Seesmic - All of your social services in one place. Curating the Revolution: Building a Real-Time News Feed About Egypt - Phoebe Connelly - Technology. Andy Carvin is a senior strategist at NPR working on digital media. He's known for putting together comprehensive and innovative packages around breaking news stories, and for the past three weeks, his Twitter stream has been a non-stop curation of the Egypt protests.
Carvin has turned himself into "a personal news wire for Egypt. " We talked with him about how he gained 4,000 followers, why he hasn't mapped his sources, and if curation is the new journalism. PC: This is not your first dive into deep social media coverage of a breaking event. How do you get up to speed on key local resources so fast?
AC: I've live-tweeted and live-blogged for a long time: 7-8 years as far as live-blogging is concerned, and four years for Twitter, especially during the '08 presidential election. So some of the people I've followed on Twitter in Tunisia and Egypt, I've followed them for several years already. PC: How are you picking people to retweet and follow? PC: Have you built yourself any maps? PC: Hrm. The Internet Is Ridiculously Huge. Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google. This semester, my students at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley researched the VC system from the perspective of company founders. We prepared a detailed survey; randomly selected 500 companies from a venture database; and set out to contact the founders.
Thanks to Reid Hoffman, we were able to get premium access to LinkedIn—which was very helpful and provided a wealth of information. But some of the founders didn’t have LinkedIn accounts, and others didn’t respond to our LinkedIn “inmails”. So I instructed my students to use Google searches to research each founder’s work history, by year, and to track him or her down in that way. But it turns out that you can’t easily do such searches in Google any more. Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers.
Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. We ended up using instead a web-search tool called Blekko. Help. Login.
Be the curator of your favorite topic! Create stories using social media - storify.com.