Monthly Archives: February 2009

Twitter for beginners – the remix

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I love remixes. A couple weeks ago I posted my ‘Twitter for Beginners’ slideshow – now it’s been remixed with an ever-so-slightly more cynical spin by Lumor2. Here it is:

Adding value to the archives: Suburbified.com mashes up NYT real estate articles

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Want to know the value of opening up your article databases and APIs? Suburbified is one of the first mashups created using the New York Times’ recently opened API.

suburbified

suburbified

Here’s what it does, according to KillerStartUps: Continue reading →

Kitemarks to save the news industry? Q&A with Andrew Currah

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Reuters recently published a report entitled: ‘What’s Happening to Our News: An investigation into the likely impact of the digital revolution on the economics of news publishing in the UK‘. In it author Andrew Currah provides an overview of the situation facing UK publishers, and 3 broad suggestions as to ways forward – namely, kitemarks, public support, and digital literacy education.

The kitemark idea seems to have stirred up the most fuss. In the first of a series of email exchanges I asked Currah how he saw this making any difference to consumption of newspapers, and how it could work in practice. This is his response:

Yes, the kitemark idea has triggered quite a response… Unfortunately, as the discussion online suggests, the term has implied to many a top-down, centralised system of certification which would lead to some form of
‘apartheid’ between bloggers and journalists. Continue reading →

Telegraph.co.uk top of Digg league

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The Daily Telegraph has more stories submitted to Digg, the social news website, than any other daily newspaper site.

Times Online may be winning at StumbleUpon, but the Telegraph has:

  • had more stories submitted to Digg,
  • more stories on the front pages of Digg,
  • and its most-Digged story has more Diggs than any other newspaper site’s top story.

The graph shows how many pages have been submitted for each site that made the Digg ‘front pages’ (ie proved sufficiently popular).

It’s based on an analysis of newspaper site pages submitted to Digg (which also suggests that the reason for the success of the Telegraph and Mail is that their users are more likely to Digg than those of other newspaper sites).

Newspaper site Diggs

Newspaper site Diggs

Twickie: easily blog responses to a Twitter question (Something for the Weekend #14)

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Twickie

Twickie

This week’s Something for the Weekend tool review continues the Twitter theme with a simple tool which helps bridge the Twitter-blog divide.

If you’ve ever posted a question on Twitter and followed it up with a blog post discussing the responses, you’ll have probably been frustrated by the inability to present those responses in the blog post – you either have to link to each one, or copy and paste them from Twitter Search (which means ugly table-based HTML and irrelevant messages, newest-first).

Twickie is a cute solution to that problem. You log on with your Twitter username and password, browse through your recent tweets to find the question you posted, and click on ‘Get @s‘ to see the replies ordered oldest- or newest-first. Continue reading →

Times Online tops newspaper Stumble list

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All self-respecting newspaper sites have share and social-bookmarking functionality, such as links to Digg, Reddit, Fark etc.

But if the results of StumbleUpon are typical then:

  1. Times Online is miles ahead of its rivals when it comes to users sharing / bookmarking its pages.
  2. The FT has a lot of work to do.
  3. Adding icons for an individual service makes no difference to how often users submit a given page.

Continue reading →

A *very* social media interview

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As this post goes live I will be speaking on BBC Radio WM’s Breakfast Show, talking about the UK media’s current obsession: Twitter. Having sighed loudly at a number of recent pieces of media coverage that focused on the celebrity angle and/or the mundane nature of the service, I could hardly say no. But I wanted to do something different – I wanted to demonstrate the usefulness of Twitter very clearly in the way I phrased my responses. 

So I turned to Twitter.

First, I asked for help in fielding the inevitable focus on celebrities and triviality, and received some great one-liners, including: Continue reading →