Scoble on how 'crowd smarts' helps journalists

"It's a great time to be a journalist," said FastCompany's Robert Scoble as he began his keynote to a packed room at the Online News Association conference in Washington DC.

Here's why: Scoble got a member of the audience to video his talk using his mobile phone and broadcast it live online. This means that not only can people watch his talk as it happens, but they can also ask him questions and influence the way the event develops.

This approach takes advantage of the audience who, he says, are smarter, richer and more educated than anyone who appears on stage. "Now I can use 'crowd smarts' while I am interviewing," he adds - and using new tools and platforms helps to change and inform the way journalism is done.

Scoble also talks about his experience of tracking the recent Chinese earthquake through Twitter. Using the microblogging platform, he says, "I was the first American to tell people about it," before the US Geological Survey had it, and before CNN. "I knew it was significant because people in China all twittered before the USGS... That was automatically a significant news event to me," he said.

[As an aside, NowPublic has recognised the power of microblogging and its Scan tool can be used to track what people are saying about any event or story as it unfolds - and indeed contact them to find out more. Here's the Hurricane Ike scan, which has some great insights from people in Texas. And here's NowPublic's scan of the conference, so you can see what people are saying about the ONA and the sessions as they happen.]

'Media snacking'

Scoble then takes us on a tour through a variety of Web 2.0 tools he uses to get his information and communicate - FriendFeed, Google Reader, Seesmic and co.

He says he has 500 friends on Google Reader who themselves filter the news - and come across interesting stuff - so he doesn't have to go looking for it. "I call this media snacking... looking for something interesting to eat."

Using methods like this, he says, "in this world, if you miss a piece of news, if it's interesting, it'll keep coming back to you."

This is all useful stuff, if you are unfamiliar with these tools as many people still are.

But it felt a bit unfocused for a keynote to me, and lacking a "big idea". The point, I think, is that many tools and platforms are emerging that allow us to find people and gather information in ways that were previously unheard of, in real-time. So we can choose to be plugged into a whole world full of people talking about many different things and sharing collective intelligence.

Needless to say, a lot of people were twittering about Scoble as he spoke - it was interesting to watch the responses from the audience through his talk - some enthralled, others drifting off as they waited for the killer piece of advice to come.