Allvoices to Adapt Twitter’s Method to Gather Global News

As Twitter ascends to the stratosphere as the communications channel of choice – and there’s no stopping it now - media types can’t be blamed for wishing there were some easier ways to separate out, say, what our dear fellow Twitterers may have had for breakfast, from significant breaking news stories.

Now, there are ways, involving tags and such, but the barrier to entry is so far proving daunting to multi-tasking journalists and bloggers. What I, for one, have been wishing out loud about for a while now would be a Twitter News Channel.

So, along comes Allvoices.com today with an interesting approch to this very issue. You may recall that we profiled Allvoices here a couple of months back. The company is run by a dynamic Pathan-American, Amra Tareen, and its mission is to create a global community for sharing news from anywhere in the world in a multimedia format that dispalys multiple points of view – “free from the traditional editorial oversight and censorship characteristic of global media organizations.”

Today, Allvoices announced that it now can accept a 160-character text news submissions, and algorithmically build a rich media context around that small snippet of information – think of it as a news headline submitted by anybody, anywhere that triggers a multimedia event page supplied by Allvoices.

A particularly intriguing aspect of this service is its global nature. According to the company, around 80 percent of the globe is now covered by SMS access numbers, so users can text in a news submission from almost anywhere.

Read the full article written on BNET by David Weir April 15th, 2009 @ 12:58 pm