Late last year the BBC started trialling a new form of citizen journalism equipping university students with Nokia N-series phones , such as the N95, which have an integrated GPS receiver and camera and can also shoot video. The experiment is intended to discover how text, images, images and sound can be combined with location (GPS) and time to produce a real time social news reporting experience. It was only recently that we saw the power of mobile phone citizen journalism capturing the chilling echoes of gunfire on the Virginia Tech campus.

As well as being a novel in other ways, the news format does involve the integration of GPS-tagging into news reporting. It’s something that is sure to become more pervasive with time. Market research leader Gartner Inc. has predicted that about 589 million mobile phones will be sold with cameras in 2007, increasing to more than 1 billion worldwide by 2010. The figures are believable when one considers that camera phones weren’t launched in the US until 2002.

The citizen journalism trial is a collaboration between the BBC, University of Brighton, Nokia and mobile marketers Ymogen. Some initial stories have been published to the Geo-stories website. Each story plays as a slide show synchronized with Google Maps presentations. Stories can be accessed by clicking on a play button or clicking the active dots/signs on a story’s map. The site shows the concept quite well but is obviously in a “beta” stage. More advanced video search seems to be the only thing that seems to be missing from the concept at the moment.

Further GPS Enabled Mobile Phone Reading

GPSTek has reviewed the Nokia N95 GPS enabled smart phone in an article which also includes a video demonstration of the N95’s features. The newly released Mio a701 GPS mobile phone has also been reviewed.

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