Alex Gamela, who by the way deserves most of the credit for the idea of Twitter Cartoon Day (see screengrabbed tweets below), put together this video about it:
He’s also started a poll for a further ‘Twitter Theme Day’ – I’m not sure if having it as a regular thing kind of undermines the spontaneous fun thing that made Friday so good, but you may disagree.
Meanwhile, below is a cartoon of sorts on the build up to the idea. Continue reading
Today is Twitter Cartoon Day. I’m going to be Dick Dastardly Dangermouse Esteban from The Cities of Gold Hong Kong Phooey Dick Dastardly. Brighten up the lives of your fellow Twitterers today by changing your avatar (picture) to a cartoon character.
And see how many pictures on your followers list change…
I you want to spread the word further, click on the image above for an image you can use as your Twitter wallpaper.
After all, it’s Friday!
Sometimes I feel like my vision of the future is slowly coming true in front of my eyes. Yesterday I discovered that the Birmingham Post features writer Jo Ind has started incorporating Del.icio.us social bookmarks into her articles. If you look at the bottom of this health article you’ll see the following line:
“To learn more about Select Research and the body volume index, see Jo Ind’s suggested links or visit her blog.”
Jo Ind’s suggested links are on Del.icio.us The tool is also being used by Radio 4’s iPM, as previously reported and Jemima Kiss integrates her feed into her Guardian blog as the PDA ‘Newsbucket’ (much as this blog and many others do as an albeit more prosaic “delicious feed”).
But phrasing the link as ‘suggested links’ (rather than ‘iPM Delicious’) and positioning it at the bottom of an article rather than as a sidebar widget is a better idea, and closer to what I was suggesting in the ‘What’ of my ‘Five Ws and a H that should come after every story’.
I’m currently preparing an article on social bookmarking for journalists. Does anyone know of any other examples of it being used in public by journalists?
Oh, and by the way: to learn more about delicious and social bookmarking, see my suggested links here and here.
I had an email recently from the Editor of NME.com, David Moynihan, about the News Diamond in practice. I thought it was worth reprinting in full:
“You describe much of what I do for a living: I am the Editor of NME.com and work in a buzzing cross-platform environment that mirrors your theories. Now that the dust is starting to settle a bit more in digital publishing, publishers are really taking notice of websites and web staff in ways that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. Continue reading
At least that’s what I’m guessing, following Joanna Geary’s study, this blog has been asking (click for larger image):
The next question is: can anyone translate the blog post from Romanian into English? (via Jo Geary)
UPDATE: The post has now been translated into English. Thanks Neagrigore.
Part four of this five-part series looks at how interactivity forms the basis of true online journalism, and explores ways to think about interactivity in practice. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism – comments very much invited.
In his 2001 book Online Journalism, Jim Hall argues that, in the age of the web, interactivity could be added to impartiality, objectivity and truth as a core value of journalism. It is that important.
Interactivity is central to how journalism has been changed by the arrival of the internet. Whereas the news industries of print, radio and TV placed control firmly in the hands of the publishers and journalists, online you try to control people at your peril.
It is important to remember that people use the web on devices – whether a computer, mobile phone or PDA – with cultural histories of usefulness or utility, very different to the cultural histories of television, radio or even print.
People go online to do something. Companies that help with that process tend to prosper online. Those that attempt to curtail users’ ability to do things with their content often find themselves on the end of a backlash.
News is, of course, a service. But up until now news organisations have been under the mistaken impression that it is a product. The web is reminding them otherwise.
Interactivity is not video, or ‘multimedia’; it is not flashy bells and whistles. At its core, it is about giving the user control. Continue reading
Good to see final year journalism degree student Todd Nash has his hoax-spotting eyes on. He’s kicked off a new journalism blog with an overview of some pretty obvious photoshopping that managed to get past the people at Sky News:
“The best pranks are the ones where the victim has absolutely no idea what is happening and this is true here. Some photoshop happy forummers on the Football365 Forum began adapting marathon photos from Flickr, Google Images and anywhere else they could get their hands on them.
“They then sent them in to the unsuspecting Sky News team with spectacular results:
“How they didn’t see Tron amazes me. Continue reading
I’ve been painfully aware of my (and many people’s) ignorance of blogs written in languages other than English. I’m aware of some – Andre Deak in Brazil; Philip Couve in France; Alex Gamela in Portugal (who writes every post in English too); Nico Luchsinger in Switzerland; Beppe Grillo in Italy (also in English); and Adam Javurek in the Czech Republic – but really I could do better.
And I’ve started creating a Yahoo! Pipe which (clumsily) translates three of those blogs into English (sadly Adam tells me there is no online Czech to English translator)
So here’s a call for comments – what are the best non-English blogs, either about journalism specifically or social media generally?
The Google News Blog has posted on some truths and myths about its ranking systems (via Cowbite) – and this one caught my eye:
“Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE
Currently, the Google News crawler only visits each article URL once. If you make updates to the article after we’ve crawled it, they won’t be reflected on our site. We hope that soon we’ll have the ability to re-crawl your articles to make sure we have the latest version displayed on our site, but for now this is not the case.”
In other words, the commercial pressure here is not to update a single article, but to instead create new ones with the new information (there is already an imperative here in that this increases your page count stats).
I’m not sure if this is a bad thing (errors go uncorrected?) or good (twitter-style newsrivers?). Continue reading
Online Journalism Blog 