Website Analysis 4 - 'Produsers'

There is a link along the side to ‘Blogs’ and ‘Discussions’ which suggest website visitors are encouraged to participate and interact.
As well as these there is a link to ‘Your Photos’ where people send in their own pictures of any news stories or incidents they have witnessed. These feature things such as ‘UK Floods’ and ‘Camden Fire’. These are interesting to look at, as although a lot of them are low quality, they’ve usually been taken before news crews and photographers have got the chance to arrive at the scene, so they feel pretty real and we know they won’t have been edited or anything. I think this is a really good idea. I reckon if I witnessed anything important and had taken some decent pictures I would consider sending them in. What does anyone else think?
This is where Axel Bruns term ‘produsers’ comes in. This refers to people who are ‘consuming’ the website (ie. reading it and accessing it) but also ‘contributing’ to it (by adding pictures and contributing to forums, etc). It highlights the impact of interactivity and how new media makes it more possible. People could always contribute to ‘old’ media such as newspapers by letters and sending photographs or whatever but contributing online makes things easier especially as most letters and photographs will now take a digital form, the ease of contributing to websites is overwhelming.