The following, written by 2011 News Challenge Winner iWitness, is crossposted from PBS Media Shift.

By Jesse James Garrett

Let’s face it: The great promise of citizen media has not really been fulfilled. News organizations have struggled to find ways to supplement their coverage of news events with contributions from citizens — and finding citizen media related to a news event is currently difficult at best.

Keyword searches and hashtags provide partial solutions, but still do not differentiate between first-person accounts and other kinds of content. And although more and more services allow their content to be geotagged, few tools take advantage of this data in meaningful ways.

That’s where we come in. My company, Adaptive Path, is a user experience design firm based in San Francisco, and with funding from the Knight News Challenge, we’re building a tool that we call iWitness.

iWitness is a web-based software tool that will enable individuals and news organizations to aggregate and cross-reference news events with user-generated online content related by time and place. If you know when and where something happened, iWitness will show you first-person photos, videos and messages from people who were there, integrating diverse media types in a unified interface.

To read more, read iWitness Aims to Aggregate News By Time and Place on PBSMediaShift.