Tag Archives: twitter

My Twitter feed has changed

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In December I used Twitterfeed to send posts and comments from my blog to my Twitter page at http://twitter.com/paulbradshaw. I’ve never been entirely comfortable with this, branding it “twitter shovelware“, so today I’ve reclaimed my feed.

From today http://twitter.com/paulbradshaw will only carry my personal tweets – what I’m doing, thinking, saying.

The updates on blog posts, comments and bookmarks are now fed to http://twitter.com/ojblog.

So change your subscriptions accordingly:

  • if you were one of those who unsubscribed from my feed because you just wanted the minutiae (hello Andrew Dubber), you can now safely re-subscribe;
  • if you were one of those who subscribed to my feed because you liked mobile updates on new blog posts and comments (step up Ryan Sholin), http://twitter.com/ojblog is the one for you.

Introducing journalists to Twitter – what I’d do differently

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On Friday I wrote about my frustrations with teaching student journalists to Twitter – which generated some very helpful debate. Having dwelt on my experiences I’ve come up with the following idea for integrating Twitter into newsrooms:

Make it an internal tool first.

What I mean is: employ Twitter as a way of keeping journalists in touch with other members of their team, and their editors, via their mobile phones.

Here’s how it would work: Continue reading →

Teaching journalism students to twitter – the good, the bad, and the ugly

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This year I started my online journalism module with three things: Twitter, Del.icio.us, and RSS readers. I asked students to:

  • socially bookmark useful webpages,
  • subscribe to useful feeds through their RSS reader,
  • use social recommendation and tags to discover new sources
  • – and to twitter the whole process.

The results? Frankly, disappointing.

If you think 19- and 20-year-olds are au fait with Twitter, think again. Only one had used it before starting the class. And even afterwards, the journalism students I was teaching hardly hit the ground running. Continue reading →

My first Online Journalism lecture – twittered

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Last week I began the new class of Online Journalism. First task: getting students signed up to Twitter. Then, I asked half the class to ‘twitter’ my lecture on, er, what Twitter is. I then asked the other half to twitter me talking about the news diamond. While I gave the lecture I had my Twitter page on screen so that students could see the twitters coming in as I spoke. The result is shown below – start from the bottom and work upwards. Forgive the poor image quality – I reduced it to 8 colours to make the file size reasonable. Continue reading →

Feb 5, 2008: the day Super Tuesday became the ‘Mashup Election’

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If news organisations thought they were starting to ‘get’ this whole internet journalism thing, yesterday may make them think again.

At 8pm GMT yesterday I received a breathless email from Azeem Ahmad, a student from the journalism degree I teach on:

“Tell me you have seen the Google Maps/Twitter mash up of the American Super Tuesday voters.. it’s amazing! The pointer is flying all over the world, from Spain to England, and all through the various parts of America.”

Logging onto Twitter I found a similar buzz from Martin Stabe and Kevin Anderson:

“Enthralled by Twitter and Google Maps super mashup. I could be entertained for hours”

A quick search on Terraminds (image below) showed it wasn’t just us journo nerds: Twitter was alive with chatter about the mashup – one tweet in particular was worth noting: Continue reading →

Making money from journalism: new media business models (A model for the 21st century newsroom pt5)

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In the final part of the Model for the 21st Century Newsroom I look at how new media has compounded problems in news organisations’ core business models – and the new business models which it could begin to explore.

Let’s start by looking at the traditional newspaper business model. This has rested on selling, in a broad simplification, three things:

  • Advertising. Put more explicitly: selling readers to advertisers.
  • Selling content to readers, and, twinned with that:
  • Selling the delivery platform to readers – i.e. the paper

Developments in the past few decades have eaten into each of those areas as follows: Continue reading →

Why journalists should use Twitter (Nico Luchsinger)

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Nico Luchsinger writes about the microblogging tool. Based on an article he wrote for the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

I recently mentioned to a colleague of mine, who also is a freelance journalist, that I’m researching an article about Twitter. “I hope you really trash this service”, was his answer. “This is nothing else than verbal diarrhoea.”

This reaction is not untypical for people having never used the service – I remember that I thought more or less the same when I first heard about Twitter. That even the most ardent users of the service (which, by now, include me) are often at pains to explain what it really is that Twitter does, is of course not helping the case. Continue reading →

“Twitter shovelware”: from 0 to 1,600 search results in six days

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Here’s a bizarre example of just how connected the internet is. Six days ago I wrote a post about some Twitter experiments, and half-jokingly coined the phrase “Twitter shovelware“. I did a Google search at the time on the phrase to confirm that, indeed, the phrase threw up zero results.

On Monday, the piece was cross-posted at Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, and today, arrived in my inbox as part of their mailing list. So I decided to click on that link to the Google search to see, six days on, how many webpages had used the phrase and been catalogued by Google’s spiders.

Twitter shovelware

I expected maybe ten or so – but 1,590?

Browsing through the results, it’s a very strong illustration of some truths about the internet. We are more networked, and digital reproduction is easier and more automated, than we realise. After the obvious results there are:

And all this from a minor blog post that has only been viewed a fraction of 1,600 times. 

PS: At least one of those pages is the web equivalent of falling trees that only make a sound if someone is there to hear them, i.e. pages that are dynamically created only when someone clicks on a link to them, or at least is unlikely to ever be seen by human eyes. More food for thought.

UPDATE, JAN 2 2008: Three weeks on, the phrase now produces 26,000 results. Incredible.

Twitter shovelware and other microblogging experiments

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This post is part of a ‘blog carnival’. Read more at CarnivalOfJournalism.com. The story so far (in updates of 140 characters or less):

  1. I set up a Twitter account, toy with it for a few minutes, then ignore it.
  2. Months later, I return to my Twitter account to cover the Future of Newspapers conference – a perfect use for the technology.
  3. Following a tip from Martin Stabe, I use Twitterfeed to push my blog’s posts – and, equally importantly, comments – to my Twitter page, in the process probably doubling the total amount of ‘tweets’ overnight.
  4. At the same time, Martin comes at it from a different angle, and pushes his Twitter posts to his blog.
  5. Realise I am guilty of ‘Twitter-shovelware’
  6. Feel privately chuffed at inventing the phrase ‘Twitter-shovelware‘
  7. Think of a better use for Twitterfeed, and create a new Twitter account for my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged ‘onlinejournalism’. It already has an RSS feed, but feeding it to Twitter allows people to receive it on their mobiles or as a ‘river’ on their Twitter page.
  8. Realise I will probably annoy people who have to delete ten texts every day I do some bookmarking.
  9. Getting even more carried away, I realise I can also use Twitterfeed to create an aggregation of the 70+ online journalism-related RSS feeds I subscribe to.
  10. Decide to use Yahoo! Pipes as part of this, which has been on my ‘To Do’ list since May.
  11. Discover that Yahoo! Pipes not only generates an RSS feed, but also options for mobile and email alerts.
  12. But the process of setting up those alerts is not as usable as Twitter, so set up the Twitter ojblogaggregator account anyway (there are only around 20 feeds included so far, but will continue to add more as I iron out bugs).
  13. Also discover three other ‘online journalism’ Pipes, one of which has been created by a former student. Feel proud.
  14. Then realise he never finished it. Feel proud regardless.
  15. Also realise I can use ‘View Source’ to build on the work of the other OJ aggregator – and that anyone can do the same to build on mine.
  16. Result!