“Citizen journalism”-have you heard that term before? If not, one of the best examples I can give you is NowPublic, a participatory news network based in Vancouver. NowPublic has thousands of reporters operating in 140 countries, ready to report on breaking news stories. For example, during Hurricane Katrina, NowPublic reports that they had more reporters in the affected area than “most news organizations have on their entire staff”.

The tagline for the site is “Crowd Powered Media”, which means anyone can contribute a story to the site. You create an account, submit your story, upload photos, video, or audio, using easy links on the site. If you use the photo sharing site Flickr, you might find one of your public photos in a story, which is how I found out about the site. A photo I took of Kaitlyn standing on our sidewalk with her wagon was grabbed for a story, and I got an email from the reporter asking me to approve or deny the use of the photo. All my Flickr photos are public so I approved it.

And now I’ve just had two more photos used in a story, photos I took just of a plate of tomato slices and a plate of lettuce leaves were grabbed to illustrate a story about how a new research study on how consuming fruits and vegetables may protect against lung cancer. By checking a box under the post, I made sure that my photos are credited to me and give a link to my Flickr page.

I’m just fascinated by this concept of participatory news, that I could be somewhere and see something news-worthy, take a photo or video of it, and have it appear on a news site. What do you think?

The blog Walk With Me Online is having a contest and giving the winner their choice from three different styles of Motorola Prepaid cell phones. The styles she has available and the complete rules can be found on on her post Tracfone Motorola phones for sale & a giveaway. Enter by May 31st, open to U.S. residents only.

Until I started spending more time on social networking and on doing product reviews, I got maybe one or two emails a day. Now, I get hundreds, and there are days when I open up Outlook and just about fall off the couch looking at all the emails there are for me to go through. And that’s just one email account! I also have three Gmail accounts. I’ve had to devise a strategy to help me manage not only the emails themselves but the information they contain. Here is what is working for me right now:

1. Performing some kind of action on each email as I open it. I used to just skim through, opening and reading, and then I would have 800 opened emails in my inbox. Not only is that inefficient, but it makes it more likely that I will forget something important in one of the emails.

Now, I open each one and deal with it immediately, either by deleting it if it’s not information I need to keep (more on that in a minute), performing an immediate action such as returning a friend request or replying to a blog comment, or by moving the email.

2. Moving email to somewhere other than the inbox. I’ve created a system of my own and you’ll have to choose one that works for you, mine is to move emails to either a pending folder, the Outlook Calendar, or into a blog post.

a. Emails that I receive that are to request advertising or a product review go into a folder labeled with the name of the advertiser or product. Each subsequent email I get as we correspond goes into that same folder. That makes it easier to manage what information we have shared, the details of the transaction, as well as the names and contact information for each person involved.

b. Emails reminding me of an upcoming deadline get copied and pasted directly into Outlook Calendar. It’s proven to be one of my most valuable organizational tools. I can see at a glance what I have coming up, and I can use the TaskPad to remind me of reviews that don’t have a specific date to be completed. After I finish an assignment, I delete it from the calendar.

c. This final organizational tip took me WAY too long to think up, and that’s using the Drafts feature of Wordpress to store email information. Once all the details of a review have been worked out, I create a new blog post containing all the information I will need for the review, including the name and email address of the person to whom I will be sending the link once the review is completed. Why do that? Because that way I don’t have to go back and forth between the blog post and my Inbox to find all the pertinent information.

3. Finally, the best advice I have for managing email is to UNSUBSCRIBE from anything you don’t absolutely need. I will sometimes come across a website that just seems so interesting that I sign up for it’s newsletter, and then after a few of those, I realize that it’s just one more email to open. I don’t mean blog feed subscriptions, I mean like the Web M.D. daily health report newsletter, stuff like that. If you aren’t really using the information, scroll down to the bottom and click the unsubscribe link.

Everyone handles email differently, so if you have a tip for me that I haven’t thought of, please leave it in your comment! I’ve resigned myself to the fact that email isn’t going away any time soon, so it has to be managed and incorporated into daily life.

I realize it’s been a month since my last post here, and I do apologize to those of you who are kind enough to stop by and check in. I’ve been having some time management issues related to my basically being unable to manage everything I have to do all at once.

I’ve also been using this more as a test blog, trying out themes and changes and such. I’ve been so busy trying to get product reviews done that I haven’t even been paying attention to what is new in the technical side of blogging. But I will try to update more often, I promise.