BuzzVines : Pakistan’s first Citizen Journalism Startup?
I came across this interesting web app over the weekend: BuzzVines wants you to start a buzz about something in a (very) similar model to Truemors, except perhaps that these guys came up with this before Guy Kawasaki did.
According to their website:
To bring you all in the know, Buzzvines is a bit of blogging and a bit of reporting and social commentary. It’s the new merger in the field of news and information.
So how does it work? Pretty much like a forum actually — you enter something you want to report, and it appears like a blog-post on the front page from where other people can comment on it and discuss it.
From the looks of it, that is primarily how people are using it as well – most of them using it as a discussion forum ; company reps (Wateen?) using it to promote their products.
In between the noise, though, there are some people that seem to be using it to genuinely report news or start a buzz. As such, the site has some decent traffic now within the beta phase.
Will Journalists in Pakistan use this to break restrictions, free the press and bring about a democratic revolution? What do you say?
12:35 pm
Dear Osama
Thanks for the review. I am the owner of Buzzvines.com
Just to add to what you have mentioned, the idea behind Buzzvines is to promote free speech in Pakistan, which should not be restricted to the technical community.
A lot of us, from all walks of life, want to add our share of experiences and thoughts, to help bring a change for better. To change opinions and to enlighten others with our (a different) point of view.
In Pakistan, unfortunately, this descretion of power was held mainly by the journalist community and later (more recently), it expanded to individual bloggers (technology gurus) who found a way to express their thoughts online. But still a common man, from some other background in arts or socialism, does not have access to such liberty of sharing their thoughts online. Buzzvines is an initiative towards empowering that common man, who has the vision to analyze issues and wants to have his inputs on that.
And just to clarify our position, Buzzvines.com is not associated with any commercial organization like Wateen or Mobilink or Nestle for their sole promotion, but does provide a platform for information broadcast on any of these, as desired by the user.
In the end, I would request all readers/ viewers of this feed/ post to please help promote this platform for creating an enlightened and well-informed society.
Thanks
Amer
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