Recent posts in my Social media Category

At news:rewired today I was part of a panel discussing optimising news sites for social media. I talked about the Guardian’s Facebook app. Here is an essay version of the talks.

The release of 60 new apps that employ Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” has sparked another round of internet debate about the value of the functionality. Here’s my take.

At the Guardian, most days we have a five minute talk about something digital during morning conference. Often it is our own products and services we showcase, but sometimes we talk about something outside the building that has caught our eye digitally. Last week I was talking about This Is My Jam.

Last night I went to the Community Managers meet-up in London. Markham Nolan was talking about how Storyful sources social media content from accidental citizen journalists.

Today is “Community Manager Appreciation Day”. If you’ve ever taken part in online community, used UGC for research or entertainment, or chased up story leads from comments left across the web, you probably owe it somewhere to an unsung community manager. I’m not normally a big fan of organised recognition, but I believe, especially in the news space, that community management is a dangerously under-valued skill.

The launch of Google’s “Search, plus Your World” launch has started a round of people exclaiming that SEO is dead. Again. I’m trying to find out exactly when the fatality took place - and the earliest claim I can find is March 2005.

Paul Adams, an ex-Googler now at Facebook, has written a great blog post about why the announcement that volunteers at the London Olympics won’t be able to use social media is not just King Cnut-like, but a missed opportunity. It is no surprise the IOC doesn’t understand social media.

Everybody loves a social media story with a happy ending - by which I don’t mean that PR stunt about that other Martin guy. Here are two that have caught my eye over the last few days, involving a student trying to get an internship, and the Muscatine Journal in Iowa.

Mathew Ingram wrote yet another great post on GigaOm the other day entitled “Yes, blog comments are still worth the effort.” He was responding to what is beginning to seem like a trend for bloggers deciding not to have comments on their site. I’m one of them - and here’s why I need a break from them.

Over the holidays the Guardian published the second ebook collection that I have edited them. Following on from “Who’s Who: The Resurrection of the Doctor”, I’ve tackled “Facebook: The rise and rise of a social media giant”. Here are some notes on the editing process of the book.

There are a limited number of letters in the alphabet, and so, with the suggestion that journalists should be using “NT” to demonstrate a neutral point of view when retweeting, I thought we should just go ahead and define the entire alphabet of inept journalistic use of Twitter etiquette all in one go.

Here is a miserable set of reading if you: 1. Like the internet. 2. Are a man. 3. Would prefer it if you lived in a society where it wouldn’t be acceptable for someone to threaten your mother, sister or daughter with rape and sexual violence for the dreadful crime of expressing their opinion on the internet.

Here are my notes from Chris Sumner’s Hacks/Hackers London talk about using tools to map social networks across the web, and what that means for information security and digital journalists.

It is just over twenty days since we released the Guardian Facebook app. I’ve been engaged with a lot of conversations with people about it on Twitter over the last couple of weeks, and I thought I might put down a few thoughts on the app, and some of the reaction to it.

This week I braved the potential troll hordes of the interwebs with a piece for Comment Is Free about the trolling phenomena, commissioned as part of our coverage of the prison sentence given to Sean Duffy for some unsavoury internet posts mocking the deaths of teenagers. Given the subject matter and the potential audience, I think I got off quite lightly in the comments, especially after it ended up with the headline “All you trolls out there – come out and explain yourself”.

This is an essay version of a talk given at last week’s Hacks/Hackers meet-up in London. I presented eight things that I believe news organisations need to stop doing, start doing, or do better, in order to cope with the way that digital has transformed the news cycle.

I happen to think that if you take most community management guidelines or blogging and commenting guidelines for staff, they basically boil down to “Don’t be a dick”. In fact, I think there is quite a simple flow chart to follow if you find yourself on the wrong end of a moderation decision on a news website.

I’ll be speaking tonight at the London Hacks/Hackers meeting, and one of the points I’ll be making is that the digital publishing revolution is a perpetual revolution, one that requires constant learning. That section of my talk is partly fuelled by how angry I was made yesterday by a piece in the Press Gazette, which suggested that editors do not value digital media skills.

Today there has been a Twitter-storm over an email sent from the BBC to Andy Mabbett. He had complained about the BBC’s use of pictures from Twitter, and the reply he got seemed to suggest that the BBC considered anything posted via Twitter to be in “the public domain”. The response was clearly wrong, and at odds with the BBC’s own guidelines about the usage of social media. Several BBC staff responded on Twitter and in the comments on Andy’s blog post. I have some sympathy with whoever wrote that original email.

There has been quite a fuss today about a BBC response to a complaint by Andy Mabbett. It implies that the BBC believes all material posted via Twitter is copyright-free and in the public domain. This approach is at odds with their own terms & conditions of use.

I’ve said on many occasions that I am genuinely baffled how so many news organisations seem to think they can grow an active community on their website, without investing in any community management. At the Guardian we have several people in a role called “community co-ordinator” who fulfill this remit. One of them, Laura Oliver, spoke at the last London Hacks/Hackers meet-up. Here are my notes on four of the key points that Laura made in her talk.

Fiona Romeo, Head of Digital Media at the National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory recently visited the Guardian to give us a lunchtime talk last week about “Inviting bots and citizen scientists into the museum”. It was fascinating - and delightfully geeky.

Over the last couple of days there has been loads of attention to a blog post entitled “How the BBC lost 60,000 Twitter followers to ITV” by Tom Callow on The Wall. Last night he tweeted: “TweetReach tells me tweets about my blog on the BBC's 'lost' followers reached over 1.3 million people via 1,100 tweets!”. Which is all well and good...except...is it true?

Over the last few months we’ve been holding a series of talks at The Guardian for staff around the theme of “digital”. Recently it was the turn of Benji Lanyado, who has made a name for himself as the Guardian’s travel writer who goes on #TwiTrips. He arrives in a city, and then relies on people tweeting him with tips and directions to find hidden gems and the things that the locals recommend.

Whilst I was in Atlanta I took the opportunity to take the Inside CNN Studio Tour, and was interested to see how an American news operation gets presented as a tourist attraction.

Paul Adams opened the UPA conference in Atlanta with a keynote talk that looked about how the web is being rebuilt around people. With a liberal dose of Facebook’s “Social by design” mantra, he explored the nature of our offline social networks as humans, and the differences between strong, weak and temporary ties between friends and people. Here are my notes from the session.

I don’t very often post to this blog just to write “Yeah! What he said”. But this is basically just that...

Yesterday I got involved in a long Twitter conversation about anonymous and pseudo-anonymous comments on news websites involving Adam L. Penenberg, Mathew Ingram, Anna Tarkov, Amrita Mathur and Brad King. It was kicked off as people responded to this piece on the issue by Mathew at Gigaom. I’ve tried to sum up the six main points I was making in bursts of slightly more than 140 characters, and I’ve tried to interweave some of the conversation.

Just recently at the Guardian we were visited by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Professor of Internet Governance & Regulation from the Oxford Internet Institute. He was talking about “Forgetting in the digital age”, and how “digital permanence” was a problem for humans and society. Here are my notes from the session.

Whilst I was at FutureEverything I did a video interview about the panel session I was on, and when asked what I hoped to get from the festival, I blurted out “Giant robots smashing up the city skyline” or something to that effect. The actual robot count at the event was very low, but a couple of talks did at least have robots in their titles or subject matter. Here are my notes from talks by David Bausola and the Guardian double-act of Meg Pickard and Dan Catt.

The “Texas mass grave” that wasn’t demonstrates that the rush to get a story on air before it has been fully verified isn’t just something that happens when news is being broken on social media.

As I blogged earlier in the week, on Saturday I was at Kings Place, not for work, but to attend the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Jam. Once the ideas generation got underway, I ended up on a team with Nicola Hughes, Jonathan Austin, David Asfaha and my colleague - and it turned out later judge - Daithí Ó Crualaoich. We ended up pitching four ideas around the theme of community.

On Saturday I spent the day in the Guardian’s offices as a guest at the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Jam. As a preamble to the actual brain-storming and designing, there were talks from Guardian journalist Paul Lewis, interactive technologist Alastair Dant, and the BBC’s Jonathan Austin. Here are my notes.

I spent a really good day at news:rewired yesterday. With one track dedicated to data journalism, and another to social media, it was no surprise that I found plenty of things of interest. Here are my notes on some of the things that stood out for me.

My curiosity was piqued by the controversy surrounding the BBC’s decision to drastically reduce the number of characters users could submit as a comment on the BBC News site to 400. And so I thought I'd carry out a quick survey of character limits across a range of UK and US news sites, and compared that with some popular blogs and social media sites.

I spent much of today at the BBC Social Media Summit, and thought it worth putting together a few quick notes on the things that stood out for me.

There was a lovely blog post by Khoi Vinh this week, about the way he thinks blogging and commenting on blogs has changed over recent years. He rightly points out that you can’t extrapolate behaviour across the web from one set of anecdotal evidence. However, his main points, that long-form blogging increasingly feels like a niche activity, and that there seems to be less conversation in the comments on his blog, are how I feel too.

Guardian Readers’ Editor Chris Elliott recently gave a lunchtime talk to assorted staff about a trip to Egypt, where he was talking to local journalists about journalistic ethics and press regulation. As well as The Guardian’s reporting having an effect in Cairo via Twitter, we were reporting what was being posted from there - and there was a good debate after Chris spoke about the verification standards that you could put to information collected this way, and how it should then presented to our audience via live blogging and other means.

Guardian Readers’ Editor Chris Elliott recently gave a lunchtime talk to assorted staff about his recent trip to Egypt, where he was talking to local journalists about journalistic ethics and press regulation. It turned out to be a timely visit, as Chris arrived shortly after the toppling of Hosni Mubarak, with the press in the country facing an uncertain, but presumably freer future. During it, he discussed how Egyptians themselves see the role played by social media in the events.

There was another fascinating round of the debate about anonymous and pseudo-anonymous comments on newspaper websites this morning, which seemed to be primarily kicked off by Times columnist David Aaronovitch on Twitter: “Can anyone think of a reason why commenters on newspaper sites should be allowed to be anonymous, or use pseudonyms? I find the CiF comments system completely pointless, partly because of ano/pseudo-nymity. Same tedious trashers endlessly recycled.”

Yesterday I posted my notes from Paul Lewis talking at a panel event discussing issues with crowd-sourcing journalism. It was part of an afternoon entitled “Data and news sourcing” jointly organised by the Media Standards Trust and the BBC College of Journalism, and hosted by the Royal Statistical Society. Also appearing on the panel were Paul Bradshaw and Turi Munthe. Here are my notes on their opening talks.

Matthew Solle, Joe Sokohl, Eric Reiss and I are running a discussion panel at IA Summit 2011. It’s called “UX Communities: Starting from the beginning”. Before heading to Denver, Matthew and I wanted to prepare by having a debate about what makes up a community, and how you go about forming them. Part one of this discussion can be found on Matthew’s You The User blog.

We've been holding a series of lunchtime talks at the Guardian's offices, with a mix of internal and external people talking about issues around digital media. A recent guest was Dr Sue Black, who was talking about how social media had played a role in the campaign to save and preserve Bletchley Park.

Yesterday I published a blog post sparked by a question after a talk I gave at the BBC World Service the other week, which was: "Do you think journalists should always read the comments underneath their articles?". One thing that seems obvious to me is this - news organisations need to have clear community management strategies if they want to have engaged communities on their sites

At the end of a talk I was giving the other week, one of the questions was: "Do you think journalists should always read the comments underneath their articles?". I have to say that my answer oscillates, and here is why...

One last post about news:rewired before I head off into the Xmas hinterlands. One of the morning sessions I attended featured Ed Walker, Neil Perkin and Anthony Thornton talking about building an online community from scratch, and here are my notes and thoughts.

Last week I went to the Online Information conference in London, and here are my notes from day 2, and a session entitled "Social media in action: driving forward information management and knowledge management", which looked at implementing social media tools within the workplace, and featured Gordon Vala-Webb, Helen Clegg, Hugo Evans & Angela Ashenden

In early November 2010 I gave a presentation at the London UKUPA meeting for 'World Usability Day'. In it, I took the day's theme of 'communication', and examined how twenty years of digital technology had smashed the boundaries between media organisations and their audiences. In this five part series, I've written that talk up as an essay, covering how the media now have to deal with users on a much more personal level, involve them in product design, and build tools to enable story-telling. This is part three.

There have been two contrasting stories of news media companies interacting with their online communities this week. On Comment is Free, the Guardian has embarked on an open discussion about the moderation in comment threads on the site. Over at Sky News, however, they have shut down their message boards, claiming that they had been 'hijacked'.

When Twitter launched their 'Who to follow' feature there was a flurry of outcry and much gnashing of teeth at the way the algorithm worked. In my case, it seems on a one-man mission to get me to follow every single possible Guardian Twitter feed going. Including @guardianrobot.

The Reuters decision to change their commenting policy has been seen as another step towards news sites "civilising" the debates that appear under stories. A few things about it stood out for me.

Online coverage of the Whitehaven shootings illustrate why the Facebook 'like' button is unsuitable for generic use on all news stories.

I'm pleased to be able to say that I'll be presenting a talk entitled "The information architect with an identity crisis" at this year's EuroIA in Paris.

The Times and The Independent have both made a move to only allowing people to post comments on their site using their real life identities. The theory is that it will drive up the quality of debate. In practice, I do wonder whether they will instead miss out some powerful contributions by users who rely on anonymity in order to be able to tell their stories.

One feature of the digital coverage of the leader's debates in this election campaign has been the contrasting approaches taken Labour and the Conservatives to following what has been happening on their websites. In this post I look at how the Conservatives 'brochure' and the Labour 'extranet' are trying to fulfill different functions.

I've been tracking the timeline of the 'digital election', and, with the second leader's debate taking place tonight, here are ten things about the new media campaign that I think we've learned so far...

Glenn Jones from Madgex gave a presentation at the last London IA evening looking at "Re-using data people have left around the web". In it he showed a demo of his Ident Engine project, which uses fragments of information about your digital identity to construct a whole profile.

Best ever user comment in the Mail about the James Bulger killers? "We should have hung them when they were ten. Killing children is wrong". This article looks at what happened when I tweeted a link to it...