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Interesting example of how citizen journalism can happen via comments and conversation, not just in a packaged story or post.
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Wonder what all those @hoosgot posts on Twitter are about? They wind up here, for what it’s worth….
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Very cool approach to a fan site, this one for “Heroes.” I especially like the wiki section
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“Put “hoosgot†in a blog post or a Twitter tweet and it’ll show up on Hoosgot. Send a twitter to @hoosgot, it works as well. You can tag a post with hoosgot or lazyweb, and we’ll pick it up as well, as long as your blog is indexed by Technorati.”
Monthly Archives: December 2007
links for 2007-12-30
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A good starter guide for the confused.
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“I’m guilty of it. I do it on the phone with my mother and at meetings. I try not to. But I do. My name is Marnie and I lecture. And I do it even though I value the conversation. I do it because it’s damed hard not to.”
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“Next week I move over to a nonprofit called Pro Publica as president and editor-in-chief. A team of 24 journalists dedicated to reporting on abuses of power by anyone with power: government, business, unions, universities, nonprofits, media, etc.. “
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“Journalists, but contrast, are often a bit negatively oriented, and gripe about things that haven’t gone well — newsrooms are full of, if not malcontents, certainly half-contents. But there is a such thing as a postive-minded journalist.:
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Research: “Rapid growth in the # of media businesses bodes well for diversity of formats and sources of media-supplied content. Most encouraging is that these entrepreneurs barely recognize the existence of barriers to entry to the media business.”
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“Here’s the problem: If I want to really be honest and be as open and critical as I would like, I have to be anonymous and vulnerable. If I write under my own name, I have to keep it clean and safe so as not to hurt my family or offend my employer.”
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Hmmm…. treating the net like a TV… I’m sure this i great for some folks, but too passive and constrained for me.
links for 2007-12-29
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“Apple rumor mill: expectations of a new smaller-than-a-MacBook portable from the mothership, or possibly even an Apple-branded tablet computer. The ModBook is still a compelling piece of hardware, but I would have a hard time ordering one at the moment.”
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Nigerian scam spam as a literary genre… I kid you not…
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“3. Is this pitch or release bullshit?” I love that!!! But that should be #1 on this excellent list!
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What level of education is required to understand your blog? Also works on Web sites. Unclear what criteria they’re applying
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Interesting journalism experiment: “interested in finding a few people affected by the shutdown of Highway 40 on Jan. 2 who would be willing to Twitter about their experience — and what they see around the community the week the highway closes.”
Twitdrawal
As I was writing that last post, Twitter went down for a while (I think it was about an hour, but not sure of the duration). When it came back up, I think this tweet from Evelyn Rodriguez put it in context:
Heh… no kidding…
Social Media Tradeoffs
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| Travelator, via Flickr (CC license) |
| Though it’s often trivialized and denigrated, instant gratification is a very powerful thing. |
As I’ve gotten more comfortable and involved with using the microblogging tool Twitter, I’ve realized that I’ve been using the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us less and less. I’m not the only one.
When I posted about this on Twitter, my friend Beth Kanter tweeted in response:
“I’ve had the same experience — less social bookmarking, more Twitter. But Twitter not great for retrieval.”
“Twitter offers immediate gratification and connection with people, not just resources. But retrieval is hard.”
This got me wondering about why I really use each of these social media tools in the first place. But Beth has a point: I’d be lying if I downplayed the appeal of instant gratification.
The question then becomes: What precisely am I finding so gratifying with Twitter?…
links for 2007-12-28
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“taking MSM news and sharing it,in timely tablespoons, on Twitter. It is not the first time that social media community members in one time zone got the news and gave it to community members elsewhere in the world.”
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Geeky air travelers, take note: “Effective January 1, 2008, the following rules apply to the spare lithium batteries you carry with you in case the battery in a device runs low…”
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“Howard Owens has issued a challenge for all your non-networked friends — you know, the ones who never read any blogs except Romenesko or Shop Talk. The ones who don’t know how to work their digital cameras.They’re all over your newsroom.”
Bhutto Assassination News via Blogs, Twitter
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| The Teeth announcement on Twitter of Bhutto’s assassination, viewed via Snitter. |
This morning as I was making tea, I learned via NPR that Pakistani opposition leader and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated at a campaign rally in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Google News already offers a slew of mainstream news coverage of the assassination — based almost entirely on reporting done outside Pakistan, since tight restrictions on journalists remain in force in Pakistan even though President Pervez Musharraf lifted lifted six weeks of emergency rule on Dec. 15. (More on that country’s press restrictions from the International Federation of Journalists and the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists.)
Given the current dearth of available professional journalism from within Pakistan, the country’s lively blogosphere — much of it in English — has become a key source of original and diverse news, analysis, commentary, and context from around that troubled nation. Today especially would be a good time to start paying close attention to Pakistani blogs.
One of the easiest places to get started is a blog aggregator with the unlikely name of Teeth Maestro…
links for 2007-12-27
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“Girls continue to dominate content creation. 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys. Boys, however, do dominate one area – posting of video content online.”
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“The set “I know x†used to be larger than, and contain “x knows me.†Today, thanks to tools like blogs, they can be non-overlapping. I am sure many people know me who I don’t know (something impossible even 10 years ago for ordinary people.)”
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Hilarious anecdote about the dangers of what we think we know, pointed out to me by Nicole Simon
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“People who do a lot of copying of quotes from other sites will like Kwout, which launched yesterday. Use it to grab a quick quotation or other screen shot from a web site and embed it into a blog or other website (one click to Flickr and Tumblr).”
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“Gmail automatically adds anyone who you correspond with to your contact list. Thus, these same people, who you might not know very well, are now able to see all of your “shared†items in Google Reader. “
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“We shouldn’t just be trying to sell ad space to advertisers, but rather we should also be trying to sell them other services. How about micro pages on our sites where advertisers can showcase their products, services, menus, etc?”
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This pretty much sums it up: “Realizing I’ve wasted an hour playing with Twitter… …when I’d meant to write about how uncompelling it is.”
How to make Furl better (so I’d start using it more again)
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| 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 if that attempt fails) of every web page you bookmark there. So when you search your archive, you’re not just searching the metadata, but the complete document. As a journalist and general research hound, I’ve found that immensely useful.
- E-mailing: I can e-mail a link and comment to people I know as I bookmark something in Furl. Google Shared Stuff allows this, but other popular social bookmarking services (like del.icio.us) don’t.
- Optional privacy: I can mark Furl items as private or public — and I can specify private to be my default setting.
- Ample comment space: Furl allows me lots of space to record notes about the items I’m bookmarking, or to clip quotes from the content. No ludicrously tight character limits like the appalling 255-character ceiling on del.icio.us.
…Now, the bad news: In the last six months or so I’ve been using Furl less and less — even though I still believe it’s a superior service — mainly because the site’s not keeping up with state of the art user interface issues. That is, I’ve found that it’s getting progressively more difficult to use Furl, compared to del.icio.us and Google Shared Stuff.
Furl, because I love you and I want to see you thrive, here are my tips for how you can upgrade your service…
links for 2007-12-26
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heh… maybe we should call it antisocial media…