This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart: community journalism. I seek out websites, blogs, and business models all the time to get ideas on how to make my GeistBlogs.com Network of weblogs better. One I’ve been watching for quite awhile is iCommunity.tv. These guys have it goin’ on!

While I believe their model is a bit too broad, they have the right idea: allow Joe Citizen to post local news about their town or community and allow them to contribute to their local “channel” as they have it defined. Users post their news clips from YouTube.com hosted content, add a description and title, and then plot the video on an interactive Google Map.  Google allows just about anyone to link to their maps and provides a free API to help you do it. But no one that I’ve seen has married this mapping technology to local video content and built an aggregation portal around it like iCommunity.tv.

While iCommunity.tv is still in beta, the idea is probably just waiting on the technology and users to catch up with it. It quite possibly be the CNN of the Internet someday with everyone in their local communities posting local news clips to iCommunity.tv and any other local niche portal. As YouTubers start plotting their mapping coordinates on the YouTube Google Map, iCommunity.tv will get some help in aggregating video content from their API master. Let’s just hope that Google keeps this platform open and doesn’t charge aggregators like iCommunity.tv a license fee. They should make enough money on the business ads they are selling through the maps to keep it free for a long time.