Twitter Updates for 2008-06-11

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  • Improve your community with a reputation system – Yahoo! maps 9 of them: http://twurl.nl/vl32mv #
  • Using Who Should I Follow again – but it only takes your first 500 friends, so the recommendations include people I already follow. Shame. #
  • Read a very good dissertation on online journalism ethics: Facebook people would be upset if journalists used their info #
  • Just watched the rushes of a documentary on citizen journalism I was interviewed for. Those 9/11, 7/7, tsunami clips are going to cost him #
  • @ragnhildo the ethics dissertation was by @ecotrip #
  • Three ways journalists can use Facebook (and other social networks) http://twurl.nl/ir0iya #
  • It’s 30 years this year since Factory Records was formed? That makes me feel old. #
  • Watching David Byrne: Playing the Building (BBTV) http://twurl.nl/gak6tw #
  • Anyone know of a plugin that allows commenters to upload an image with their comment (not link or embed one)? WordPress or other CMS #
  • DailyLit is to Twitter-publish 3 books. Looking forward to reading Down & Out In The Magic Kingdom. http://twurl.nl/evmifr #
  • The twitter grapevine apparently knows what i’m doing two days before i do – and i think i know the source. #
  • Finally a panel discussion worth reading about: retweet jemimakiss: PDA >> @ Future of Journalism: Women on the web http://tinyurl … #
  • Finally a panel discussion worth reading about: retweet @jemimakiss: Women on the web http://tinyurl.com/3gu3bl #
  • Trying out #Evernote – yet another beta. #
  • Suggest to me a twitter friend you think I should be following #
  • @clarewhite http://twurl.nl/qgxuma #
  • Jay Rosen live now on radio about citizen journalism. Who wants to bet this is dumb-dull? http://twurl.nl/xmajw6 #
  • I can’t believe we are having a discussion about whether a member of the public has the right to ask a public figure a question #
  • …and to publish that. #
  • Here’s the guide: if it’s a public figure, in a public place, at a public event, then it’s public. Otherwise, be courteous? #
  • Anyone else listening to this Jay Rosen thing on KUOW? #
  • ah well, it’s over anyway. #

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Patterns for designing a reputation system

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Yahoo! have released a family of Reputation patterns:

“They don’t tell you how to lay out a page or where to put an interactive widget. Instead, they address how to design a reputation system for your social software.”

Why is this important? The patterns are a wonderful resource for any news organisation looking to plan a community element in which reputation performs a role. In my experience, reputation systems are pretty important in encouraging users to keep coming back to your online community – you could argue, for instance, that the number of friends in Facebook or followers in Twitter is one simple example. Plurk more explicitly uses ‘karma’, as does (in a much better way) Slashdot (for more on Slashdot and karma systems I thoroughly recommend Gatewatching by Axel Bruns).

Yahoo say these are “the first of several collections of social-design related patterns that we’re working on,” so worth keeping an eye on what comes next.

Geotagging and news – the mobile future is here

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I’ve written before on just how important geotagging will be in preparing for a mobile future – well, now that mobile future is here:

“Apple’s newly unveiled second-generation iPhone includes a news service from the Associated Press which provides stories tailored to an individual user’s location.

“The application uses the phone’s in-built GPS (global positioning system) and serves stories based on the user’s immediate area.”

Now, what’s your excuse?

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An investigative journalism conference worth paying for

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Taking place this Friday, the ‘Investigative Journalism Goes Global’ conference at the University of Westminster has one of the most impressive casts of panelists you could ask for (and I’m not just saying that because I’m on one of the panels). An event like this deserves a good turnout – I’m hoping it can spark off some ideas about how we can maintain investigative journalism in a new media world, so if you want to meet up and chat about that let me know. Here’s the full running order: Continue reading →

THIS BLOG IS MOVING – update your RSS feeds

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The Online Journalism Blog has now permanently moved to OnlineJournalismBlog.com – this means that if you subscribed to the onlinejournalismblog.Wordpress.com RSS feed, it may eventually stop working.

What this means in plain English is: to keep following the OJB you need to update your RSS feeds as follows:

Posts: http://feeds.feedburner.com/onlinejournalismblog

Comments: http://feeds.feedburner.com/OnlineJournalismBlog_comments

The new site will allow me to do lots of new things with the blog, beginning with allowing you to make video comments. Hope you can join the conversation.

10 reasons (or more) to be a jolly journalist

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A thick veil of gloom is slowly blanketing journalism. From resembling Clark Kent and Tintin in their youth, journalists now look more like Jason Blairs, untrustworthy information distorters. Layoffs, shorter deadlines and declining ad revenues are adding to the pessimism of the trade. To feel better, some of them even fake readership data.

We stand against this trend. We are sure that journalism is getting better and stronger by the day. And that journalists will benefit from this.

More than just a big vent session for happy or angry journalists, we want to list the reasons why journalism is going in the right direction. Why it’s easier than ever for young journalists to access sources. Why journalists have more power than ever against their editors. Why journalists will have a more positive impact on society.

This is why the Online Journalism Blog team created JollyJournalist.com, a place where you can tell the world why you think that these are good times to be a journalist. We’ve added ten reasons to get you started below. Once you’re done reading them, please head over to JollyJournalist.com to comment on them or add your own! Continue reading →

Making the web more live

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The web is becoming a more live medium, the medium itself isn’t changing it is how we publish to it. I think the ‘live web’ is the most exiting development since the rise of social networks. You write a Twitter notification on your mobile phone, post a picture to the web or stream a live video with Qik or Seesmic. Often recording is publishing.

When you write a blog or create a podcast your entry has context in itself. It has a start and it ends. Most postings on micro blogs don’t have context in the messages. The context is in the stream or in time. For example Twitter messages often make sense in your personal timeline or in the conversation within your personal network.

Twitter and Qik are just the first services. Realtime platform independent micro services, that distribute contextless fragments of information are here to stay.

This sense of a ‘live medium’ is something that is changing the web as it is and how we use it. It will change search, or at least sorting search results and it will change reporting news.

A service like Twitter makes news travel fast. This makes it the #1 breaking news source for a lot of people. Why? Because it is reporting as it is happening. It isn’t always right, but it is reporting, open for conversation and correcting itself. It is live coverage and it is a storytelling experience. Continue reading →

Plurk to add 15 new verb options

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To those who haven’t been caught up in the fuss, Plurk is a new microblogging service and rival to Twitter. Users are invited to post about what they’re doing using one of 15 verb prefixes, including ‘loves’, ‘is’, ‘thinks’ and ‘shares’. Indeed, it has found itself so successful among disenchanted Twitterati that Plurk has decided to introduce 15 new verb options. These are:

  1. smokes – e.g. “ryanlim smokes another wimpy rollup”. In an attempt to generate revenue, users will be charged a 15% tax on every smoke-Plurk. However, due to health and safety regulations they will not be able to smoke-Plurk indoors.
  2. shouts – for users who accidentally leave caps lock on. e.g. “ryanlim shouts GOING HOME NOW”.
  3. lies – for double-bluffing Plurk users.
  4. lurks – for users who are only there to read other Plurks. Lurk-Plurks are invisible.
  5. waffles – for users who, even with a 140 character limit, still manage to talk too much.
  6. dies – for users who smoke-Plurk 60 times a day.
  7. rhymes – for hip hop artists, poets and drunkards.
  8. impersonates – for identity thieves.
  9. mutters – for users who really don’t want to be heard. mutter-Plurks disappear after two seconds.
  10. reincarnates – depending on a user’s karma score, they may be reincarnated as follows:
    • 0.00 to 21.00: a bee
    • 21.00 to 41.00: a big bee
    • 41.00 to 61.00: a wasp
    • 61.00 to 81.00: a small mammal
    • 81.00 to 100.00: a drummer in a tribute band
  11. steals – Plurk “warns users that valuables are left on Plurk at their own risk”.
  12. denies – for users who have been accused of steal-Plurking and Plurk-lying.
  13. shags – Plurk-porn is a further business model being considered by the founders, who promise shag-Plurks will be done tastefully and with great lighting.
  14. gloats – for users with inordinately high karma scores
  15. leaves – for Plurkers who have decided one Twitter service is enough.

Paul Bradshaw

Web-surfing behavior: stuck in the 1990’s?

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A new research from Indiana University showed that 54% of URL requests had no referrals. That means that most of the time, people do not click on links. They merely pick a site in their favorites or type in an URL in the address bar. A mere 5% of URL requests came from search engines.

The figures can hardly be doubted. The study monitored 100,000 users over 9 months – the largest yet. What is more, the number of URL requests without referrals actually increased over the course of the study.

Users seem less Google-prone than what is often claimed. They spend little time surfing and prefer to go directly to destinations they know. Continue reading →

The ‘title’ link attribute: is it worth it?

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The title attribute of a hyperlink allows for a short description of the destination page to be displayed under the cursor. It helps the user get a hint of the linked page’s content without the loading time associated with Snapshot-like plugins (used on this blog).

Most of us would look at the browser’s status bar, but it can be difficult for regular users to determine whether a link is safe for work or if leads to any interesting content. For all the value the attribute adds to user experience, it takes an awful lot of time for a journalist to fill in all the fields. 30 seconds per link, 10 links per article and that’s 5 additional minutes per story. Continue reading →