Posts filed under ‘social networking’
How useful could Seesmic be for journalists?
See this video and respond on Seesmic
I’ve recently been playing with Seesmic once again, having briefly dabbled with an alpha invite a few months ago and stupidly written it off as a vague video blogging platform.
It isn’t.
It’s social. (more…)
Dutch site reinvents what news looks like online
Recently my attention has been drawn to the Dutch news website www.en.nl. Wilbert Baan, interaction designer for the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, told me he wants to see “what we can do with news, social networks, wikis and more.
“I think you might like the experiment we are doing,” he wrote.
And bloody hell was he right. (more…)
Q: “What is the point of Twitter?” A: …
Someone recently posted on my Facebook wall: “Paul, I don’t understand, and fear I may be too old for all this already… but… what exactly is the point of twitter?”
I can come up with at least nine answers. I’m sure you can come up with more:
- It’s a great way to publish to mobile devices;
- it’s a social networking tool to make contacts and carry on conversations;
- it’s a way of discovering new information (through tips and leads);
- it’s a great way to follow what’s happening through your mobile (set Twitter up to send you mobile updates)
- It’s a way of organising people
- It’s a great way of reporting from a live event or other occasions when you only have your phone
- You can aggregate a number of twitter feeds to one collective feed of what a group of people are doing
- You can push an RSS feed into twitter, creating a mobile/social network update
- For bloggers, it’s a good place to put thoughts and ideas that are so brief you wouldn’t normally blog them
Any more for any more?
Social bookmarking – The Guardian way (Five W’s and a H that should come *after* every story: addendum)
The Guardian has brought its typical idiosyncratic approach to social bookmarking with the launch of ‘Clippings’. But for once I think they’ve missed the mark.
By clicking on the scissors icon (
) next to a story users can now ‘clip’ an article to their own account. They could do this before anyway – but importantly, the revamped service means they can see others’ saved stories and subscribe to a feed, or publish their own feed elsewhere.
These are welcome additions to an older service, but there are some glaring oversights. (more…)
JEEcamp – when the cottage news industry met mainstream media
What happens when you bring together local journalists, bloggers, web publishers, online journalism experts and new media startups – and get them talking?
That was the question that JEEcamp sought to answer: an ‘unconference’ around journalism enterprise and entrepreneurship that looked to tackle some of the big questions facing news in 2008: how do you make money from news when information is free? Where is the funding for news startups? How do you generate community? What models work for news online? (more…)
BASIC principles of online journalism: A is for Adaptability
In the second part of this five-part series, I explore how adaptability has not only become a key quality for the journalist – but for the information they deal with on a daily basis too. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism – comments very much invited.
The adaptable journalist
A key skill for any journalist in the new media age, whatever medium they’re working in, is adaptability. The age of the journalist who only writes text, or who only records video, or audio, is passing. Today, the newspaper and magazine, the television and the radio programme all have an accompanying website. And that website is, increasingly, filled with a whole range of media, which could include any of the following:
- (Hyper)Text
- Audio
- Video
- Still images
- Audio slideshows
- Animation
- Flash interactivity
- Database-driven elements
- Blogs
- Microblogging/Text/email alerts (Twitter)
- Community elements – forums, wikis, social networking, polls, surveys
- Live chats
- Mapping
- Mashups
This does not mean that the online journalist has to be an expert in all of these fields, but they should have media literacy in as many of these fields as possible: in other words, a good online journalist should be able to see a story and think:
- ‘That story would have real impact on video’;
- or: ‘A Flash interactive could explain this better than anything else’;
- or ‘This story would benefit from me linking to the original reports and some blog commentary’;
- or ‘Involving the community in this story would really engage, and hopefully bring out some great leads’. (more…)
Online Journalism Atlas: Norway
The Online Journalism Atlas continues, with Kristine Lowe looking at online journalism in Norway, where some newspapers make more money online than in print. Got any information about your own country’s online journalism? Add it here.
Norway is one of the most newspaper-reading in countries in the world, a fact also reflected in the country’s online media environment. In contrast to many other countries, Norwegians seem to prefer news-driven sites with journalistic content to all others.
Early starters
Early adoption has put Norwegian online media at a great at advantage, some of the online players even earn good money. (more…)
A web presence without a website?
Charlotte Dunckley is a final year journalism degree students who has already launched a fanzine and is in the process of turning it into a commercially viable magazine – Things.
She recently popped in for an ad hoc tutorial and I asked her about her web strategy.
“I don’t have a website,” she replied.
“But you have a blog?”
“Yes.”
“Facebook?”
“Yes. And a MySpace page. With 800 friends.”
“So you do have a web strategy.” (more…)
March 27, 2008 at 9:01 am paulbradshaw 7 comments