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Earlier today, I had suggested that Global Voices and Desipundit lead the effort to create a ‘State of the Indian Blogosphere 2009‘ collaborative report. Going by the positive reaction to the idea, it seems that the report will happen in one form or another.

To start things off, here is a list of the top five newsworthy events in the Indian blogosphere in 2008 –

1. Citizen journalism played an important role in covering the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.

Citizen journalism came to age in India during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.

Several bloggers posted first hand updates during the three day crisis (Amit Varma, Sonia Faleiro, Rahul Bhatia, Arun Shanbhag), several others live-blogged reactions on legacy media news, and some of us played the role of curators (Global Voices, DesiPundit, Mumbai Help, Dina Mehta, Gauravonomics).

Almost a month after the Mumbai terror attack, Indian bloggers continue to discuss the tragedy and many observers believe that this engagement will continue till the 2009 Indian general elections.

Introduction

Late on November 26, 2008, India was shaken by a series of terrorist attacks across ten prominent locations in Mumbai, India’s cultural and financial capital (Wikipedia).

The ten terrorists, linked to Islamic terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba, managed to hold Mumbai hostage for more than 60 hours and killed 171 people, including several foreign nationals.

Citizen journalism played an important role in covering the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack and several observers, both in the mainstream media and the tech blogosphere, have written about it from many perspectives.

The story has been framed in several ways — “participatory media vs. legacy media”, “Twitter vs. blogs”, and even “Indian internet users vs. American internet users”. As someone who tracks social media and citizen journalism in India very closely, I thought that it may be worthwhile to write a long article length post and separate the myths from the reality.

I’ll divide the case study into four sections —

- Section 1: What was the role of citizen journalism in covering the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack?