture that I took with my cellphone, which I added a small amount of text to and sent on to Flickr, which in turn posted it to my blog. Later, Mike Brown posted additional information about the candidates to help with the sense making process. When and if I get time, I hope to write up a more detailed post about the Oyster Festival, but the way things are piling up, that just may not happen.

So, if we break apart the information gathering part of the journalistic process from the sense making part, we may find that we want to apply the distribution to both the information gathering part of the process in addition to the sense making part.

As I have been working to get bloggers, delegates, and others going to Denver to submit their information via cellphones to sites like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and so on, I’ve also been working on the distribution channels of this raw information. The DemConvention Room on FriendFeed is set up to pull in information from many such sources so people can look at a fairly raw, unedited feed, and then decide what they want to use for their own sense making.

CSpan is getting into this game as well. They have just set up an account on Twitter and have additional plans in place for their website, which will include aggregating messages on Twitter flagged with the #DNC08 and #RNC08 hashtags.

Here in Connecticut, Lon Seidman has set up http://ctgoestodenver.info/, a site that will have various content from the Connecticut Delegation in Denver.

As a final note, as I checked the DemConvention FriendFeed room, I saw a posting about one of the Denver bound bloggers who was in a serious accident.

Please do whatever you can to help the blogger and her family with the increased expenses this accident will add to their coverage of the convention.