At the International Citizen Reporters’ Forum

I’m here in Seoul, South Korea, at the International Citizen Reporters’ Forum. Got in last evening after an 11-hour flight from San Francisco. About 100 participants here, from places as diverse as Cameroon, Japan, Argentina, the US, Nepal and Australia. This is my first time in Asia, believe it or not.

Here are some photos on Flickr.

The conference is being put on by OhmyNews, the granddaddy of citizens’ media sites, now over 6 years old.

I just finished participating in the opening panel, Citizen Journalism and Technology, alongside Craig Newmark of Craigslist and Cryan Nunez, technology manager of Witness.org and moderator Amit Asaravala, editorial chief of TechSoup. The session was videotaped, so I’ll post a pointer if and when it goes up. Spent some time talking about Drupal and some of the 400 other content management systems.

But mostly I mentioned the new approach we’re taking with Ourmedia and invited conference participants (and others reading this post) to work with us so that we can showcase your users’ works of grassroots media on our front page while keeping the media file on your own servers. We especially want to highlight international contributions of citizens’ media from sites and blogs that may not get a lot of visibility.

Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media, Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices and Tim Lord of Slashdot are among those here.

Ethan’s talking now. He’s one of the founders of Global Voices, which is now getting about a million visitors a month. They put up a wiki that allows people in different countries to suggest the best blogs in that nation, such as Cambodia. They’re increasingly showing home-grown podcasts, pulling together different podcasts from sources around the world. (It’s a great site, check it out.) Their correspondent filmmaker-blogger Hao Wu was just released Tuesday by the Chinese authorities after five months in jail.

I’m meeting a lot of great folks here so won’t blog most of the sessions I’m attending. For that, look particularly to Ethan’s blog and other bloggers.

By the way, yesterday there were huge anti-FTA protests in downtown Seoul led by labor unions, with more than 50,000 demonstrators. Chuck Olsen, blogger and Rocketboom correspondent, has photos and is working on a video.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.