Almost since the internet became publicly accessible, there have been attempts to harness the power of the network to let everyday people report on what's happening deep in the hearts of their communities.
From early sites like GeoCities to the Chronicle's own chron.commons blogs to Facebook - the most successful of these platforms - the internet has been seen as a window into what's important in people's lives.
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Now, it's Google's turn to take a shot at enabling on-the-ground reporting. The search giant has launched a pilot program called Bulletin that makes it easy to report on hyperlocal news and events. Slate reports that it is currently only available as a trial in two cities, Nashville and Oakland.
And Slate apparently found it after Sami Cone, a blogger in Nashville, wrote about Bulletin and posted a YouTube video of the launch event there.
According to Google's Bulletin site:
Bulletin is a free, lightweight app for telling a story by capturing photos, videoclips and text right from your phone, published straight to the web (without having to create a blog or build a website). If you are comfortable taking photos or sending messages, you can create a Bulletin story!
In the launch event video, Google product manager James Morehead says his company will work with local media to surface the stories that are posted to Bulletin and possibly republish them. And as Slate notes: "The author controls the content and can take it down anytime they want."
Some news organizations will likely look at this as a competitor for local news, but it strikes me more as Google offering media outlets a new tool for finding out what's going on and possibly working directly with some of the more trustworthy and skilled users of Bulletin. This is an opportunity, if it's done properly, rather than a threat.
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Of course, news operations already this in a way, searching public social network posts for news and using them as tips to develop stories on their own platforms. And Facebook, Twitter and others have mechanisms that allow the embedding of stories directly into other websites. Entities with bigger media megaphones then give hyperlocal posters a broader reach.
But there's still a lot of noise in this process, and finding good stories takes work. We'll have to see whether Bulletin, when and if it rolls out to more cities, can solve that problem.
If you want to be considered to test Bulletin when it comes to your community, you can fill out a form here.
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