Online Journalism Blog

BBC Backstage’s Ian Forrester has been blogging about the attention that Twitter has been getting from the BBC and some experiments they’ve done with using the open source microblogging platform Laconi.ca:

“I think as the BBC gets its heads around microblogging it will quickly notice that not only is it somewhat promoting a single startup through its wording but that Microblogging is much bigger and like how we don’t host our blogs on wordpress.com, we will want to host it ourselves. There’s all type of things we could do with our microblogging system, things which are forbidden on Twitter or even not possible because of the way Twitter is setup. The obvious example is a children’s microblogging service. This will resolve its self and it will be the geeks who had a hand in the new bright future of the BBC.” [Read more]

Assuming you want them to, how do you get people to blog? It’s a challenge facing most community editors, particularly as they seek to encourage a conversation with readers for whom Wordpress or Blogger are still too fiddly.

Enter Posterous, a fantastically intuitive, quick and easy blogging platform. Scrapping the need for registration, or even the need to go onto the web, this has the potential to be a mass blogging tool – as well as a great tool for blogging on the move. [Read more]

Amy Gahran is learning about microblogging the Total Community Coverage in Cyberspace (some interesting reflections – well worth reading), which gave me a perfect reminder to finally publish a post I wrote in draft form a month or so back. So, for what it’s worth, here are three lessons I’ve learned about Twittering:

1. Keep to a niche. If blogs are about niches, microblogging is about microniches. If you’re expecting people to put up with constant updates it’s got to be very specific. So, think Madeleine McCann, not ‘news headlines‘.
2. Link to mobile-friendly pages if you can. When I get my Twitter updates from Press Gazette on my mobile phone and ‘click’ on the link, I get a very large designed-for-the-monitor page that I have to scroll down and across to read. I long ago stopped clicking on those links. If you’re giving tasters of your stories to people who may be viewing on their phones, you’re going to frustrate them if the full linked-to versions don’t use liquid designs or mobile stylesheets.
3. Be part of the conversation. Martin Stabe has 114 followers; the publication he writes for has 66. Maybe it’s because Martin follows 92 other twitterers, whereas his publication (yes, Press Gazette again) only follows two (both members of staff).