Category Archives: relevanceCover via Amazon
I just finished reading a killer classic fiction mashup (literally), Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It’s a parody of the Jane Austen novel (which I tried to read in college and found unbearably tedious).
I must admit, though: The addition of a Night of the Living Dead-style zombie plague made all the endless fretting [...]
Image by mobatalk via Flickr
Later today I’m giving a talk at an entrepreneur’s group about how you can get more benefit out of social media by using hashtags. I’ve found that these can be exceptionally valuable tools to connect with topics and people. They also can help you make yourself (or a topic, organization, or [...]
Column-based Twitter applications like Tweetdeck can make following hashtags easy. (Image by Tojosan)
As I’ve mentioned before, hashtags are a powerful tool that allows Twitter users to track what many people (especially people whom you aren’t already following) are reporting or thinking about a particular topic or event.
Here’s the catch: Hashtags aren’t an officially supported Twitter [...]
Typically news is presented in narrative story format (text, audio, or video). Often, that works well enough. But what about when people want to dig into issues on their own? What if they want to learn more about how the news connects to their lives, communities, or interests? Generally, packaged news stories don’t support that [...]
Journalists typically recoil at the thought of writing anything that resembles marketing copy — or even from thinking of news as a product. But we’re already long past the age when an established news brand was all you needed to determine the relevance and quality of news. If journalists truly believe the quality of their [...]
NOTE: This is part 2 of a multipart series. See the series intro. More to come over the next few days.
This series is a work in process. I’m counting on Contentious.com readers and others to help me sharpen this discussion so I can present it more formally for the Knight Commission to consider.
So please comment [...]
Clearly Ambiguous, via Flickr (CC license)
Local is just one set of ripples on the lake of news and information.
UPDATE SEPT. 15: I’ve launched a new series fleshing out this discussion. See Being a Citizen Shouldn’t Be So Hard! Part 1: Human Nature
When it comes to information that helps people function better as citizens in a [...]
Just now, Jeff Jarvis posted something that resonates strongly with me. See: The myth of the creative class:
“We have believed – I have been taught — that there are two scarcities in society: talent and attention. There are only so many people with talent and we give their talent only so much attention — not [...]
Gary W. Priester (Click image to enlarge.)
Often, the first challenge in life is simply to see the target.
I really used to hate stereograms.
When they became popular in the early 1990s, they often reduced me to serious frustration and headaches. I would stare at them — glare at them, really — trying to will their embedded [...]
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