Monthly Archives: April 2008

How journalists can master Twitter (blogger’s cut)

The following is a longer version of the article that appeared in Journalism.co.uk last week, with some extra tools and quotes.

It’s almost impossible to sum up Twitter in one line. To some, it is a way of delivering content to mobiles as headline text alerts. To others, it’s a social networking tool for getting contacts and leads. Some use it as a research tool for developing stories; and still others as a project management tool to gather a number of contributors together – for example, drivers posting updates on traffic.

In other words, it is what you make it and the only way to figure it out is to start using it. The following is a guide to getting started on Twitter as a journalist, and some of the things that can be done with it. Continue reading →

The European News Interactivity Index

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Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been turning the Online Journalism Blog into a group blog. For our first project we have taken Jo Geary’s news interactivity index, and applied it Europe-wide, creating an ‘interactivity index’ of newspapers across European countries – at the moment: the UK, Spain, Portugal, Macedonia, Hungary, Poland and Switzerland…

Not just that, but we’ve made the index itself interactive. Specifically, Nicolas Kayser-Bril has created this PHP object which allows you to compare two selected newspapers or countries.

The team so far is as follows: UK and France: Nicolas Kayser-Bril; Switzerland: Nico Luchsinger; Portugal and Spain: Alex Gamela; Poland: Marek Miller; Macedonia: Darko Buldioski; Hungary: Molnar Emil; Netherlands: Wilbert Baan.

If you want to help add information on one or more of your country’s newspapers you can do so here – you’ll need to ask Nicolas for a password: nicolas (at) observatoiredesmedias.com.

More newspapers will continue to be added, and there are other graphical tricks to come.

You can also embed this widget on your own blog with the following code:

Seven psychological complaints of bloggers and social media addicts

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In my capacity as amateur psychotherapist to the blogerati, I have discovered a new raft of complaints as social media addicts adapt to the demands of new technologies and fluctuating social structures. The syndromes identified include:

Comment Guilt

Patients complain of an overwhelming regret that they are not commenting more on other people’s blogs, and ‘engaging with the online community’. Feelings of worthlessness and frustration. Continue reading →

Economist gets PageRank wrist-slap from Google

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Matt Wardman has an interesting post on the Economist having its PageRank cut by Google (translation: Google punishes Economist for unknown transgression by giving its website less importance and therefore, probably, lower ranking).

Here’s what he says: Continue reading →

Something for the weekend #6: Mashups with Yahoo! Pipes

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Image by Sid05 via Flickr

This weekend’s tool-to-play-with is Yahoo! Pipes. Chances are you’ve heard of Yahoo! Pipes (it’s been around for over a year and I’ve blogged about it before) but if you’ve not played with it yet, now is the time to have a go.

Pipes is essentially a mashup tool, particularly useful for doing things with RSS feeds. And at its basic levels it doesn’t require any knowledge of programming language. Continue reading →

Online magazine Monkey goes social

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Dennis’s online-only (and hugely successful) magazine Monkey is set to launch another website next Wednesday (at MonkeyMag.co.uk) with a focus on the social. It’s “for readers”, you see.

A press release says the website

“will be centred around the same type of great video found in Monkey, while also encouraging readers to interact with the site by posting their own ratings and exchanging comments on the clips. The website will also offer daily content not found in the mag, competitions and exclusive chances to vote for what you want to see featured in upcoming issues.” Continue reading →