THIS BLOG IS MOVING – update your RSS feeds

The Online Journalism Blog has now permanently moved to OnlineJournalismBlog.com – this means that if you subscribed to the onlinejournalismblog.Wordpress.com RSS feed, it may eventually stop working.

What this means in plain English is: to keep following the OJB you need to update your RSS feeds as follows:

Posts: http://feeds.feedburner.com/onlinejournalismblog

Comments: http://feeds.feedburner.com/OnlineJournalismBlog_comments

The new site will allow me to do lots of new things with the blog, beginning with allowing you to make video comments. Hope you can join the conversation.

Plurk to add 15 new verb options

To those who haven’t been caught up in the fuss, Plurk is a new microblogging service and rival to Twitter. Users are invited to post about what they’re doing using one of 15 verb prefixes, including ‘loves’, ‘is’, ‘thinks’ and ‘shares’. Indeed, it has found itself so successful among disenchanted Twitterati that Plurk has decided to introduce 15 new verb options. These are:

1. smokes - e.g. “ryanlim smokes another wimpy rollup”. In an attempt to generate revenue, users will be charged a 15% tax on every smoke-Plurk. However, due to health and safety regulations they will not be able to smoke-Plurk indoors.
2. shouts - for users who accidentally leave caps lock on. e.g. “ryanlim shouts GOING HOME NOW”.
3. lies - for double-bluffing Plurk users.
4. lurks - for users who are only there to read other Plurks. Lurk-Plurks are invisible.
5. waffles - for users who, even with a 140 character limit, still manage to talk too much.
6. dies - for users who smoke-Plurk 60 times a day.
7. rhymes - for hip hop artists, poets and drunkards.
8. impersonates - for identity thieves.
9. mutters - for users who really don’t want to be heard. mutter-Plurks disappear after two seconds.
10. reincarnates - depending on a user’s karma score, they may be reincarnated as follows:
    • 0.00 to 21.00: a bee
    • 21.00 to 41.00: a big bee
    • 41.00 to 61.00: a wasp
    • 61.00 to 81.00: a small mammal
    • 81.00 to 100.00: a drummer in a tribute band
11. steals - Plurk “warns users that valuables are left on Plurk at their own risk”.
12. denies - for users who have been accused of steal-Plurking and Plurk-lying.
13. shags - Plurk-porn is a further business model being considered by the founders, who promise shag-Plurks will be done tastefully and with great lighting.
14. gloats - for users with inordinately high karma scores
15. leaves - for Plurkers who have decided one Twitter service is enough.

Paul Bradshaw

What is original about Charlie Beckett’s ‘conceptual model of networked journalism’?

Charlie Beckett, the Director of the LSE and LCC thinktank POLIS, and former Senior Editor of Channel 4 News, has just published his book SuperMedia - and if you follow this blog you’ll find his conceptual model of “networked journalism” rather familiar…

Below you’ll find my ‘Model for the 2st century newsroom’ and, below it, Beckett’s own “conceptual structure”,

Has blogging changed your journalism?

As part of a book chapter on the subject I’m putting together some research on if and how blogging has changed our work as journalists. It would help me enormously if you could take a few minutes to complete this short survey on ‘Has blogging changed your journalism?’.

If you could pass on the link to other journalists who blog I’d be very grateful too.

It’s all anonymous, and the results will be published here as soon as I compile them, with an email notification to members of the Online Journalism Blog Facebook group.

If you want to say more on the subject, please email me at paul.bradshaw@bcu.ac.uk – or indeed, blog about it yourself and link back here so I know about it.

Many thanks.

A week in online journalism: roundup

Allison White has written this wonderful roundup of last week’s news for the OJB. But now she’s got a job. Persuade her to do this again in the comments…

Google

-Announced no desire to create content and will respect copyright.

It added face-blur technology to its Street View mapping serivce to protect privacy. Also speculation from Groves Media on whether this technology is more of a threat to civil liberties than CCTV.

Microsoft

-Looking to limit the kinds of computers that can use their low-cost OS, making them poor computers even if they could be better and still be as cheap.

Introducing: the Facebook group for online journalism educators and academics

I’ve set up a Facebook group for online journalism educators and academics. I don’t know about you, but I find Facebook groups very useful for organising things quickly, asking for feedback, or finding the right people quickly. Teaching or studying online journalism can be like taking a shot in the dark sometimes, so I hope this will become a place to network, share ideas and gather support. Join it if you think it’ll be useful – I’ll try to assign an admin in every country so we can make it as useful as possible.

PS: There is also the Online Journalism Blog Facebook group.

Social bookmarking for journalists

This was originally published in Press Gazette as Del.icio.us social bookmarking explained and Need some background info? Just follow the electronic trail.

How journalists can use web bookmarking services to manage, find and publish documents.

Every newspaper has a library, and most journalists have kept some sort of cuttings file for reference. But what if you could search that cuttings file like you search Google? What if you could find similar articles and documents? What if you could let your readers see your raw material?

That’s what online bookmarking – or ‘social bookmarking‘ – tools allow you to do. And they have enormous potential for journalists.

There are a number of social bookmarking services. Del.icio.us is best known and most widely used and supported. For this reason this article will focus mostly on Del.icio.us.

10 questions from a student: How has social networking transformed journalism? (Now with transcription)

I’ve decided to respond to student questions now via video. The latest collection are from Jess Barlow, and are copied below. The video responses are split into three videos – and there is a transcription of the responses at the end:

1. Which online tools and resources do you use to keep up to date with breaking news stories, and why do you use these?
2. Do you keep a personal Blog and if so how regularly do you update it, and why?
3. How important is Blogging to you personally, and in your opinion for online news production?

Video comments and a new review on JournalismEnterprise.com

The Online Journalism Blog’s sister site, JournalismEnterprise.com, has a review of the social bookmarking site socialmedian (currently in alpha). I’ve also added a video comment facility to the site, so if you’re on Seesmic you can post video comments on any of the sites reviewed on JE.com.

Also worth checking out is Alex Lockwood’s recent review of Friction.tv

Graph of the day

From Zooming In on Online Video, a toolbox of advice to “help newspapers of any size develop profitable video applications”.