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Social Networking
The Quixotic Quest to Avoid Olympic Spoilers on Social Media
Olympic fever hit me young. One of my earliest memories is of a coloring book featuring the raccoon mascot from the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics that my mom gave me when I was three. I colored in the pictures of the raccoons skating and bobsledding while I watched the Olympics on our old boxy television. From then on, wherever I...
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5Across
5Across Classic: Olympic Athletes on Social Media
We decided to pull up this 2010 episode of 5Across about athletes using social media because of its relevance to the current 2012 Olympics, especially as the roundtable includes two U.S. Olympians: Natalie Coughlin and Donny Robinson. Not much has changed in the last couple years, except that even more athletes are on social media -- and more are connecting...
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Global View
Best Online Resources for Following the 2012 London Summer #Olympics
The 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London have largely been anticipated as the first social media Olympics. Athletes, fans, and the media shared their voices online during the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, but this time in London, even the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided to adopt a full-fledged social media strategy. Starting with the Athletes' Hub - fully...
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World View
Special Series: Olympics in the Digital Age
It used to be that there were two ways to experience the Summer Olympics: watch the games on your TV (and on NBC's schedule) or travel to the games themselves. Oh my, how things have changed. This summer, you can follow your favorite Olympian on Facebook. Live stream the finals on your laptop. Look at near real-time photo galleries online....
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Social Media
London 2012: The Thrills (and Agony) of the Social Olympics
It's an Olympic achievement. Not just the London Games, but the social media infrastructure behind them. People definitely engaged online during the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. But new apps, better mobile devices, and an Olympic policy encouraging athletes to use social media mean that fans will have more access and interaction with Olympians than ever before. An International...
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World View
Social Media Flexes Muscle in Mexican Election Protests
Mexican students who organized massive protests against the country's biggest broadcaster may not have seen their favored candidate win, but they did spotlight how online media can seize the political agenda in a country with little media competition. Using the hashtag #YoSoy132, these students created YouTube videos and social media tools to rally against what they saw as the potential return...
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Social Media
How to Defend Yourself Against Facial Recognition Technology
Facial recognition technology is now just about everywhere we are. It's in our phones, social networks, and media management, and this itself carries vast implications. (See this post about how the technology works, where it is, and how legislators and regulators are reacting to it.) But it's also increasingly used by law enforcement and for surveillance of "public" spaces, as...
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Media Usage
5 Tips to Prevent Digital Burnout and Maintain Good Mental Health
The Internet's reach is so pervasive, it feels as though it has always been around. The reality is that the web is still in its infancy, and we don't really understand the risks it poses to our mental health. In fact, various experts, such as Larry D. Rosen, a psychologist and author of "iDisorder," believe that personal gadgets are...
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MagazineShift
Magpile Brings Social Sharing to Print Magazine Enthusiasts
Reading a print magazine doesn't have to be a lonely experience anymore. Magpile, a new social site for magazine lovers, offers enthusiastic readers a place to share their favorite magazines and discuss them online. Founder and print magazine fan Dan Rowden, a web developer, noticed that although a number of websites let readers rate and discuss books, magazine fans were...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #49: Facebook IPO Mania; Internet Week; 16th Webby Awards
Welcome to the 49th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, with Mark Glaser and Dorian Benkoil as co-hosts. Today is the day for the Facebook IPO, so we've got it covered like a wet blanket. Special guests Debra Aho Williamson of eMarketer and Troy Young of SAY Media talk over the ins and outs of Facebook as it soars into the...
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Your Take
Poll: What Do You Think About the Facebook IPO?
Now we have a date (May 18) and a price range ($28 to $35 per share) for what could be the biggest initial public offering in the history of tech stocks: Facebook. The company has grown by leaps and bounds since it was born in Mark Zuckerberg's dorm at Harvard in 2004, and now could make Zuckerberg richer than Microsoft...
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Media Usage
Infographic: Moms Hold Big Influence Online
This post and infographic originally appeared on the Nielsen blog Nielsen Wire here. It is reused here with permission. Moms are often at the center of their family's offline life, so it's little surprise that they're also at the center of many of the biggest trends online as well. Whether to look up the latest product reviews or to connect...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #47: Positively Dan Rather; Future of Facebook; Rise of Snip.it
Welcome to the 47th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, this time with Mark Glaser and the Rafat Ali as co-hosts. On this show, Rafat had the honor (and early-morning wakeup call) to interview news icon Dan Rather at 7 a.m. while Rather was traveling by train to Washington, D.C. Rather has a new memoir out, "Rather Outspoken," and talked to...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #46: Photography Special: Creative Commons, Cameraphones, Instagram, Google+
Welcome to the 46th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, this time with Mark Glaser and the Rafat Ali as co-hosts. Rafat is celebrating his birthday, we're not sure how old he is, but we know that he loves photography. So this week we are celebrating his birthday by doing a special show focused on photography in the digital age....
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Social Media
As the 'Friction-Less' Web Grows, Friction Against It Does Too
Control over our public image is incredibly important to us -- from the clothes we decide to wear each morning, to the music we blast loud enough for street-goers to hear, to the very words we speak aloud to our friends, bosses and strangers. Often, they're carefully chosen within our rooms, our headphones, and our minds. We need these private...
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Social Media
Socializing the Space Shuttle's Farewell
More than a decade ago, I was driving down a Tampa, Fla., street when I saw one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen -- and may ever see. A space shuttle, piggybacked on a jumbo jet, came out of nowhere and seemed to fill the entire sky. It was massive -- seeing it on TV was one thing,...
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Culture
Governments Increasingly Targeting Twitter Users for Expressing Their Opinion
This piece is co-authored by Trevor Timm. In its six years of existence, Twitter has staked out a position as the most free speech-friendly social network. Its utility in the uprisings that swept the Middle East and North Africa is unmatched, its usage by activists and journalists alike to spread news and galvanize the public unprecedented. As Twitter CEO Dick...
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Social Networking
Online Privacy: Kids Know More Than You Think
Much of the anxiety around tweens and social media lies in the fear that they don't care about or understand privacy settings. Parents worry that kids will either willingly or unintentionally expose themselves to dangerous anonymous predators, or that they don't fully understand that the information they share about themselves can be used against them. But tweens are much more...
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Your Take
Poll: How Is Social Media Changing Activism?
How do people end up in the streets protesting something? What motivates them to take action, even when that action could lead to their arrest? Last year, Facebook and Twitter played major roles in helping organize street protests during the Arab Spring, to the point where dictators were focused on either blocking the services or using them to spy on...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #44: Social Media's Role in Activism, Trayvon Martin; Pinterest's Legal Drama
Welcome to the 44th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, this time with Mark Glaser and the Rachel Sklar as co-hosts. Sklar is a writer and social entrepreneur, and is filling in for Rafat Ali. This week, we convene a special roundtable to discuss how social media is changing activism, in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, in a...
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Social Networking
How Social Media Is Changing Protest Reporting in the U.K.
In March 1984, tens of thousands of British miners went on strike over expected coal mine closures. During the next year, unions faced off with police and Margaret Thatcher's conservative government in what became Britain's most turbulent industrial protest of recent decades.
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Social Networking
Infographic: The Role of Mobile Devices, Social Media in News Consumption
Editor's note: This week, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual State of the News Media report. The following is an infographic the organization put together to spell out some of the report's biggest findings and it is used here as a guest post. Click on the image below for a larger version of the...
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Social Networking
At SXSW Music, Streaming and Engagement Apps Rule
The common ground between technology developers and music companies becomes clearer and clearer every year at SXSW. For many years, the festival has seen a distinct interdependence between the two industries. However, as the Interactive conference transitions into the Music conference, the two industries are beginning to show significantly different trajectories. While the Interactive conference focuses more and more on...
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Social Networking
What started out as a casual live music conference has grown into something huge. The South by Southwest conference now encompasses music, film and interactive, and spans 10 days in March. Last year, SXSW estimated that the conference brought in 65,200 people to its exhibit space, and pumped a whopping $168 million into the local economy in Austin, Texas.
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Social Networking
Pew Report Finds Americans Unfriending Over Political Beliefs
As a teenager who was vocally opinionated about political issues, I often heard the cautionary refrain "Politics is not the topic of polite conversation." That counsel must have been lost on me, since I find myself as an adult publicly airing my opinions as both the political correspondent for this blog and as a Democratic analyst periodically appearing on FoxNews.com.
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Social Media
How the Anti-Social Media Crowd Misses the Mark
Facebook's impending stock offering has rekindled laments about the ills of social media. They largely miss the mark. The toppling of dictators, strengthened familial connections, rebirth of friendships, fanning of imagination, and creation of new methods of sharing -- to these I can add some very personal examples of how social media have helped me.
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Your Take
Poll: What Do You Think About Pinterest?
Lately, the social network that's been all the rage has been Pinterest, which is a visual look at the things you like. That means recipes, infographics, photos, design and more. MediaShift's Courtney Lowery Cowgill wrote that Pinterest was the first thing she'd been excited about online in a long, long time. So have you tried out Pinterest? Are you addicted...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #38: Online Report from Tunisia; Pinterest Craze; Apple Monitors Factories
Welcome to the 38th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Jillian York, who is filling in for Rafat Ali. First, we get a special on-the-ground report from special guest Mohamed El Dahshan in Tunisia, talking about a ruling expected from the country's Supreme Court about filtering the Internet....
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Social Networking
College Memes Madness: Students Posting Non-Stop on Facebook
College memes are suddenly invading the Facebook streams of students at schools throughout the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe. As The Cherwell, Oxford University's student newspaper, explains, the meme is "an idea or behavior that spreads through a culture by imitation. Internet memes follow this principle, humorous images are copied and re-captioned, concisely describing or satirizing the activity of...
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Social Networking
Pinterest: Why What It's Not Says So Much
It's almost impossible to explain Pinterest to someone who has never been on it. And now that it's hit the big time, there's a lot of explaining to do -- especially, it seems, to men who can't seem to avoid hearing about Pinterest from the women in their lives. Pinterest -- which Mashable's Pete Cashmore called "2012's Hottest Website" in...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #37: Merger Mania: CIR-Bay Citizen; GigaOm-PaidContent; Twitter Censorship
Welcome to the 37th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Jillian York, who is filling in for Rafat Ali. It's been a crazy week in media + tech, with important mergers abounding! First up is the Center for Investigative Reporting announcing that it will try to merge with...
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PoliticalShift
Are You Part of the 2% (of People Who Get Campaign News From Twitter)?
Many of you are, like me, among the proverbial "99%" when it comes to economics and income. But if you regularly learn about the 2012 campaign from those you follow on Twitter, as I do, you're in an elite class of a different sort. A new report out from the The Pew Research Center for The People and The Press...
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Your Take
Poll: What Will Facebook Be Worth in 5 Years?
They say that history repeats itself, but that's so easy to forget. It was only as recently as 2006 that analysts were saying that MySpace was likely worth $15 billion (and I was spoofing that conclusion). And you can go back to older social networks like Friendster or Tribe.net or America Online's chat rooms... you get the point. So now...
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Philosophy
Romenesko Gets His Mojo Back After Leaving Poynter
Jim Romenesko is having a good time. Lately, the "journalism evangelist," "KING of the blogosphere," and "go-to source for news about the news" has been waking up earlier, posting more often, and featuring content he had not felt free to publish for more than a decade. In the wake of his abrupt departure from The Poynter Institute late last year,...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #35: Apple's Boffo Earnings; Get More Clicks Per Tweet; NYC vs. Silicon Valley
Welcome to the 35th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Dorian Benkoil, who is filling in for Rafat Ali. Once again, Apple dominates the headlines, this time for quarterly earnings that blew away Wall Street -- and everyone else. The company made $13.1 billion in profits in the quarter,...
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MarketingShift
It's True: We Really Are All Publishers Now, Including Brands
Though it's a relatively new idea, the phrase, "We're all publishers now" already has become somewhat of a cliché. Seriously. Let me Google that for you. I'll wait while you go look ... Back? See what I mean? More than a full page of results with that exact phrasing. While it seems very democratizing, and it is, what many don't...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #33: CES Jumped the Shark?; SOPA Battles; Google+ in Search
Welcome to the 33rd episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali. This week we have a special show focused on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) happening in Las Vegas all week. Apple isn't there and Microsoft did its last keynote presentation there. Is the show losing momentum? Are...
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Ethics
3 Laws for Journalists in a Data-Saturated World
At the Cyberspace Conference in London in November, Igor Shchegolev, the Russian minister of communications and mass media, referred to sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #32: Yahoo's Mr. Wrong?; Steve Rubel's Clip Book; Fake @Wendi_Deng
Welcome to the 32nd episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali. We're back from our holiday break and ready to tackle more media news. The big news of the new year is a new CEO (again) at Yahoo, this time PayPal president Scott Thompson will try his...
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Collaboration
The 5 Tenets of Open Journalism
I'm not a middle-of-the-roader and wasn't aiming for a compromise position with my discussion paper, "The Case for Open Journalism Now: A new framework for informing communities," published early this month by the University of Southern California's Annenberg Innovation Lab. Instead, I sought to identify and propel a culture shift that might build a healthier relationship among those who produce...
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Social Media
A Newsroom Primer: Starting Fresh With Google+ Brand Pages
If newsrooms avoided creating an account on Google+ when the product asked brands to stay away, the time has come to build your brand inside the social-networking tool. Last week, Google opened up brand pages for all to use. But before you set it up, there's an important thing you need to know: You can set up a brand page...
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Social Networking
Dutch Artist Explores Privacy, Social Media With 'Showroom Girls'
This past summer, Amsterdam's Foam museum exhibited a controversial project by Dutch visual artist Willem Popelier -- a project that has raised a debate about the intersection of the Internet, in particular social media, and privacy.Popelier's Showroom Girls centers on the story of two 14-year-old girls the artist tracked through social media.The two girls visited a shop where customers can...
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EducationShift
Using Facebook, Hoot.me as a Study Tool
Protecting student safety has been the rationale behind the recent spate of "laws restricting teachers' and students' communication via social networking. The laws call into into question once again the educational value of these sorts of online social tools: Why do teachers need to talk to students on Facebook? Shouldn't students be studying? Isn't Facebook just a waste of time?
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Social Networking
2011 Knight-Batten Winners Include Storify, Andy Carvin
Since 2003, the winners of the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism have encouraged new forms of information sharing, increased user engagement, and created innovative ways to share information. This year's cream of the crop, announced earlier this month in Washington, D.C., were no exception. While Storify, a publishing platform for social media, took home the top spot and a...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #21: Social Wars: Facebook's Timeline, Media Grab; Google+ Dead or Alive?
Welcome to the 21st episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and entrepreneur Rafat Ali. This week is a special edition the war between the social networks, and what that means for the media world.
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Social Networking
A Journalist's Primer to Google+
After a few months of chatter, Google+ has opened up to everyone. As a journalist, Google+ is something you need to explore. Its simplicity of broadcasting your message is worth understanding and using to connect with news consumers. I jumped into the new social space within 24 hours of its release. I'm an early adopter, and I love to share...
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Social Networking
Google+: Social Media Upstart 'Worse Than a Ghost Town'
I wanted to log on to Google+. I swear I did. But the thought of it made me tired. I recently wrote a piece for MediaShift on the perils of tweeting interview requests. Like I've done for past pieces and many of the posts on my blog College Media Matters, I carried out all the expected social media promotion. I...
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World View
How Social Media Is Keeping the Egyptian Revolution Alive
This piece was co-written by Hanna Sistek. CAIRO -- The revolution in Egypt is unfinished business. While new online tools are used to strengthen civil society, activists are still struggling with the digital divide when it comes to mobilizing masses against the army and the remains of the old administration. On a Saturday evening in Cairo, a digital campaign against...
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Philosophy
September 11th Ten Years On: 'Are You OK?'
There is nothing like an anniversary to force you to notice change. In New York City this weekend, a lot of us are contemplating what's happened over the past decade: to ourselves, to our city, and to the world. One of the most startling realizations is the shift in the role of the media since the attack. We remember watching...
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Social Networking
An avatar, for lack of a better explanation, is our incarnation on the Internet -- the virtual Halloween costume we wear every day. Whether it's an animated alter ego in a game or online community, or a two-dimensional Facebook profile picture or Twitter "Twavatar," your avatar is how the online world sees you. It's also how you see yourself. Researchers...
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World View
Andy Carvin's Twitter Feed Swerves from Libya to Earthquake
NPR's Andy Carvin has been the star of the Twittersphere during the Arab Spring, even sending out an eye-popping 1,200 tweets in one weekend. But today was a day like no other for Carvin, as the Libyan rebels took over Colonel Moammar Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli, while an earthquake struck the East Coast in the U.S., shaking Carvin's house as...
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EducationShift
Twitter Interview Requests: #Innovative or #Epicfail?
Over the past year, I have noticed an emerging student press trend sweeping the Twitterverse: the tweet greet. An increasing number of student journalists appear to be using Twitter as the prime spot to seek sources for their story or class assignments and to make first contact with these sources. The result: a dramatic rise in brief, public, and sometimes...
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Social Networking
What the England Riots Tell Us About Social Media
When England instituted the Riot Act of 1714, it did so to prevent "tumults and riotous assemblies, and for the more speedy and effectual punishing the rioters." That statute came off the books in 1973, but now British Prime Minister David Cameron is targeting the "riotous assemblies" of the online and social media worlds in the wake of deadly and...
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Social Networking
Overexposed? Baby Photos in the Age of Facebook
From the moment that pink solid line appeared on the pregnancy test, every little decision felt monumental. Home birth or hospital? Cloth or disposable? Co-sleeper or crib? Sling or stroller? With each choice, I did more research than perhaps a person should do and there was almost always more information than I needed. By the time my last trimester...
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Media Usage
Twitter Chat: How to Avoid Ads for Kids, Share Meaningful Media Moments
As part of our ongoing series on Kids & Media, we had a recent live chat on Twitter with a group of parents to talk about how our kids use media. Special guests included MediaShift managing editor Courtney Lowery Cowgill, Common Sense Media's Caroline Knorr and PBS Parents' Tracey Wynne. I was the moderator, and we had a good...
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Social Networking
Google+ Terms of Service, Illustrated
Editor's note: When Google+ launched, there was much ado about the Terms of Service, especially in how they related to photos. So, artist Ryan Estrada set out to simplify things with the following infographics, which immediately went viral. He explains below what inspired them. I'm an artist who makes my living sharing my work online, and when I joined Google+...
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Free Speech
Social Media Plays Major Role in Motivating Malaysian Protesters
More than a week after Malaysian police fired teargas and water cannons at thousands of demonstrators seeking reform of the country's electoral system, a Facebook petition calling on Prime Minister Najib Razak to quit has drawn over 200,000 backers, highlighting the role of social and new media in Malaysia's restrictive free speech environment. One contributor to the page wrote: "The...
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World View
Social Media and Satire Fuel Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt
Political satire is, historically, a great propeller of social movements. As Srdja Popovic, a leader of Optor, the Serbian resistance movement, said: Everything we did [had] a dosage of humor. Because I'm joking. You're becoming angry. You're always showing only one face. And I'm always again with another joke, with another action, with another positive message to the wider audience....
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Social Networking
How Social Media 'Friends' Translate Into Real-Life Friendships
When social media first gained attention, I heard many people scoff that these online connections couldn't possibly be real friends. Some even used "Facebook friend" as a synonym for shallowness, fearing people might trade face-to-face interaction for a virtual life online. But many years, re-tweets, meet-ups, event invitations and birthday wishes later, the majority of the people I know now...
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Social Networking
How to Correct Social Media Errors
In my job as the social media editor for MediaShift, I'm used to fitting big ideas into tight spaces. But recently, in the fray of 140-character editing, I struggled to condense a curious statistic. Finishing up, I double-checked grammar, the link, and clicked "submit" as usual. It was retweeted more than 100 times (see the tweet at left). And it...
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EducationShift
College Students Miss the Journalistic Potential of Social Media
This piece was co-written by Alexa Capeloto. A couple of days after news broke of Osama bin Laden's killing in Pakistan, a group of students at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where we teach journalism, sat in a classroom and talked about how they were first alerted to the story. Most said Facebook. Some said friends or family, primarily...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #12: Facebook Gets Skype Video; Phone-Hack Scandal in U.K.
Welcome to the twelfth episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali, the founder of PaidContent. This week's show looks at the recent launch of Facebook video chat with Skype built in. While Facebook called its announcement "awesome" it was underwhelming for tech and media insiders who have...
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TVShift
KOMU-TV Puts Google+ Hangout Video Chat on the Air
As a reporter and anchor for KOMU-TV, the NBC affiliate in Columbia, Mo., and the broadcast lab for the Missouri School of Journalism, I already chat with viewers via Facebook and Twitter on our "Livestream" behind-the-scenes webcam mounted on the news set. Now, KOMU has added yet another delightful distraction to the other side of the set. It's turned me into...
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Your Take
Every few months, a new social network is born, and the cycle begins again. It starts with the emails: "Joe Blow wants you to join his network!" "Jane Blow wants you to join her network!" Then you check it out. Huh. It looks like all the other social networks, except that no one's there yet. Then you have to build...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #11: Can Google+ Overtake Facebook, Avoid MySpace's Fate?
Welcome to the eleventh episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali, the founder of PaidContent. This week's show looks at the recent launch of Google+, a more fully formed social network that is taking on Facebook. Google+ is in an invite-only mode but both Mark and Rafat...
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Social Networking
The Twitter Effect: How Social Media Changes the News Narrative
The Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, best known for the bleak and cynically fatalistic love poem, "Dover Beach," once described journalism as "literature in a hurry." As the news cycle has been spurred on by Twitter and social media, and quickened to the point of being nearly instantaneous, I can't help but wonder what Arnold would think of...
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Social Media
Social Media Creates New Avenues for Connecting Journalists and Sources
The true value of a reporter can be measured by the number of contacts in his or her address book, I'm told, and one of the most important priorities for a journalist is to establish a wide network of sources, which can later be used to produce solid and trustworthy reporting. Now, increased Internet and social media usage in newsrooms...
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Social Networking
How the Egyptian Revolution Inspired Protests in Spain
Shortly after I moved to Madrid after visiting Cairo, an Egyptian friend tweeted solidarity with the hashtag #SpanishRevolution. A revolution? In Spain? Was this his attempt to make my new home seem more exciting? The link he posted led to video of a packed Puerta del Sol -- a square in the center of Madrid. And so, someone 2,000 miles...
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Social Networking
Weiner Scandal Lesson: Sexting More Trackable Than Real-Life Flirting
My first internship was covering state politics. College parties were nothing compared to the drinking, carousing and eye-opening public behavior I saw during the legislative session. It was the 1970s -- a mere decade after the "Mad Men" '60s. Each week brought a new jaw-dropper, such as when a legislator told me he'd be happy to discuss a bill he...
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Social Media
How PBS NewsHour Used Social Media in Response to Hack Attack
PBS NewsHour staffers who were awake late last Sunday before Memorial Day, including myself, were just as startled as the rest of the Internet to discover a legitimate-looking blog post on our site claiming that late rapper Tupac Shakur was alive. We were under a hacking attack. Suddenly, it was time for damage control. I hope you never find yourself...
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Legal Drama
Who Really Owns Your Photos in Social Media?
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced June 1 that the company was partnering with Photobucket to make it easy to share photos at Twitter.com. With a "Twitter native photo-sharing experience," he said, "users will own their own rights to their photos." The implication? That this might not be the case with third-party services. Therein lies the real battle over photo-sharing sites:...
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Social Media
How to Use Social Tools to Curate, Research and Expand Sources for a Story
Our website, Tijd.be has existed for 15 years now, and my colleagues recently asked me to write an opinion piece about what the next decade and a half will bring -- a daunting task. I had some ideas, of course, but I wanted to eat my own dog food and actually tap into my social media networks to write the...
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RadioShift
5 Must-Have Apps for iPhone Radio Reporting
Having the right tool for any job is important, especially when your finished product is due right now. Since February 2010 I've been doing all my field production and reporting on my iPhone for all-news WTOP-FM and wtop.com in Washington, D.C. You can read my in-depth report on how I use the iPhone for reporting in this previous report for...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #9: Twitter Buys Tweetdeck; Facebook's Role in Breaking News
Welcome to the ninth episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser along with PaidContent founder Rafat Ali. This week's show looks at the recent purchase of Tweetdeck by Twitter, and the questions it raises about companies starting businesses on the platform of other companies. If you run an app for...
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Your Take
What Does the LinkedIn IPO Signify?
Last week when business social networking site LinkedIn went public, the stock shot up from $45 per share to more than $90, and even today is trading at $96-plus per share. The company's valuation is more than $9 billion, even though the company had earnings of just $15.4 million last year. That kind of eye-popping debut on the public markets...
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Social Networking
Newsroom, Community Use Facebook as Key Hub After Joplin Tornado
When Joplin, Mo., was hit with a massive tornado, I knew my community would react. Even though we're nearly 250 miles away, many people in Columbia and mid-Missouri are either Joplin natives or have family there. My newsroom's normally local-focused Facebook page quickly became a clearinghouse for updates about how mid-Missouri could help the tornado-ravaged community. Fans are using the...
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EducationShift
Children and Facebook: The Promise and Pitfalls for Social Media
With more than 500 million Facebook users across the world, it's hard to refute that the social networking site has profoundly changed the way we communicate and share information. But what's the Facebook effect on kids? When it comes to navigating the social networking world -- whether it's Facebook or fan fiction sites -- the terrain becomes even murkier. Parents...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #8: LinkedIn's Bubbly IPO; Grueskin on the New York World
Welcome to the eighth episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser along with PaidContent founder Rafat Ali. This week's show looks at the big IPO of business networking site LinkedIn, with the stock price doubling to more than $90 per share in its first day of trading, valuing the company...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #6: Bin Laden News on Twitter; Demand Media Goes Long-Form
Welcome to the sixth episode of "The Mediatwits," the new revamped longer form weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser along with PaidContent founder Rafat Ali. This week's show looks at the way the news of Osama Bin Laden's death played out over Twitter and other new media, making minor celebrities of @ReallyVirtual and @KeithUrbahn. Our...
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EducationShift
Columbia J-School Students Try to Keep Professor Off Social Media
News of Osama bin Laden's death brought a huge surge of activity to Twitter and other social media platforms Sunday night and Monday. So it's a strange quirk of timing that this is the week that Sree Sreenivasan -- digital media professor, dean of student affairs at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and longtime social media enthusiast -- has agreed...
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Social Networking
A Twitter Timeline on the Killing of Osama Bin Laden
[View the story "Timeline of Tweets Around Death of Osama Bin Laden" on Storify] Did you see any other key tweets around the news of Bin Laden's killing? Share them in the comments below and I'll add them to the timeline above. Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report...
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Social Networking
Canadians Prefer to Get News from Friends (not Editors) on Social Media
Journalists today are expected to be active on social media, sharing observations, anecdotes and links with their audience. Facebook itself is reaching out to newsrooms, recently launching the Journalists on Facebook page as a resource for the media. But a study from Canada suggests more people prefer to get their news via their friends and acquaintances on social media, than...
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PoliticalShift
European Council Changes Course on 'Tweetwall' After Berlusconi Insults
The social network platform Twitter broke the one billion tweets barrier as it celebrated its fifth anniversary in March of this year. Since October of 2010, the European Council and its President Herman Van Rompuy have contributed to this record result. Twitter gives politicians a chance to better connect with their voters. Political institutions have also recognized the value of...
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Social Networking
Susan Orlean Explains How Twitter Affects Her Long-Form Writing
As I spoke to Susan Orlean about the role the social web plays with her long feature articles and books, I couldn't help but compare her to another famous writer for the New Yorker: E.B. White. Like Orlean, White had decided to leave the frantic mania of New York City life for a much quieter one in the country, moving...
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Social Networking
Facebook Sometimes Slow to Remove Offensive Content, Fake Profiles
When it comes to Facebook, what goes up may not come down, at least not without a fight. In many cases, the social networking giant has been slow to act when it comes to offensive content and fake profiles. Robin Sinkhorn, mother of actress Lauren Potter, who plays Becky in the popular TV series "Glee," learned this last year. Potter...
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Social Networking
Social Media's Role as a Crucial Lifeline During Japan Disaster
This is the story of seven people connected by the Great Tohoku Kanto Earthquake that rocked northern Japan in March and their need to obtain immediate and accurate information. Mass confusion combined with their desire to reach loved ones compelled them to turn to social media as a lifeline. Through networked, digital technologies, they created new ways to supplement lifelines...
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EducationShift
Many Journalism Schools Put Minimal Effort into Facebook Pages
As students at the Missouri School of Journalism, we've learned about the importance of social media to the news industry. But beyond the scope of journalism, we use social media every day just to communicate with each other. From perusing Spring Break pictures to keeping up with friends' birthdays, Facebook and Twitter are constant companions for many college students. So...
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Social Networking
7 Social Lessons Learned from the MediaShift Mixer
MediaShift has been in existence since 2006, and has a vibrant, engaged community that has grown over those five years. But where is that community of readers and contributors in the real world? How can they connect, get to know each other and network face-to-face? That's been the conundrum for me as the founder and executive editor of the...
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Europe
Romanian Magazine Uses Facebook for 'Crowd-Publishing' Success
It all started over a beer. One evening in April 2009, Cristian Lupşa and four other young journalists were chatting in a pub in Bucharest, Romania about the low quality of the country's print media. They should start their own magazine, someone joked. They could call it Decât o Revistă, which in slightly broken Romanian means "just a magazine." It...
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World View
How Social Media, Internet Changed Experience of Japan Disaster
The reports and pictures of the devastation from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last week reminded me of reporting on the earthquake that leveled Japan's port city of Kobe in 1995. On a personal level, I am praying for the people in a country I have come to see as a second home. As a media observer, what struck me...
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Social Networking
How Tuenti Held Off Facebook in Spain with Better Privacy
JEREZ DE LOS CABALLEROS, SPAIN -- When I first got to Spain, my Spanish students immediately asked me if I was on Tuenti. Like most Americans, I had never heard of it. Once I learned that it was another social network, I figured I didn't need it. First of all, I had a Facebook page, and secondly, I was wary...
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Social Networking
Facebook Pushes Comments Upgrade, But Will Publishers Bite?
Bit by bit, feature by feature, Facebook is making inroads into sites that live outside of Facebook.com. Major publishers now sprinkle their sites with Facebook plug-ins, from fan page widgets to friend recommendations to the ubiquitous "Like" thumbs-up. And hey, why not? It's a win-win, with publishers getting more engagement and increased traffic from Facebook News Feeds, and Facebook getting...
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World View
How Technology, Social Media Is Making Life Hard for Dictators
This is the third of our on-the-ground reports from Cairo, Egypt, from Jaron Gilinsky. In this video report, Jaron considers the effects of social media on the Egyptian revolution. I wondered how Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak eventually knew about the hundreds of thousands of people in the streets calling for his resignation. Surely, he had many agents on the streets...
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Public Relations
How to Fix the Tech PR Industry's Diversity Deficit
PBS.org has recently been home to some frank and thoughtful discussions about an overlooked issue: the lack of racial diversity in the media. For those who may have missed it, the dialogue was sparked by Retha Hill in an Idea Lab post about the lack of minorities at new media conferences. Mark Glaser expanded the conversation from the comments section...
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World View
One Journalist's Survival Guide to the Egyptian Revolution
During the uprising that eventually ended the 30-year reign of President Hosni Mubarak, I became convinced that the most important journalistic work being done today is in those countries where journalists are not wanted. Mubarak and his agents were determined to silence the protesters and their message. But, thanks to the valiant efforts of journalists and the resilience of the...
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AdvertisingShift
On Facebook and Online, Privacy Is Only an Illusion
As our public selves merge perceptibly with our private selves on social networks, our notions of what constitutes privacy -- arguably even the very definition of privacy -- is undergoing a radical revision. Mark Zuckerberg audaciously quipped in 2010 that privacy was no longer a social norm. For many of the 600 million-plus users of Facebook, the idea of...
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MusicShift
Silverman: CD Sales to Co-Exist with Cloud, Digital Downloads
There's a growing feeling in the American music business that the future will be in the cloud. No one will need physical CDs anymore, but will listen to music on streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify, which will eventually merge into a grand digital jukebox. But industry veteran Tom Silverman, who founded dance music label Tommy Boy Records in...
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Social Networking
Social Media Grows at NY Times, But Home Page Remains King
Lately Facebook has been trumpeting its prowess in driving traffic to news sites. In a blog post a couple weeks ago, Facebook media guy Justin Osofsky crowed that Facebook was now the number one referral site to SportingNews.com and that the Washington Post saw Facebook referral traffic grow 280 percent year-over-year. That's certainly impressive, but the New York Times website continues to get the majority of traffic from its own home page.
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Environment
How Green is Facebook, Microsoft Push into Cloud Computing?
Information and communication technology (ICT) companies already account for up to three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions -- a figure projected to increase as more data centers are built to store the shift of information to the web. During interviews with MediaShift, executives at Microsoft and Facebook said cloud computing could have positive environmental impacts. But analysts and activists have expressed serious doubts about the implications of the coming data-center building boom.
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Social Networking
Are People of Color Missing in New Media? A #MediaDiversity Chat
How many times have you been to a technology or media conference and noticed the dominance of white male speakers at the podium or the room? That's what Arizona State University professor and media veteran Retha Hill saw when she attended the recent NewsFoo conference in Phoenix and the ONA conference in Washington, DC. She wrote about the diversity problem...
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Media Usage
Top 10 Media Stories of 2010: WikiLeaks, Facebook, iPad Mania
This year has been all about privacy, or lack therof, online. Time magazine named Mark Zuckerberg as their Person of the Year, while the popular vote went to Julian Assange, the founder and chief instigator of WikiLeaks. Much has been made about both men trying to make our lives more transparent, Facebook with its 500-million-strong social network, and WikiLeaks...
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Social Networking
Vietnam Pushes Facebook Clone to Control Online Speech
HANOI, VIETNAM - Inside one of Hanoi's more than 3,000 online gaming houses, gamers clad in coats and scarves pass the hours shooting at each other on their screens, oblivious to the wintry gray and 10 celsius evening outside. This is southeast Asia, but the French colonial architecture and the proliferation of tourist-market socialist kitsch -- all covered by a wet blanket autumn gloom -- give the place a slightly European feel.
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Yahoo Prefers Delicious Sale to 'Sunset'
In this week's 4MR podcast, I look at the controversy surrounding Yahoo possibly closing down social bookmarking site Delicious, which it bought five years ago. An internal slide was leaked showing Delicious was on the "sunset" list (to be closed), but after an outcry on Twitter and other social networks, Yahoo said it would look for an outside home for Delicious, meaning it could open the way for a sale. I talked with ReadWriteWeb co-editor Marshall Kirkpatrick about the future of Delicious, and even photo-sharing site Flickr in the wake of chaos at Yahoo.
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Minorities, Young People Lead in Twitter Use
In this week's 4MR podcast, I look at the recent survey results from Pew Internet on Americans' use of Twitter. The research group found that 8% of American use Twitter, with 2% using it daily. That use is even more pronounced among Americans aged 18 to 29, and among blacks and Hispanics. I spoke to Pew Internet senior research specialist Aaron Smith about the survey results and how Twitter use compares to social networking use.
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PoliticalShift
How the Tea Party Utilized Digital Media to Gain Power
The biggest story of the U.S. midterm election has been the growing influence of the Tea Party movement. Since their first rallies in early 2009, these vocal, visible conservatives have succeeded in shifting the center of American political discourse to the right. This election cycle, Tea Partiers have gone a step further, successfully backing primary challengers against moderate Republicans...
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PoliticalShift
Will Geo-Location Services Play a Role in Elections?
The experiments that took place with Facebook and Twitter during the 2008 presidential campaign are now viewed as standard operating procedure just two years later. Will the same be said about location-based services come 2012? Foursquare and Gowalla are the current crowned kings of geo-location and have been getting regular mentions in the tech blogosphere and beyond. Geo-social is very...
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PoliticalShift
GOP Beating Democrats with Social Media for Midterm Elections
There is a major shift going on in politics this election cycle, with more candidates and campaigns using social media and technology to boost their chances. From today until the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 2, MediaShift presents an in-depth special report, PoliticalShift 2010, with data visualizations, analysis, a 5Across video roundtable and live CoverItLive chat on Election Night with...
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Social Networking
Public, Closed or Secret? How to Use the New Facebook Groups
I was wrapping up a normal evening of checking through my newsroom's content before bed when I noticed I had been invited to a Facebook group. This was about seven hours after Mark Zuckerberg and his team introduced a number of changes to groups. The change that most piqued my interest was the new groups process. So when I noticed...
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MagazineShift
Revamped Forbes Pushes Advertorials, Social Media, Conflict
Earlier this year Kevin Gentzel, the chief revenue officer of Forbes, took a look at what the chief marketing officers in the Forbes CMO Network were doing with their companies. He realized they were becoming content creators -- and that this had big implications for his magazine and other traditional media. Gentzel said this underscored the massive shift that was...
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Social Media
'Liquid Newsroom' Project Developed with Radical Openness
People often think it's best to hide their good ideas and develop them in secret. The goal is to beat the competition by emerging only once your concept is fully developed and ready to go. This can be the case with a new business, or a piece of journalism. At the moment, though, people seem intrigued by the opposite approach....
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EducationShift
Professors Speak Out About Changes Coming to J-Schools
Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. This article was co-authored by Abby Moon. A previous article on MediaShift mined the OurBlook series of interviews with leading journalists and academics to...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: New Twitter Makes Room for Ads
In this week's 4MR podcast I look at the newly redesigned Twitter.com, now with a double-pane view, embedded photos and video, and infinite scroll. Some folks say this means Twitter is more of a media company, getting people to pay more attention to its website, where it could serve up more ads. I talked with tech pundit and blogger Robert Scoble, who said he likes the redesign and thinks third party Twitter app makers will need to innovate to survive.
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Facebook Places Wants to Be Turned Off
In this week's 4MR podcast I look at the recently launched Facebook Places location feature. While the social network touts it as a great way to tell your friends where you are in the physical world, others worry about the privacy implications. In fact, the most popular stories on the subject are telling people how to turn it off. I talked with Gawker staff writer Adrian Chen about his take on how Facebook could have made it easier to turn Places off.
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Thought Leader Q&A
Facebook Launches Media Page But Resists Revenue Sharing
Facebook is the alpha dog of social networks, and it's also becoming a top dog when it comes to referring traffic to news sites. That became clear in February when Hitwise found that Facebook was referring more traffic to news and media sites than Google News. But for a long time, Facebook only had intermittent communication with media companies about...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Kachingle Hopes 'Social Payments' Can Help Fund Content
If advertising alone isn't going to support all the online journalism and content sites, and pay walls will just turn readers away, perhaps there's another solution, a third way: Social payments. More than just simple donations, social payment systems such as Kachingle and Flattr simplify giving money to sites you visit. Both services set up a monthly payment system, with...
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EducationShift
The Influencer Project Showcases 60 Speakers in 60 Minutes
The world is flooded with multi-day web marketing conferences and other educational opportunities aimed at teaching people how to use social media. But this week the shortest social media conference ever lined up 60 thought leaders to speak for 60 seconds each.
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MovieShift
How 6 Big Summer Films Are Using Facebook For Marketing
Tony Stark, better known as Iron Man, believes in "better living through technology." Most marketers would argue that better marketing is enabled by technology as well. One of the primary game-changers today is Facebook and studios are learning how to engage audiences online to spur a better box office. Movie marketers understand the impact that reaching their desired audiences on...
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World View
Crisis in Thailand Leads to Net Crackdown, Censorship
At least 80 people were killed during the latest clashes in Thailand. But the confusion and danger that are present in various parts of Bangkok do not explain why several Thai and foreign journalists have been shot since April. Two are dead. The tense political situation also doesn't justify the leadership's blocking of more than 4,000 anti-monarchy websites. As we...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Facebook Privacy Update; Bay Citizen Launch
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition I look at how Facebook tried to simplify its privacy settings in the face of widespread criticism and defections. Now the 50 settings have been streamlined down to 15, but still some critics decry the opt-out nature of sharing vs. opt-in. Plus, the new Bay Citizen non-profit news...
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Social Networking
Social Media Training: From Conferences to the Classroom
She sat in a chair signing an autograph, as the camera's flashes made the stones on her Ms. America crown sparkle. A man knelt about five feet in front of American royalty and drew a sketch of her on the iPad. Caressa Cameron, Miss America 2010, was addressing the audience at the 140 Character conference in New York City last...
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PoliticalShift
Aussie #Spill Breaks Down Wall Between Journalists, Audience
The spectacular demise of the Australian conservative party's leadership in November 2009 was a turning point for political journalism in the country. This is the third and final installment in a special MediaShift series (read part one here and part two here) about the transformative impact of the biggest Australian political story of 2009, which became known simply by its...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: A Primer on Facebook Privacy Issues
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition I focus on the recent privacy brouhaha at social networking giant Facebook. Why are prominent techies deleting their accounts and complaining? Mainly because Facebook keeps adding features that are "opt-out" instead of "opt-in" and its privacy policies are a complex mess. I talked with lawyer Michael McSunas to...
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MagazineShift
'48 Hour' Births Crowdsourced, Print-on-Demand Mag in Public
The first issue of 48 Hour Magazine, though printed on old-fashioned paper, is one of the most technologically interesting magazine projects today. The staff of 48 Hour Magazine sent off its finished "Issue Zero" to MagCloud, a print-on-demand service, at noon on May 9 after a harried two-day submission, editing and design process. Following weeks of building buzz about the...
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PoliticalShift
How Technology Changed American Politics in the Internet Age
The 2008 U.S. presidential campaign drew the attention of the world. In the aftermath, the Obama campaign's use of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were widely credited with helping secure the historic victory of President Barack Obama. But the Obama campaign wouldn't have been able to make its technological strides without the innovations first deployed by the Howard Dean campaign years...
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PhotoShift
Photo Essay: Location Apps Battle, Geeks Gather at SXSW
Every March, the city of Austin, Texas, welcomes the world for its annual South by Southwest Festival, otherwise known as SXSW. The festival consists of three parts: SXSW Interactive, a four-day geekfest for the Internet community; SXSW Film, ten days of international cinema programs; and SXSW Music, a four day non-stop celebration of live music. The Interactive section, known as...
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Social Networking
Geo-Location, Sentiment Analysis, AT&T Blankets SXSWi
As SXSW Interactive comes to a close and SXSW Music kicks off, it's worth taking a look at the ideas, trends, discussions, and issues that dominated the four-day technology summit. Here are the five areas that stood out the most to me. 1. Conference Buzz Every year there is a product or two that monopolizes most of the buzz --...
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MagazineShift
How Magazines Use Social Media to Boost Pass-Along, Build Voice
Magazines have always prided themselves on their longevity as a medium and their pass-along circulation -- the additional readers each copy gains when it's passed from hand to hand. Today, social media are providing opportunities for readers to share content and experience their favorite magazines as part of their social activity online. As a result, this is the dawn of...
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RadioShift
NPR, SiriusXM Internships Steeped in Multimedia, Social Media
When you think about internships at media companies, you probably picture people fetching coffee, running errands, or worse. But some internships have taken a different tack, setting up specialized blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages for their interns to help them understand new technology and spread the word about their programs. At NPR, the 40-plus interns put together a...
more »Social Networking
<- Go to Photo 15 On a final note, I couldn't resist the chance to show off my rope skills with Internet star Shira Lazar at the Girl + Guy Party. To read more about SXSWi 2010, check out Jason Feinberg's report on MediaShift. For more of Kris Krug's photos from SXSW this year, check out his Flickr photostream tagged...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Olympics Tape-Delay Backlash; PleaseRobMe's Geo-Scare
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the backlash against NBC's coverage of the Winter Olympics, with people on the West Coast angry at the network for tape-delaying the best events until prime time. Plus, a new service called PleaseRobMe.com points out the vulnerability of people who use check-in geo-location services such as Foursquare along with Twitter. And I ask Just One Question to NewTeeVee's Liz Gannes.
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World View
NGOs Must Harness Social Media Beyond Disaster Relief
When the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Doctors Without Borders had 1,300 followers on Twitter. Now, it boasts over 13,000. The Red Cross follower count shot up by just over 40,000 people in the weeks following the quake. If technology wasn't already transforming the public role of the non-governmental organization, it has now brought many to a point of...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Google's Mixed Buzz; Olympic Social Media
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the new Google Buzz, offering ways for people to use their Gmail contact list to send out status updates, videos, photos and more. Google has had to react to an array of concerns over privacy and the way Buzz automatically generates followers (and followees). Plus, the Olympics start on a somber note, but are being covered like never before over social media. And I ask Just One Question to NYU J-school grad and former MediaShift contributor Alana Taylor.
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Facebook as News Reader; Engadget Comments
This episode of 4MR is brought to you by GoDaddy, helping you set up your own website in a snap with domain name registration, web hosting and 24/7 support. Visit GoDaddy to learn more. Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the rise of Facebook as a place to find news. Hitwise...
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Digging Deeper
Best Online Resources for Following Haiti News, Taking Action
In the face of devastating news happening far away, there is comfort in making a connection. And those connections often are made online among strangers who are sharing video, photos, stories or tweets about the devastation around them. Such is the case in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a city that was devastated by an earthquake last Tuesday, with tens of thousands feared...
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MusicShift
The Year in Digital Music and Predictions for 2010
As 2009 comes to a close, and the music industry shifts focus to 2010, it's worth looking back at some of the noteworthy events of the past 12 months. This is also the right time to look ahead and predict what will happen next year. For some in the business, this year brought trouble after trouble; for others, 2009 was...
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Legal Drama
Lessons Learned from Tweeting a Biker Gang Trial
We fell into Twitter somewhat accidentally in our newsroom at the London Free Press in Ontario, Canada. The Bandidos biker gang trial was going to be a big one for the Free Press. We'd extensively covered the crime when it first happened: eight bikers from Toronto found dead on a rural road near London, and six men charged with...
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PoliticalShift
Best of Twitter: FTC Workshop Discusses Future of Journalism
For two days this week, some of journalism's most high profile executives and experts descended upon Washington, DC, for "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" a workshop hosted by the FTC. One exchange of note came between Rupert Murdoch and Arianna Huffington, who spoke separately but did a good job of representing two divergent points of view. Murdoch kicked...
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5Across
5Across: Social Media Marketing 101
There's a new series of demands being made in company meetings everywhere: "What is our social media strategy? What are we doing on Facebook and Twitter? I want followers and fans, and I want them now!" But before companies large and small -- as well as non-profits and charities -- jump into social media, they need to take a deep...
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PoliticalShift
Young Political Candidates Confronted by Digital Past on Facebook
Last spring Emanuel Pleitez, 26, ran for California's 32nd Congressional seat in a special election to replace Hilda Solis, the new secretary of labor. During the campaign, one of Pleitez's opponents, California State Sen. Gil Cedillo, discovered photos from Pleitez's Facebook profile that showed Pleitez hanging around with various women at parties. The Cedillo campaign used the photos as the...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Murdoch-Google Spat; Ft. Hood Shooting on Twitter
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at recent comments by News Corp. honcho Rupert Murdoch about taking his content out of Google searches, and how many people reacted to it. Plus, many news organizations made Twitter Lists to cover the Ft. Hood shooting, but the Austin American-Statesman had an excellent Twitter feed...
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Social Networking
Media140 Brings Old and New Media Together, With Explosive Results
Over 300 people gathered under the Media140 banner in a concert hall at Australia's national public broadcaster ABC in Sydney last week to consider the future of journalism in the social media age. Media140 is a newly formed global collaboration of journalists, academics and social media practitioners that is staging conferences around the world. The goal is to examine the...
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Hyper-Local
TheDigitel.com Brings Human Context to Local News Aggregation
Many news websites are working to refocus on local news, and often this means turning to automated aggregation. One hyper-local startup in Charleston, S.C., is blending links, community and visuals to try and redefine aggregation by giving it a human context. TheDigitel.com was launched by Ken Hawkins in June 2008, and recently received its first round of venture capital funding...
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PoliticalShift
Politicians Use Social Media to Bypass the Press Corps
Politicians are figuring out what social media technologies like blogs, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have to offer: direct access to voters. More than ever before, they can bypass the professional press and deliver an uncensored, unfiltered -- and unchecked -- message. "[Social media] allows me to gives my thoughts on the events of the day and the complete text of...
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Philosophy
The Right Way For Media Companies to Create Social Media Policies
Swimming in the roiling sea of online journalism, increasing numbers of newsrooms have decided to take up the challenge of articulating editorial policies for social media. Over the past year, news organizations from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times to the BBC have issued protocols for staff on Facebook, Twitter, and personal blogs and websites. Recently, the...
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World View
How Webcasting Helps Exclusive Conferences Be More Inclusive
For four days last month, Bill Clinton convened an elite group of heads of state, business leaders and celebrity activists for the annual meeting of his Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). Each year CGI picks a theme, and the focus of this year's gathering was the empowerment of women and girls in developing countries. The impact of the gathering was considerable,...
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PoliticalShift
Local Politicians Use Social Media to Connect with Voters
When television cameras panned across the room full of senators and representatives during the recent presidential address to a joint session of Congress, the audience at home caught a glimpse of several political leaders tweeting away on their BlackBerry phones. At the national level, social media has been embraced by many politicians. Even the White House has a Twitter account...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Facebook Takes on Twitter; iPhone Backlash
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at all the recent moves Facebook has made to take on Twitter, including revamping its search, coming out with slimmed-down "Facebook Lite" and buying out FriendFeed. Plus, various high-profile tech pundits have come out against the iPhone after Apple rejected Google Voice from its App Store....
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PoliticalShift
How U.S. Departments of Defense and State Differ in Social Media Approach
The Defense Department's new head of public affairs says there is no more powerful communication tool in reaching supporters and critics alike then with a personally delivered message. What's the suggestion? Social media technologies like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter must be thoroughly engaged by civilian and military personnel at DoD in a new era of personal communication. That's what Price...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Edelman's Steve Rubel Switches from Blog to Lifestream
I spoke with Rubel a couple months ago when he was visiting San Francisco for the Ad:tech conference. We met at B Restaurant near Moscone Center and I interviewed him with my Flip camera. We talked about his balancing act as a blogger/journalist/PR person, how PR is shifting with the advent of social media, and what lessons Edelman and Edelman's client Wal-Mart have learned from previous missteps online.
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Weblogs
Zombie Bloggers Create Communal Horror Stories
On June 13, bloggers around the world imagined they were under attack by the living dead, writing short horror narratives for the annual Blog Like It's the End of the World Day (which was especially appropriate for me since it fell on my birthday). But there are some bloggers who blog as if everyday were the end of the world:...
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NewspaperShift
5 Ways a Community Manager Can Help Your Media Outlet
Recently, the New York Times appointed its first ever community manager, someone to "concentrate full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers." Of course, the New York Times is a huge operation, and has an enormous community of print and online readers/users. Do we at...
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Social Media
How Journalists Balance Work, Personal Lives on Twitter
Twitter is continuing to make headlines around the world as it amasses followers. But it's also making an impact on the newsmakers themselves. Journalists are invading the space at a rapid pace and learning to report live, crowdsource stories and engage with a whole new audience...in 140 characters or less. It may not be revolutionary -- many journalists view the...
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Social Networking
Journalists Should Customize Social Networks to Maximize Experience
Online social networks are essential tools for journalists. They make it possible to build extended networks, search for story ideas, build contacts and dig up information. But even more important, they help to shake up the relationship between the individual journalist and the people formerly known as the audience. But many journalists don't know how to get the full benefit...
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Legacy Media
WSJ's D Conference Fumbles Transition to Web 3.0
CARLSBAD, CALIF. -- The organizers of the tony, high-priced tech conference known as D All Things Digital, included a manifesto of sorts in the program guide titled "Welcome to Web 3.0." In that treatise, organizers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher define Web 3.0 as "the real arrival, after years of false predictions, of the thin client, running clean, simple...
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Social Media
How Journalists Are Using Twitter in Australia
Twitter became big news once journalists realized its power as a tool for breaking stories during the Mumbai Massacre in 2008. In the aftermath of the micro-blogging platform hitting the headlines, there was an explosion of professional journalists in the Twittersphere. This growth has been fueled by increasing mainstream awareness of the importance of social media to the future of...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: WSJ's Social Media Guidelines; NYT's Pay Plans
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. This week I look at the Wall Street Journal's code of conduct for reporters and editors, with guidelines for using Twitter and social media sites. Plus, the New York Times is considering two different plans for charging for online content -- a metering system and subscription system -- according to a report...
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MobileShift
Live-Blogging EconSM Gathering About Social Networking on Mobiles
SAN FRANCISCO -- I am at the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center right down the hill from where I live in Potrero Hill. Yes, it is "Bike to Work Day" today in San Francisco, but I couldn't bike down in nice clothes. So I split the difference and walked most of the way here. The topic is how social...
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MagazineShift
Vanity Fair, New Yorker Fan Blogs Give Free PR to Conde Nast
The Twitter user who writes under the handle Vanityfairer would not tell me her real name. She began following me in December after I mentioned the magazine Vanity Fair in a tweet, and for the next few months we exchanged replies and direct messages about the magazine's content and its writers. Though she made no claims to be associated...
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Culture
How Charities Harness Social Media to Raise Awareness, Money
On April 14, actor Hugh Jackman pledged to give AUS $100,000 to the charity that could best convince him, via Twitter, that it was deserving of the award. On Friday, Jackman announced that, unable to decide, he had chosen two winners to split the prize: Operation of Hope, a medical foundation that donates surgical procedures to children in developing countries...
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Legal Drama
Coalinga Newspaper Not Liable for Running MySpace Rant
A post on a social networking site like MySpace could end up anywhere, and depending upon where it ends up, the result could be catastrophic. We've covered that territory before on MediaShift, discussing a case involving discipline of a teacher for conduct shown on a MySpace page. In Moreno v. Hanford Sentinel, a California appeals court considered a case...
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NewspaperShift
Newspaper Cartoonists Engage Audiences (Including Haters) Online
I once worked for a daily newspaper, where there were two things guaranteed to generate letters to the editor: articles about cats and the comics section. Readers didn't have much to say about our coverage of local elections or big trials, but we were sure to receive letters if someone disagreed with the slant of an editorial cartoon or didn't...
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MarketingShift
'Cluetrain Manifesto' Still Relevant 10 Years Later
When The Cluetrain Manifesto appeared on the web in 1999, neither its supporters nor its authors believed it was trying to say anything particularly new. Rather, the 95 theses and the following chapters -- written in almost a stream of consciousness, psychoanalytic style befitting of something labeled a "manifesto" -- were thought to merely point out the obvious to the...
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MusicShift
Five Tips for Musicians to Engage Their Fans Digitally
There was a time when celebrity musicians were positioned as unreachable idols. Those days are long gone; in today's wired marketplace, musicians have to forge a personal relationship with their audience to keep their fans' interest. And for many, that means creating opportunities for fans to have an inside look into all aspects of an artist's life.
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Embedded Report
Developing Social Media Workshops for Journalists
For the last few weeks, my colleague Raphael and I have been organizing a series of social media workshops for our fellow journalists at the Belgian business newspapers and websites De Tijd and L'Echo. I'd like to open this up to reader suggestions, so let me tell you what we intend to cover in this course -- and I hope...
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Social Networking
How Celebrity Imposters Hurt Twitter's Credibility
By the time the news spread that the Dalai Lama had opened a Twitter account it no longer seemed such a novelty that a high profile individual would join the micro-blogging service, even if he was a divine being. The account gathered nearly 20,000 followers before Twitter pulled the plug two days later when representatives of the Tibetan leader informed...
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Social Media
Journalists Still a-Twitter About Social Media
Journalists are obsessed with Twitter. Obsessed. They use it, talk about it, analyze it, deconstruct it, reconstruct it, love it, hate it, capitalize on it, become experts on it, monetize it, argue about it, and become micro-famous on it. They are mesmerized with what it is and they are as giddy as Tom Cruise on Oprah just thinking about what...
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Digging Deeper
Warning: Dependence on Facebook, Twitter Could Be Hazardous to Your Business
You've probably heard how much the micro-blogging service Twitter can help your business, or that being on social networking site Facebook can boost your company's profile. But what you might not have considered is the potential danger in over-relying on these startups that could go out of business, get bought out, or close your account if you aren't familiar with...
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Legal Drama
U.S. Supreme Court (Finally) Kills Online Age Verification Law
In 1998, the U.S. Congress enacted the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a law intended to control child access to sexually explicit material on the Internet. The law was immediately challenged on free speech and other grounds and its enforcement was delayed. After ten years of litigation, on January 22 the U.S. Supreme Court dealt the final blow to...
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PoliticalShift
Obama, Congress Enlist 'Direct to Constituent' Communications
Professional communicators are paying close attention to the rise of "direct to consumer" (DTC) communications. This is a phenomenon largely enabled by the rapid proliferation and adoption of online technologies, whereby organizations can communicate directly to the public without filters or mediation from the press. Corporate blogs or advocacy groups' online "action alerts" are just a couple examples. As a...
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Media Usage
How Forwarded Email Jokes, Hoaxes Evolved with Social Media
When I first ventured online in the late '90s, my in-box was constantly flooded with email forwards. Friends and co-workers alike tossed around lists of jokes, hoaxes and cautionary urban legends, pleas about a dying child in Idaho that needed your prayers or horror stories about human fingers discovered in fast food hamburgers. Today it seems that there are fewer...
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PoliticalShift
Government 2.0: How Social Media Could Transform Gov PR
It's easy to see governments as nameless, faceless monoliths, something impersonal or, even worse, untrustworthy. Much of that is because government culture remains steeped in traditional ideas about public relations and outreach work, notions that have become archaic in an Internet-enabled, hyper-connected world. Just as private companies are learning to embrace social media to manage brand reputations, governments must adapt...
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Social Networking
Dealing with Friend Inflation on Twitter, Digg
It happens several times a day now. Ever since I opened my Twitter account approximately three months ago, the follow alerts have been gradually increasing in frequency to the point that they clutter up my email inbox if I don't clean them out often enough. "Jessica Kositz (jkositz) is now following your updates on Twitter" my latest alert tells me,...
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Embeds
FriendFeed Widget Motivates Reporters to Use Social Media
Blogs should be conversations. At least, that is how we think about blogging at Mediafin, Belgium's leading publisher of business newspapers and websites. This last week, I have been busy reorganizing our major financial blog, Bear&Bull, adding FriendFeed widgets in hopes of encouraging more audience interaction. The results have been surprising -- although the audience has been slow to react,...
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Legal Drama
Teacher Fired for Inappropriate Behavior on MySpace Page
It's not just students who can get into difficulty for school-related blogging. In a recent case, a federal court rejected a challenge brought by a non-tenured teacher when the public school at which he taught decided not to renew his contract. The school had accused the teacher of overly familiar contacts with students via his MySpace page that were deemed...
more »Digging Deeper
The Best 2008 Political Convention Coverage Online
In 2004, the major political conventions gave a few dozen bloggers press credentials, a historic moment for the new media outsiders. And this year, the political conventions have tried to be even more open to bloggers, video reporters, podcasters and new media. The Democratic convention credentialed 120 bloggers, and the GOP has credentialed 200 bloggers, according to Forbes. And the...
more »World View
African LGBTI Communities Come Out of the Closet Online
"The closet I have come out of -- it is similar to the wardrobe my relieved parents stepped out of when I unlocked the wardrobe after the police had left. If you're black in South Africa, the inhuman laws of apartheid closet you, if you're gay in South Africa, the homophobic customs of this society closet you. If you...
more »Digging Deeper
'Technology Sabbath' Offers One Day to Unplug
Lately, I've been experimenting with taking one day each week away from work completely. You might think this would be an easy task as there's a "weekend" each week that allegedly offers up two full days of rest. And yet, as I work at home, the shiny big screen of the iMac beckons at all hours, and I am often in front of its white glow the first thing every morning and the last thing at night.
more »Your Take Roundup
People Get Picky on Adding Friends on Social Media Sites
There comes a time in every person's online life when they have to make a decision: to add or not to add a "friend." I put friend in quotations because that's usually the problem. Is the person a friend, a real friend, or someone who wants to be a friend? Should I add them as a friend because it's polite, or ignore them because I want to protect my personal information?
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
3 Reasons FriendFeed Is Great -- and 3 Ways It Scares Me
Ask me what my mother is doing right now and I couldn't tell you. Or what my best friend has been up to lately...no idea. But with a quick look at my computer screen, I can see what a staggering number of people I barely know are doing right now, 10 minutes ago, or last night. What they are reading, what they are posting and what they are commenting on -- all in one place.
more »NewspaperShift
Fear and Loathing (and Bad Hooker Jokes) at the Old Media Corral
LAS VEGAS -- When Editor & Publisher and MediaWeek magazines presented the recent Interactive Media conference, it seemed like the perfect time for traditional media execs and managers to examine the interactive landscape and consider innovative approaches to the web. The idea was a good one, and timely, but the execution was sorely lacking. Everything about the conference had...
more »Your Take
How do you decide on friend requests?
If you belong to social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn Twitter, Flickr, et al, you probably face this question each day: Should I add this person as a friend? Most services will send you an email alert that someone has requested that you become their friend. Now it's up to you to decide to accept or ignore it....
more »Citizen Journalism
This Reporter Becomes a Participant at an Unconference
Are you going to be part of the problem or part of the solution? That's a question you hear a lot when people complain about something that's gone wrong in our modern world. And there's a lot of hand-wringing about the future of journalism and whether it will survive its painful transition in the digital age. But the conference...
more »Social Networking
Africa's Social Media Conundrum
"Web 2.0 [is] a venture capitalist's paradise where investors pocket the value produced by unpaid users, ride on the technical innovations of the free software movement and kill off the decentralizing potential of peer-to-peer production."
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Citizen Journalism Spreads in Spanish-Speaking World
Traditional media has always drawn a line between the reporter and the "reported to." But citizen journalism is a phenomenon that looks to bridge the gap between the news and the people, with average folks being able to use digital technology and the Internet to create and distribute their own news. But most stories about citizen journalism in the...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Facebook Becomes Catalyst for Causes, Colombian FARC Protest
This morning, I received a notification on my Facebook profile that said if I sent a virtual plant to some of my friends, I'd help them "save the Earth." If you're a Facebook user, you probably wonder how much the incessant pleas by certain applications on the site might actually "change the world." Modules built to help you attack...
more »Digging Deeper
With the advent of the Internet and a growing number of security breaches, people worry that their personal information can be seen and exploited around the world in an instant. If you have incriminating photos online, a potential employer or love interest might find them and make snap judgments. If you shop online with a credit card, a merchant might steal your information and run up charges on your card. If you surf online around major media sites, publishers might use your "data trail" to target advertising to you.
more »Citizen Journalism
Social Media, Google-Twitter Mashup and More on Super Duper Tuesday
11:02 am Pacific Time I'll be live-blogging the Super Tuesday election day here in the U.S. and will be highlighting all the efforts online to cover the day's events and results. I'm especially interested in finding the best social media sites, mainstream news sites and blogs and video coverage -- and am asking for your input on any innovative efforts...
more »Your Take Roundup
Facebook Has a Problem with Trust
In the not-too-distant past, I remember fondly getting an email notification from Facebook that one of my friends had sent me a message or "poked" me virtually. I happily clicked over to Facebook to see what someone had said or done, and responded in kind. Now, my reaction to getting the same kinds of notifications has changed, and I...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
The Benefits and Pitfalls of Using Social Media for Reporting
Because we live in an age when social media sites are our daily bread, it seems natural to turn to them as resources for writing a story. When I wrote a piece about the popularity of Facebook all over the world, I went straight to Facebook to get the user interviews I needed. And when I wrote about the...
more »Digging Deeper
Traditional Media Ready to Elevate the Conversation Online -- with Moderation
Major media sites have started to get the religion of audience participation, but there's been one big hitch: How do you harness the audience's knowledge and participation without the forums devolving into a messy online brawl that requires time-intensive moderation? Over the years, traditional media sites have tried forums, killed them, and tried them again, this time with more...
more »Social Networking
The Universal Language of Facebook
It's been just four short years since a college student named Mark Zuckerberg launched a new social network with a very specific target demographic: American Ivy League college students. Since then, the Facebook phenomenon has exceeded everyone's expectations. After opening up accessibility to anyone interested in signing up late last year, growth in the U.S. for the social network has...
more »Your Take
How important is digital media in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign?
As the U.S. presidential primary season quickly approaches, the question remains just how important the Internet and new media have been in the election race. While political tracking sites such as TechPresident can show how many Facebook friends the candidates have, or how many video views they've had on YouTube, there isn't a direct correlation between online popularity and actual...
more »Digging Deeper
TechPresident, 10Questions Put Spotlight on 'Voter-Generated Content'
Just as the Internet and technology have shifted the playing field in media, allowing bloggers and podcasters to help set the news agenda, so has the realm of politics been disrupted by technology that gives voters more power to inject their own issues into the fray. And in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, that disruption has been strongest in...
more »AdvertisingShift
How much do online marketers and websites know about us? Do they save records on what we've bought, sites we've visited, people we've contacted? It's a subject that few of us bother with until we find out our private information has been stolen or inadvertently been made public. And privacy concerns have been front and center lately as MySpace...
more »Social Networking
Am I Really Worth $300 as a Facebook User?
"I do not plan on being on Facebook too much anymore -- seems like a waste of time & it seems my friends cannot even take a breath without me receiving notification of it. E-mail is better!" That was the note I got from one of my new friends on Facebook who had become obsessed with Facebook, found that...
more »Digging Deeper
MarketWatch Turns 10, But Can It Evolve for Another 10?
As the financial news site MarketWatch celebrates its 10th anniversary next week, the stalwart Web 1.0 company stands on the precipice of change. It has launched a community initiative that lets people comment on stories, rate stories, and compete for points by making market predictions. As part of Dow Jones, MarketWatch will become part of the News Corp. empire...
more »Digging Deeper
6 Maxims for Music Promotion in the Digital Age
Not too long ago, there was an established route for promoting musical talent. The music would go into heavy rotation on the radio and MTV, the artist would play in a record store, and promotion might include an advertisement in a music magazine. But the old formula has been updated with the advent of digital distribution, social networking sites...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
YouTube, Flickr Become Forces for Cultural Change
The term "social web" brings to mind images of people around the world interacting with each other without borders or barriers. With the arrival of more and more sites that help us connect, express ourselves and share media, it seems like we're advancing toward a more open Internet, in which everyone has the right to view or post whatever...
more »Digging Deeper
Your Guide to Social Networking Online
Social networking websites help people connect with others who share their interests, build online profiles and share media such as photos, music and videos. The idea of social networks has been studied by sociologists for decades as they analyze the ties between people in families, organizations and even in towns or countries. According to "Wikipedia", "Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals."
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Flickr Changes Lives, Launches Photog Careers
With the plethora of social networking sites, it's easy to come to the quick conclusion that what we are doing on these sites -- chatting up strangers, lurking on people's profiles, spying on friends -- is just a waste of time. But there is one site that is more than just an unhealthy habit: Photo-sharing site Flickr is a...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Food Lovers Become Experts at Chowhound, Yelp
Before the web was in widespread use, food lovers would wait patiently for the New York Times restaurant reviews to come out for the hottest new spot in SoHo, or for hometown papers to write up the little Korean joint that just opened down the street. We relied heavily on that system of stars, dollar signs and bells indicating...
more »Your Take
What's your favorite way of getting hyper-local or neighborhood news?
Lately there have been a lot of happenings in the world of hyper-local citizen journalism projects. The venture-funded Backfence series of sites crashed and burned, Pegasus News was sold to Fisher Communications, and the Washington Post launched its first hyper-local effort, LoudonExtra. The idea behind many of these sites is to capture the smaller stories that newspapers, TV and radio...
more »MarketingShift
Marketers Grapple with Giving Teens More Control Online
SAN FRANCISCO -- A curious thing happened at the Hotel Nikko in downtown San Francisco today during the Ypulse Mashup 2007 conference about those wired teens. Yes, a lot of older folks dressed business-casual tried to look hip and decipher what the kids were doing online in social networks, on mobile phones and in virtual worlds. But on numerous...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Why My Smartphone Is Dumb About the Net
I've got a problem: I hate using the Internet -- on my phone, that is. I am one of those people whose ears perked up at the idea of being able to take my online activities, such as reading news, watching videos and social networking with me wherever I go, on my phone. And after investing in a flashy...
more »Social Networking
Social Media Runs on 'Friend' Power
I've been thinking a lot lately about friends, and the shifting definition of friends within online social networks such as "MySpace", "Facebook" and "LinkedIn." There was a time in the not-so-distant pre-web past when I considered a friend to be someone who had my back, someone I could go to for advice or help, someone I considered a trusted ally.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Face-to-Face Networking Trumps Panels at Conference
SAN FRANCISCO -- In my account of Supernova 2007 yesterday, I didn't mention one of the things that really irked me about the conference: the silence. When panelists were on the huge stage at the main ballroom in the Westin St. Francis Hotel, the large audience sat silent typing away at their laptops. While some sessions ended with a...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Business Crowd Considers Web Users in Third Person
SAN FRANCISCO -- Anyone tired of Web 2.0 topics and discussion, and the current venture-capital-fueled hype, would have been advised to stay far away from the Supernova conference here. The conference site bills it as "the only event that assembles the most compelling people and companies from the converging worlds of computing, telecom, and digital media to put decentralization...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Orkut, Friendster Get Second Chance Overseas
What do Brazilian and Indian Internet users have in common? A favorite social networking site called Orkut, a Google web property which, when it was launched in 2004 was meant to put its parent company on the social networking map in the U.S. Orkut may not have taken off stateside, but it has exploded in these two countries, and...
more »Your Take Roundup
Virtual Worlds for Kids Entwined with Real World
While the media has been abuzz about Second Life and adult virtual worlds, a bevy of virtual worlds for kids have been even more popular than their adult counterparts. Tween world Club Penguin has more than 4 million visitors per month, according to a New York Times article on the virtual world craze for kids. But I wondered when...
more »Social Networking
Dangers Overblown for Teens Using Social Media
I remember the first time I watched Dateline NBC's To Catch a Predator, a TV series where they snared sexual predators using online venues. It was a train wreck -- the kind you can't keep your eyes off of. These predators were so creepy and so dumb. Some of them were lured into the trap more than once by...
more »Guides
Your Guide to Micro-Blogging and Twitter
Micro-blogging allows you to write brief text updates about your life on the go, and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web. The most popular service is called "Twitter", which was developed last year and became popular among techno-gurus at the 2007 South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas. Part of the magic of Twitter is that it limits you to 140 characters per post, forcing you to make pithy statements on the fly.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Are We Sharing Too Much Information via Social Media?
Social media -- the online tools we use to keep in constant contact with friends and to spy on strangers -- is something many of us believe makes the Internet a more fun, more personal place to be. It makes it easier to keep in touch with people we care about, and facilitates relationships with people we might have...
more »Legal Drama
Digg Users Show Strength in Numbers in DVD Dust-Up
The community-generated news site, Digg, has been an experimental hothouse for online communities. Last summer, there was the move by Netscape to offer to pay top Diggers to do their news-article bookmarking at Netscape, with Digg CEO Jay Adelson saying he'd never pay Digg community members. Now comes the user revolt after Digg decided to remove posts that mentioned...
more »NewspaperShift
USA Today Walks the Talk of Audience Involvement
When a major newspaper announces it is redesigning its print layout or website, it doesn't usually merit much attention. The regular readers usually complain about it, and then get used to it, and life goes on. But in the case of USA Today redesigning its website, there was more at play than a new look; the site added social...
more »Digging Deeper
Nielsen BuzzMetrics Tries to Measure Buzz in Social Media
Last year was a watershed for social media, with millions of people creating and sharing their own media on sites such as MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr and turning away from traditional one-way media such as TV, radio and newspapers. But for the proprietors of these new media sites, there's one very big problem: How do you make money off that popularity?
more »Social Networking
Finding Balance in Teen Use of Social Media
Earlier today, I had the unusual experience of giving a speech to a group of academics at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Ill. The unusual part was that I talked and interacted with them via AIM instant messaging on video. They could see and hear me talking from my home office in San Francisco, and I could hear their reactions and questions, and see the people questioning me. I even heard an announcement on the school loudspeakers about pumpkin projects!
more »Your Take Roundup
Facebook Still a Favorite...For Now
Sometimes we in the media get carried away by the news of the day, and draw hasty conclusions that turn out all wrong. Take Facebook and the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace. Because they are the province of the young, we assume their tastes are fickle and that these sites will be hot today, gone tomorrow.
more »Online Video
Google Spends $1.65 Billion for YouTube
It's deja vu all over again as an unprofibable Internet startup, barely 19 months old, was bought for $1.65 billion yesterday. But the startup in question, video-sharing phenomenon YouTube, is not just any startup looking to cash in on hype. YouTube is the eyeball catcher of all eyeball catchers, racking up 100 million-plus videos watched per day, and has become a brand that has broken through to the mainstream, to the non-technical masses, to our grandparents and little kids.
more »Social Networking
MySpace May Be Worth $0 in Three Years
SAN FRANCISCO (Goiters) - MySpace, the social networking Web site, could be worth around $0 within three years, measured in terms of the value created for shareholders of parent company News Corp. , according to a media analyst forecast on Wednesday.
more »Your Take
Has Facebook jumped the shark?
The popular college and high school social networking site Facebook has recently been in the news for all the wrong reasons. The site introduced a controversial "news feeds" feature that allowed people to see what their friends had been doing lately online, leading to thousands of users signing a petition saying they opposed the feature. Facebook relented and allowed people to opt out of the feature. But then the service decided to change from being a closed community of college and high school communities, and become a more open service where anyone could sign up for geographic-oriented communities. Has the service lost its way and "jumped the shark" (meaning it's passed its prime)? If you are a longtime user, are you going to stay with Facebook or try another service? What do you like about it, and what turns you off about it? Share your thoughts in the comments below, and I'll run the best responses in the next Your Take Roundup.
more »Social Networking
Why Participants Matter in Online Communities
It must be fun to play God as the owner of an online community or social networking site. You have millions of people who "live" on your website, and with each feature or new technical wrinkle, you are changing the way they live their lives online. But with that power comes responsibilities, and when those responsibilities are forgotten, the community rebels and leaves you in the dust.
more »Your Take
What's your favorite site for finding and sharing photos?
Digital technology has changed forever the way we take photos, share them, and print them out. Before, we had to buy 35mm film and pay to get the film developed. Now we can use powerful digital cameras that have no film and allow us to print only the best photos with our own photo printers. Plus, we can post photos online at sites such as Flickr and Shutterfly to share with friends or the world. So tell us which photo sites you like to visit either to see great photography, or to share your own photos. Why do you like the site, and what features set it apart? As a bonus, tell us what features you would like that don't exist yet. Share your thoughts in the comments, and I'll run the best ones in the next Your Take Roundup.
more »Digging Deeper
Digging Deeper::MySpace, Wikipedia Cope With Growing Pains
When a TV show or radio program becomes a hit, the producer usually makes more money and everyone benefits. But when an online community becomes hugely popular, complications arise with the influx of a mainstream audience and trouble-makers who have no history with the site. That's because TV and radio are broadcast or one-to-many outlets, while user-generated content sites...
more »MusicShift
CD Swapmeet::La La Love Ya, Don't Mean Maybe
I have a wall of CDs that sit around gathering dust. I always thought that one day I would just rip them -- i.e. copy them to my computer hard drive -- and get rid of them. But that day never came, and the CDs just sat there, unlistened to and unloved. Then came La La, a service that...
more »Social Networking
Your Take Roundup::Split Verdict on MySpace's Future
Lately, the hugely popular social networking site MySpace has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Politicians and parents are worried about sexual predators and other illegal activity on the site. And Jupiter analyst Nate Elliot believes the membership numbers for MySpace -- hovering around 60 million registered users -- are deceptive. Most of these users create...
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