Tag Archives: klout

Twitter & DataSift launch live social data services for under £1 (useful)

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Journalists with an interest in realtime data should keep an eye on a forthcoming service from DataSift which promises to allow users to access a feed of Twitter tweets filtered along any combination of over 40 qualities.

In addition – and perhaps more interestingly – the service will also offer extra context:

“from services including Klout (influence metrics), PeerIndex (influence), Qwerly (linked social media accounts) and Lexalytics (text and sentiment analysis). Storage, post-processing and historical snapshots will also be available.”

The pricing puts this well within the reach of not only professional journalists but student ones too: for less than 20p per hour (30 cents) you will be able to apply as many as 10,000 keyword filters.

ReadWriteWeb describe a good example of how this may work out journalistically:

“Want a feed of negative Tweets written by C-level execs about any of 10,000 keywords? Trivial! Basic level service, Halstead says! Want just the Tweets that fit those criteria and are from the North Eastern United States? That you’ll have to pay a little extra for.”

Content, context and code: verifying information online

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ContentContextCode_VerifyingInfo

When the telephone first entered the newsroom journalists were sceptical. “How can we be sure that the person at the other end is who they say they are?” The question seems odd now, because we have become so used to phone technology that we barely think of it as technology at all – and there are a range of techniques we use, almost unconsciously, to verify what the person on the other end of the phone is saying, from their tone of voice, to the number they are ringing from, and the information they are providing.

Dealing with online sources is no different. How do you know the source is telling the truth? You’re a journalist, for god’s sake: it’s your job to find out.

In many ways the internet gives us extra tools to verify information – certainly more than the phone ever did. The apparent ‘facelessness’ of the medium is misleading: every piece of information, and every person, leaves a trail of data that you can use to build a picture of its reliability.

The following is a three-level approach to verification: starting with the content itself, moving on to the context surrounding it; and finishing with the technical information underlying it. Most of the techniques outlined take very little time at all but the key thing is to look for warning signs and follow those up. Continue reading →

Content, context and code: verifying information online

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The full version of this post can be found here (this is a duplicate).

When the telephone first entered the newsroom journalists were sceptical. “How can we be sure that the person at the other end is who they say they are?” The question seems odd now, because we have become so used to phone technology that we barely think of it as technology at all – and there are a range of techniques we use, almost unconsciously, to verify what the person on the other end of the phone is saying, from their tone of voice, to the number they are ringing from, and the information they are providing.

Dealing with online sources is no different. How do you know the source is telling the truth? You’re a journalist, for god’s sake: it’s your job to find out.

In many ways the internet gives us extra tools to verify information – certainly more than the phone ever did. The apparent ‘facelessness’ of the medium is misleading: every piece of information, and every person, leaves a trail of data that you can use to build a picture of its reliability. Continue reading →