Clay Shirky, well-known 'Internet Guru' and New York University professor, believes that both journalism and democracy in general have much to gain from the "cognitive surplus" that the new media world is giving us. Technological developments mean that journalism has the potential to be at its best, if it can find a way to support itself. Shirky was speaking at an event organised by Microsoft's Regard sur le numérique (Eye on digital) project in Paris.

The idea behind the Cognitive Surplus - the title of Shirky's 2010 book - is that as we switch from passive television watchers to online content creators, there is so much content in all its different forms being generated at all times that we should be able to make this valuable, particularly in light of our interconnectedness.

The public is no longer simply consuming information supplied by those with authority, but is generating it and the way in which it comes together can actually make a difference. Shirky brought up the example of Ushahidi, a crowd-sourcing platform which allows anybody to contribute reports that are then marked on a maps - on post-election violence or rigging, for example, or on storm damage - and hence creates a useful resource out of scattered pieces of information.

With the plethora of online comments, newspapers are having difficultly editing responses from their users. Reuters recently noted this problem, claiming the importance of encouraging comments that advance the content of the story while simultaneously blocking tasteless responses. "I've become increasingly concerned about the quality of discourse in comments on news stories on Reuters.com and on other major news sites," reports Dean Wright. "On some stories, the 'conversation' has been little more than partisans slinging invective at each other under the cloak of anonymity," Wright refers to how Richard Baum, Reuters Global Editor for Consumer Media, is handling the comment dilemma.

Baum affirms that newspapers need to have control over what users publish onto professional news sites. He explains that comments which contain racist language, incitement to violence, uncivil behavior towards other users are plainly unacceptable. Other types of comments where there is excessive use of capital letters, spelling and grammar errors, or irrelevant responses to the story reflect poorly on the newspaper industry. "When we block comments of this nature, it's because of issues of repetition, taste or legal risk, not political bias," says Baum.

Following reports that CBC is considering putting an end to anonymous comments on news stories, the old argument concerning anonymity or identity for online comments has resurfaced. Jeff Keay of CBC's media relations put forward a possible model: "People have to sign their real name," he explained, "and the newspapers, for example, will check and verify the identity of the person.

In an interview with The Guardian, MP Shawn Murphy supported banning anonymous comments, stating that they "are getting nastier and nastier." He implored news websites to go the old fashioned way of not accepting "unnamed letters," especially since user anonymity is only an illusion. "There have been many court cases in the last year," he said, and "it is very easy for one to get the ISP numbers of the computer that those comments came from through a court order."

Ushahidi is a crowdsourcing mapping platform created by Kenyan lawyer and blogger Ory Okolloh in the aftermath of the 2007 Kenyan general elections. The idea is that with enough input from users, the platform can use the aggregated information to monitor situations such as riots, or natural disasters and help to provide a useful overview of the situation, via a map. Ollokoh received $70,000 from the Knight News Challenge in 2009 to develop Ushahidi further.

Nieman Lab's Megan Garber spoke to Ushahidi's director of crisis mapping and strategic partnerships, Patrick Meier, about how media outlets can use the platform. Meier gave Al Jazeera's work in Gaza as an example: its journalists were texting and tweeting direct to an Ushahidi map and the news outlet directed its audience to the map as their "first stop." The map was then opened up to the public in Gaza to add their own information. Meier found this combination of professional and amateur coverage very interesting, particularly as comparing reports made it possible to start to detect who were the more credible members of the crowd.