Update II: This post caused a lot of controversy because in its original form it showed some very graphic pictures from the Israel/Palestinian conflict happening at the moment. Something you’d expect when a war was happening. Unfortunately the detail of the post was lost in the debate about the appropriateness of the imagery, plus I was accused of favouring one side over another. This was profoundly not the intention, but it was clear I had stumbled unwittingly into a political area because the post largely carried pictures of Palestinians under siege and no pictures of Israelis under rocket attacks. Unfortunately this was not done to favour one side – I simply couldn’t find any of the latter kinds of pictures on the site, simply because no Israelis had uploaded any at that time. This is clearly a failing of a picture agency which relies purely on user-generated content, in that it leaves it to “the crowd” to gather the footage – and the crowd is not usually out to be balanced. I’ve now removed the imagery, other than the original, to illustrate the piece. Comments are now closed on the matter.

It’s one thing to have these photos and to say where they’re from and make a brief reference to highlight your point, but to include statistics and personal stories and to emphasize THOSE has NOTHING to do with Demotix, just your opportunistic way to bring the conflict to technology and get more readers. If I wanted to read a political blog, I’d read the Huffington Post or something else. This article is a FAIL.

Lonely Planet are also venturing into the revenue-sharing field, paying amateur bloggers for content (see: http://www.paidcontent.co.uk/entry/419-swn-lonely-planet-to-share-ad-revenue-with-amateur-travel-bloggers/ and http://inside-digital.blog.lonelyplanet.com/2008/11/14/working-with-bloggers/), but they’re a massive business, the website was originally subsidised by the long-established print part of the enterprise, plus now they’re part of BBC Worldwide, so one would expect they can afford to absorb the slight financial hit the rev-share element will precipitate.

I agree that the ability of major publishers to cover events globally in detail is diminishing, but maybe it’s still too soon for Demotix to benefit..? I’d be interested to hear others thought on this.

http://www.order-order.com/2008/12/economics-of-blog-comments.html

We should expect better from TechCrunch which last time I checked is a tech blog, not a political blog with an ideological perspective.

(I say this as the guy who pulled Scoopt’s launch press release on July 7th 2005 because it coincided with 52 people being murdered in London. We had an image of Concorde ablaze on the home page and the connection between cash and content was too close for comfort on that occasion.)

I think what everyone is trying to say is that you didn’t exercise very good (smart?) judgement in the way you wrote this article.

Even when Mike was covering the pre-election issues for TC, he was always neutral no matter what gaffes or flash stories were popping up on a daily basis.

By zeroing in on the dead Palestinians (which is a tragedy no matter which side you are on) you have taken a small snapshot of a much greater problem. The readers of this blog are here for technology but they will always have a political opinion – this just isn’t the right forum for it.

Gaza is happening now, people are dying on both sides and emotions are very raw. Injecting this angle into a story about a potentially promising business just isn’t good judgement.

And Demotix, thanks for encouraging us to send pictures of carnage and death. That’s a great way to promote your business.

I think it’s the tinfoil hat you’ve been wearing.

I know that in you’re mind your trying to educate the clueless American public about how awful Israel is and how pure Hamas is, but that simply teaches us that you, and many of your European media cohorts are propagandists with little to know understanding of the principles of journalism.

It is good to have goals in life. Maybe being honest about your agenda would be a good start.

You have an agenda, your post is propaganda, and you’re too much of a weasel to admit it. Simply reporting about a startup, indeed.