• Advertising Age, Thursday, October 2, 2008 11 AM

Eager to jump on the twin bandwagons of citizen journalism and iPhone applications, CBS quickly launched Eyemobile for iPhone, which makes it easy for users to upload "news-worthy" photos to its user-generated news site. But apparently not everyone agrees on what makes something news worthy.

Users logging on to CBSeyemobile.com yesterday were greeted with semi-pornographic images and videos apparently uploaded through Eyemobile for iPhone. Once discovered, the offending material was quickly removed, but not before hundreds of thousands of users surely saw it. Perhaps worse, Google was placing ads adjacent to the NSFW material.

The mobile application does have safeguards against such material, but they apparently weren't working at the time. "This seems to be a classic case of nobody paying attention to whether any of the materials are newsworthy or not," said Karl Johnson, chief operating officer of BrandContent, a Boston-based agency. "Looks to me like Facebook run amok, but even Facebook has a moderator."

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