Ask YC: Review my startup: See'n'Report - People Powered News | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Review my startup: See'n'Report - People Powered News

17 pointssharjeel9 comments

We are a bootstrapped company from Pakistan. We've built a Citizen Journalism news service (www.seenreport.com) which allows ordinary people to report text messages, photos and videos of unfolding news events directly from their cell-phones, as and when it happens. Readers of the news website can discuss, share and rate the news, vote stories up and down and syndicate the content on thier blogs.

The service also allows people to run their own "channels" to cover their events.

For instance, my country is going through political turmoil as the citizens across the country are carrying out long march for the restoration of judges deposed by former dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf. The current government has violently tried to curb the movement by force resulting in violence. The government has also put a ban on segments of media. People across the country are sending us their eye-witness accounts via SMS, MMS, email and web-upload to make news, be heard and bring change. All of it can be viewed at http://longmarch.seenreport.com/

Please take a look at it and let us know what you think about it.

It's well done, and good luck. Are you as an organization in support of the long march protest, or is this subdomain "owned" by the organizers?

Another thing... I have worked on both traditional and "citizen" news sites. I think there is a fundamental problem citizen news sites ignore:

On a typical day for a typical citizen, absolutely nothing interesting happens.

You are in a crisis right now so it may not seem that way. But for every 100,000 people perhaps 2 or 3 witness something actually newsworthy.

You need to develop truly innovative ways to gather actual news better than traditional sources. Giving out a mobile text number is not enough.

Thanks for the valuable remarks. You are absolutely right about getting content from Citizen Journalism. We are working on different ideas in this regard.

The organizers are the "owners" of the sub-domain in the sense that they can moderate the news coming in, change settings and control look & appearance.

Do you want a domain of mine (WeAreBigBrother.com)? I was going to be building something like this, but it looks like you might make more use out of it.

Here is the clickable link: http://longmarch.seenreport.com/

Excellent idea. I've been looking for something like this for a while.

One criticism I have right off the bat is that it is too busy. A lot of news sites are like that and maybe there is a reason, so it may be worth it to spend a few days working on a way for the user to change the layout if he chooses. (I use Twitter's RSS feed because I can't stand the custom backgrounds.)

That's only a suggestion, but here is something else to think about if you want to hit the US or Japanese markets: figure out how to filter tweets. I'm neither familiar with your site nor Twitter's API, but I imagine you could filter tweets on a term like @seenr or something like that. It benefits the user because they are posting to their personal tweet domain when they see something incredible but they are also posting to a news service. It's a great start, keep it up.

Have you considered filtering Twitter posts to add more content to your site? And what about votes for each of the posts?

Your site looks like a great alternative news source but I found it too hard to find useful information relating to specific geographic locations (the map feature didn't work for me.)

A less cluttered UI would also be great. (Eg Alltop.com)

I'm a pakistani working abroad and I'll have to admit that seenreport has definitely kept me and my friends up to dated with the current rally in pakistan. Its a great idea and the best part is that you guys have implemented it with perfection.

Cool website. Can you compare what you are doing to NowPublic, http://www.nowpublic.com?

We are more focused towards providing platform to media houses and other entities (political parties, activisits etc) to enable their citizen journalism arm. This has certain advantages. For instance it provides vertical filters for stories and builds communities around the content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com