The pictures were often grainy and the video shaky, but in media terms, they were gold dust. The bloggers of Burma used new technology to tell the world about last week's protests in their previously closed country. Thanks to them, we saw pictures of monks marching through the streets of Rangoon, and heard crackly phone calls with a chilling soundtrack of gun shots.

Many pointed out the difference technology has made compared with the 1988 uprising, when the junta's bloody suppression was largely hidden from outside view. It's no surprise then that last Friday, the authorities suspended internet links to the outside world and blocked mobile phone lines.

Since then, people inside Burma seem to be getting patchy access to the internet, but there's no doubt that it's a struggle to get their message out. On October 4, bloggers around the world plan a protest in support of their Burmese colleagues. In solidarity, they'll refrain from posting on their blogs, instead putting up only a banner with the words "Free Burma!".

The bloggers and citizen journalists in Burma are only the latest example of how news has been transformed in a very short time by what's known in the jargon as "user generated content" (UGC).

If you think back to the 9/11 attacks in the United States, the dominant images we all remember came from journalists. The BBC received only a few emails in the early stages, and of those, only two could be turned into interviews - by contacting the people involved.

According to Dan Gillmor, author of We The Media, it was the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that marked the turning point - a before-and-after moment for citizen journalism. One blog created just after the disaster, waveofdestruction.org, logged 682,366 unique visitors in just four days.

Many people felt this new kind of coverage was a one-off, or as one commentator described it, down to "lots of rich white westerners in bathing suits". But it wasn't.

The South Asia earthquake of October 2005 showed how wrong some major media groups had been in calling the impact of this new kind of reporting.

Within eight minutes of the quake bringing down Islamabad's Margalla Towers, the BBC's Talking Point portal received an email from someone who'd been next door in Al Mustafa Towers.

The corporation received 3,000 emails on the first day after the quake hit Pakistan, including comments, information, photographs, and messages about those who were missing. At some points, it was receiving news from the ground faster than its journalists - and aid agencies - could get there, especially from the badly affected city of Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

DISASTER REPORTING SHAKE-UP

As a researcher looking at how humanitarian disasters are reported, I find this particularly interesting. In the past, there's been a fairly traditional way of reporting disasters like earthquakes and famines, which often comes down to a close relationship between aid agencies and journalists.

Aid agencies need publicity for fundraising and advocacy, and so they talk to journalists and give them "case studies". Journalists need help and logistical support in places they may not have visited before.

This often adds up to a template along the lines of starving child (or other suitably distressed "victim"), hero aid worker and journalist reporting breathlessly on how awful it all is.

Today, citizen journalism is blowing apart that cosy narrative. The flow of information is no longer controlled by just a few journalists and aid agencies, because people can tell their own stories.

After the Pakistan quake, a doctor called Irfan Noor emailed the BBC about his work in the affected region. Once his details had been verified by a journalist at the BBC's UGC centre, he went on to record a two-week diary for the corporation about his activities in Peshawar, Odhi and Balakot.

Aid agencies - who in the past would have given this kind of story to journalists, and got their organisations' names in the papers as a result - are having to adapt.

A few years ago many transformed their press offices into pseudo-newsrooms, including employing former journalists. Now they seem to be trying to change themselves into user-generated content providers.

Many aid workers post blogs, daily diaries and photo journals on their own website or others like AOL, MySpace and YouTube, in order to get their message across and bypass a sceptical mainstream media.

Of course, there can be problems with citizen journalism. UGC is susceptible to hoaxing - major media organisations all received fake photographs of the tsunami; those who got caught out included The Times of India and Sky News in Australia.

Unlike journalists, bloggers don't have to verify their stories with two sources. And because UGC tends to work best with dramatic visuals, it's likely to exacerbate what some see as a media trend towards more coverage of one-off spectacular disasters at the expense of long-term complex emergencies.

Nonetheless, the hope is that UGC can be put to good use in allowing us to hear voices from more diverse places.

Potentially one of the most exciting developments could be in Africa, which is experiencing an explosion in mobile-phone usage. Within the next 24 hours, some 50,000 Africans will buy a mobile phone. Between 80 and 100 million Africans now have one, compared with only 8 million five years ago.

Many think this will allow the continent to leapfrog a stage in its industrial development, fundamentally altering how the continent trades, and receives aid.

It will certainly mean more people can make their views clear, as I discovered when I worked briefly on the BBC World Service "World Have Your Say" programme last year. There was a huge appetite from Africans to contribute to this daily phone-in programme.

The only thing that let people down in the past was the quality of the phone connections. But, as Burma's junta has learned over the past few weeks, it's increasingly difficult to ensure anything stays secret.

"Now, Burma is blacked out. How long can the regime afford to shut the country down?" wrote Aung Zaw on The Irrawady, a Thailand-based website that has been reporting from Burma. "I think the fight continues between the Burmese journalists and citizen-reporters who want to remain connected to the world, and the generals who cut the line of communication to isolate Burma."

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