In 2008 I converted part of my research on social networks and social networking online into material to be embedded within a marketing book.
I wasn’t the first (e.g. Google’s CEO said that the impact on printed news would be an increased demand of quality content), and will certainly not be the last to extol the potential virtues of user-generated news.
But there is another side-effect: the potential for spontaneous and instant feed-back on specific issues.