It seems Seesmic is already fulfilling its promise as ‘the next Twitter’ insofar as it’s being used for previously unforeseen purposes. Last night I was able to post a video comment on a blog post thanks to a teamup between Seesmic and the comment tracking service Disqus. Continue reading
I’ve set up a Facebook group for journalism and news entrepreneurs – a place to network, share ideas and gather support. Join it if you think it’ll be useful.
PS: If you’ve not joined the Online Journalism Blog Facebook group, please do. It’s great.
Following my post on the Seven psychological complaints of bloggers and social media addicts, it appears there have been more syndromes identified. Here they are:
Identified by KerryJ, sufferers exhibit intense feelings of alienation after missing out on viral ‘event’, e.g. Twitter Cartoon Day. See also: FOOcamp anxiety.
Identified by Sarah Hartley: “The sufferer feels what they have to add to the world is so humourous it must be shared – but only after every one of the 140 characters has been considered in depth. Stems from a deep-rooted phobia of “comment shame”.”
Patient experiences disorientation upon becoming stranded from social media ‘anchors’ such as Facebook groups, Twitter, blog community etc. Triggers include: service outage; power or battery failure; loss of wifi signal.
Patient is haunted by the ghosts of user accounts created but never used, or long since abandoned. Symptoms include random friend invites from imaginary MySpace users; emails from Plaxo; and Pownce files from the ghostly Dave Winer.
There’s been an earthquake in China, and the Twittersphere is alive with it. I’m going to write a post on this and keep adding to it through the next hour or so. Let me know anything interesting you’ve spotted @paulbradshaw
The first interesting point is Tweetburner: its most-clicked links shared on Twitter are almost entirely about the earthquake, and show some interesting uses:
Here is crowdsourcing without the editorial management. How quickly otherwise would a journalist have thought of using Twitterlocal with a Google translation? And how soon before someone improves it so it only pulls tweets with the word ‘earthquake’, or more specific to the region affected? (It also emphasises the need for newspapers and broadcasters to have programmers on the team who could do this quickly) Continue reading
Another day, another set of questions from a journalism degree student – this time, one of my own, Azeem Ahmad. If you want to help him by answering the questions, post your comments below.
How important is blogging to you, and your business?
If my ‘business’ is education and freelance journalism, then: enormously important on every level: generating ideas, gathering information, publishing stories and ideas, and marketing and distributing those and, I suppose, myself as a journalist and (*cough*) academic. I find conversation extremely helpful in working through ideas and finding new information, and blogging is a wonderful way of having that conversation with some very well informed and intelligent people. I hope it makes me more intelligent and well informed in turn. Continue reading
Thanks to Adam Javurek for adding some Czech newspapers to the News Interactivity Index. And a Catalonian newspaper has also appeared on the tool too. Click here to use it.
Over at Press Gazette you’ll find my latest article on using social bookmarking for journalism – split into three areas: managing cuttings; sourcing information; and publishing. Let me know if you have any personal experiences with bookmarking services – are there better services than Delicious?
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. Continue reading
Skoeps.nl, a citizen-journalism venture, closed down last week after its owners declared it unprofitable. The business plan seemed simple enough to succeed:
The plan worked, except that there wasn’t enough revenue to share. Skoeps cash-flow was in the black, which means that, if investors refused to go forward, growth must have been minimal and could not have offset the initial investment in the near future. Continue reading
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