“Moblogs Seen as a Crystal Ball for a New Era in Online Journalism” é o título de um artigo que está disponível no Online Journalism Review (OJR), e que integra um texto de Howard Rheingold (“Smart Mobs Revisited”). O autor começa por escrever sobre os “moblogs”, ou seja, os blogs criados com a ajuda de ferramentas móveis (com destaque para os telemóveis, mas não só), e vai passando para outras preocupações, nomeadamente os efeitos que este fenómeno poderá trazer para o jornalismo online. Só para aguçar o apetite, aqui fica um pequeno excerto: “The right tools for global, instantaneous, multimedia production and distribution are necessary, but not sufficient, to achieve the goal of democratizing journalism. (…) Journalism, if it is to deserve the name, is not about the quality of the camera, but about the journalist's intuition, integrity, courage, inquisitiveness, analytic and expressive capabilities, and above all, the trust the journalist has earned among readers”. E ainda, sobre o papel social e político dos blogs: “The more attentively we sift and analyze and share our discoveries online, the more the writers of blogs (and whatever blogs evolve into) can grow a social intelligence: personally tunable but collectively produced sense-making and way-finding. At least that's a plausible ideal. (…) For all its entertainment and social networking value, the most important promise of blogging is that it could help revivify the moribund public sphere that is as essential to democracy as voting”.