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category archive listing Category Archives: research

Hashtags: Your Social Media Radar Screen and Magnet

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 [...]

Chicago Tribune Story Idea Survey: Good Idea, Poorly Executed

(Image by Getty Images via Daylife)

The Chicago Tribune recently reported that it has halted a “short-lived research project in which the Chicago Tribune solicited responses from current and former subscribers to descriptions of Tribune stories before they had been published.”
The project — a collaboration between the paper’s editorial and marketing departments — was stopped [...]

MediaCloud: Tracking How Stories Spread

Last week, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society launched Media Cloud, an intriguing tool that could help researches and others understand how stories spread through mainstream media and blogs.
According to Nieman Lab, “Media Cloud is a massive data set of news — compiled from newspapers, other established news organizations, and blogs — and a [...]

Pew on Social Media: It’s Bigger than You Think

Image via Wikipedia

On Jan 14., the Pew Internet and American Life project released a report on Adults and Social Networking Services. It said, “The share of adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has
more than quadrupled in the past four years — from eight percent in 2005 to 35 [...]

Tipsheet Approach to News: The Launching Point IS the Point

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 [...]

Being a Citizen Shouldn’t Be So Hard! Part 1: Human Nature

NOTE: This is part 1 of a multipart series. More to come over the next few days. See Part 2.
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 [...]

Newsrooms hemorrhage more jobs than ever

Further to my earlier point that preparing today’s j-school students (undergrad and grad) mainly to work within mainstream news orgs does them an increasingly grave disservice, Rick Edmonds noted on Poynter.org today:
2,400 Newsroom Jobs Lost: Biggest Dip in 30 Years
WASHINGTON — After years of mildly reassuring numbers tracking the size of newspaper newsroom staffs, the [...]

How to make Furl better (so I’d start using it more again)

Furl, I love ya, but…

First, the good news: I love Furl. I really do. I have for several years. It’s long been one of my favorite social bookmarking tools because it includes several features beyond basic item tagging and descriptions:

Archiving: Furl saves a complete copy (or at least, it attempts to, and lets you know [...]

Social Media Up, Porn Down? Hmmmmm….

I was just watching the first episode of Buzzlogic Vino Diaries, a pretty good vidcast where people get together in a wine bar to talk about social media. Just my speed on both counts!
Here, Buzzlogic’s Valerie Combs talks with Bill Tancer of Hitwise about several intriguing online-media topics — over a fine glass of tempranillo. [...]