Online Journalism Blog

Amidst the recent furore over Max Gogarty’s unblog-like/allegedly nepotistic travel blog entry on the Guardian website, a phrase caught my eye: Director of Digital Content Emily Bell’s reference to their “duty of care” to blogger Max.

It particularly interested me because I had a similar experience recently with a student blogger, who was on the receiving end of ferocious (and partly justified) criticism on an Australian alpha blog.

What was my duty of care to her? [Read more]

Another Twitter lead led me to this one:

“Going Solo is a chance to learn how to do things like set your rates, make yourself known, close deals, find clients or let them find you, explain what you do to the world, find a life-work balance, or deal with administrivia in the networked world we web people work in.

“Who’s involved? Until we get a proper ordered list, here is a bunch of names (organisers, advisors, helpers…): Stephanie Booth, Elisabeth Stoudmann, Charlene Knoetze, Stowe Boyd, Suw Charman, Imran Ali, Stephanie Troeth, Sibylle Stoeckli, Martin Roell, Carlos Pacilio, Anne Dominique Mayor, Chris Brogan, and others…”

More here, including an early bird discount if you book by the end of March.

The EJC filmed three videos during the day at JEEcamp - here they are:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWkC_-M8wtY]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOvYFs6OCfw]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_9zG_q0GkU]

Thanks to Shawn Smith for leading me to Twitter Quotient.

This week’s Something for the Weekend is a little different, as it’s a tool for newsgathering rather than publishing. But what a tool.

iMacro is a plugin for Firefox, with paid versions for Internet Explorer or standalone use.

There’s a lot of corporate/technical jargon on the website (“create solutions for web automation”), because, like some of the best web tools (e.g. Twitter), this can be used for so many things it’s hard to describe in a single sentence. But here are some of the headlines: [Read more]

I’m not the only one to have noticed an unusual surge of people signing up to Twitter recently. But today, Downing Street started using it. And when the UK government signs up to Twitter, you know it’s hit the mainstream.

Oh, and where did I hear this? On Twitter.

Anyway, turns out it’s just Twitter shovelware using Twitterfeed, though that’s not bad in itself, and actually shows a higher level of tech savviness than simply twittering.

Meanwhile, those who want mobile updates on government matters now have it, which is pretty good. Marshall Manson suggests Brown may be the first head of state to use the tool, while Luke Pollard adds “to be fair both Obama and Clinton are well progressed and twittering a plenty in their fight for the democratic nomination â€" here and here – and arguably have a better Twitter pedigree”. [Read more]

All the information you need to know can be found on the webcamp wiki. With the login ‘mobiel’ and the password ‘devcamp’ you can add your name, and a presentation you want to give. More details on Dorien Aerts’ blog. I’ve asked Dorien to report on what happens…

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:

1. It’s a great way to publish to mobile devices;
2. it’s a social networking tool to make contacts and carry on conversations;
3. it’s a way of discovering new information (through tips and leads);
4. it’s a great way to follow what’s happening through your mobile (set Twitter up to send you mobile updates)
5. It’s a way of organising people
6. It’s a great way of reporting from a live event or other occasions when you only have your phone
7. You can aggregate a number of twitter feeds to one collective feed of what a group of people are doing
8. You can push an RSS feed into twitter, creating a mobile/social network update
9. 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?

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.” [Read more]

Once again news organisations will be looking over their shoulder at the launch of MetaCarta’s news mapping service. The more I play with this, the better I like it.

The red page icons on the opening page are something of a red herring – those are just the main headlines. A search for “Birmingham” brings up a whole lot more from my home town (and interestingly, not Birmingham, Alabama, meaning the site has worked out where I am).

Perhaps more interestingly, a keyword search gives you a global picture of what’s going on with, say news on the “environment”. How else would I have discovered a story about logging in Indonesia?

You can combine places with keywords, and change the date range of your search (the default is last 24 hours).

There’s a lot of scope for serendipity here, but a few weaknesses.

The most obvious is lack of RSS or bookmarkability. Having to keep checking this site and, worse, repeat a search makes this extra work.

Secondly, the current sources are limited to Reuters, AP and Guardian.co.uk. News organisations should be helping make their content map-friendly to get in on this.

And related to this, locations are currently quite generic, seemingly based on text recognition. Imagine what this could do if it tapped into geotagged stories from local newspapers such as those of Archant?