What happens when you put laptops, digital cameras, high-speed wireless cards, and Ustream accounts into the hands of two curious young net users in the technology mecca of the world, just as one of the most sensational global news stories of the year erupts around the corner?

That’s what happened on June 8th, when Tomohiro Kato drove a truck into a crowd in the middle of Tokyo’s Akihabara district, the start of a stabbing spree that ended with 7 deaths and over a dozen injuries. Hanging out just nearby, two Ustream users wandered outside in the aftermath of the massacre with their laptops and cameras in hand to see what the commotion was about — streaming what they were seeing as they went.

And they saw a lot. One of the two users, Kenan, described the scene in his blog:

It was very vivid, with people right next to the camera so badly wounded that they were receiving resuscitation, and cloths used to stop the bleeding scattered all about.

Shortly after Kenan started his stream, another Ustream user named Lyphard joined in from a different location. Viewers following the two streams climbed, from only dozens at first, soaring to a total of 2000 to 3000 at their peak.

Lyphard explained how this happened at his blog gunnyori:

I broadcast through Ustream what was happening on the spot. There was nothing different between doing that and what I had
been doing just up until that point, broadcasting the situation at Linux Cafe. The reason that I did it was just that I wanted to broadcast what was happening at the scene, the atmosphere at the scene. But that was it.

Nothing out of the ordinary for a leisurely Sunday in Akihabara, maybe. But these guys did a whole lot more than just shoot a few images of bloody towels on the street.

I’ve been reading and writing about Japanese blogs for a while now, and I’ve never seen debate as profound as the conversations that
exploded on the Japanese blogosphere after this brief experiment in live "citizen media". The questions that bloggers were asking themselves are questions that I’m betting we will all be asking ourselves very soon. Do we have an ethics of live video reporting like
this? Where is the boundary between the "curious onlooker" and the "critical reporter"? The technology to stream live video from your very own cell phone might be already here, but are we ready for it?

One of the most powerful statements on this story was made by a Japanese blogger named complexequality, who I quoted in my blog round-up on this story. complexequality put our ethics to the test with this thought experiment:

If it is hard to see this, try imagining the following thought experiment. The offender this time is writing a lifelog [blog] on his cell phone this time. Many people are looking at that lifelog. Through “reports”. So now, what if the offender had suspended a wireless camera from his neck, and had streamed the entire scene that unfolded before his eyes, right up to when he was taken in by police, on Ustream? Would we all have watched that?