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Online - E-Media Tidbits

Online - E-Media Tidbits

http://www.poynter.org/category/how-tos/digital-strategies/e-media-tidbits/

What Exactly is the Point of Twitter? Advertisement Since this question has come up at least three times in the last week, I figured it might save time down the road to jot down my take on Twitter, just so its in one place and I don’t have to try to dig up what I’d previously written about it. Let me start off by saying that I was a relative late-comer to Twitter. It had been popular for quite some time before I signed up, because I, like many of you, thought “I’m already on Livejournal, MySpace, Facebook and <insert other social networking site here>. What’s the point?” Why would I need yet *another* social network to keep track of, update, care about, post to, etc?

Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’ Delivering news digitally in a personalized manner is a nut many a startup – as well as many established Internet companies and publishers – are desperately trying to crack. A newly-founded Palo Alto startup called Hawthorne Labs is one of them. Today, the company released their first application, dubbed APOLLO, for the iPad (iTunes link – screenshots and video below). Their lofty ambition is to become the number one daily destination of top personalized news content from around the Web, build a genuine Newspaper of the Future™, and thus “deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry”.

University of Kentucky launches free citizen journalism classes The university’s Kentucky Citizen Media Project (KCMP) launched its website Lexington Commons on January 23 and will begin its free citizen journalism classes from February 14, according to a news release. The four workshops, which are open to members of the local Lexington community, will teach the basics of journalism (e.g. how to find a news story and how to write it), as well as exploring ethical and legal issues. With a focus on multimedia, the classes will teach participants how to upload blog posts and stories, video, audio and images to the Commons site. 7 Free Twitter Software Programs for Managing Your Online Social by Sherice Jacob, author of “Get Niche Quick!” – Niche Marketing Online – Follow her @sherice Just like in real life, your online social life will expand to fit any amount of time you give it. Twitter is the most notorious for this “productivity drain” – that’s why talented programmers have taken it upon themselves to create new ways to make managing your online social life even easier. Here are seven of the most popular software applications you can use to effortlessly keep up with Twitter (and other popular networks) even when you can’t be constantly connected. 1.

Crucial reading on the evolution of news, as it stands today – Invisible Inkling I feel like this summer has been sort of a rolling watershed moment in the Present of News, if not necessarily the Future of it. (Yes, yes, the lowercase present is always becoming the lowercase future, but I’m talking about the supposed collective vision for the Future of News that, well, usually gets held up as a straw man as if every proponent of online news tools for communication believes the same thing.) There are a lot of ongoing battles right now, if I can call them that, over things like paywalls and copyright. These are more than kerfuffles here, folks; we’re talking about the future business model paths for some pretty large chunks of the mainstream media at this point, for better or worse. So, in an effort to pull together some of what I think would be the most important footnotes in the Summer 2009 chapter of the book someone surely must be writing at this point, here are some recent favorites:

Forbes new tool tracks advertisers’ corporate reputation Get past advertising. It’s a commodity — and who wants to buy a commodity? But a service — that’s a different story. Twitter Gets Hacked, Badly Phishing attacks, which hit Twitter over the weekend, are a sign a service has arrived (Facebook has the same problem). But someone hacking into Twitter’s internal admin tools and compromising 33 high profile accounts , including President Elect Barack Obama, has Twitter users freaking out about what to do.

A Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection « Pursuing the Complete Community Connection This is a vision for transformation of our media company and of media companies in general. A vision like this needs lots of detail and I’ll provide plenty of that in related posts. But most important, it needs a simple proposition — how consumers and business customers will see us:

An open letter from the newly launched Investigations Fund Many of the UK's top investigative reporters involved in new venture As previously reported on this site, some of the UK's leading investigative journalists have been holding a series of meetings in London, in order to discuss the crisis in investigative reporting. Now, their project has been formally announced: the Investigations Fund, formed by the newly created Foundation for Investigative Reporting. More to follow from Journalism.co.uk later. Re: Formation of a foundation for investigative reporting c/o The Frontline Club, 13 Norfolk Place, London W2 1QJ FROM:Antony Barnett, Martin Bright, Heather Brooke, Peter Barron, Nick Davies, Nick Fielding, Misha Glenny, Stephen Grey (editor), Mark Hollingsworth, Andrew Jennings, Philip Knightley, Paul Lashmar, David Leigh, Jason Lewis.

5 Ways to Share Images on Twitter Josh Catone is a writer, editor, and entrepreneur from Providence, Rhode Island. He is a social media enthusiast and the founder of the web's largest Ruby on Rails community, Rails Forum. You can follow him on . As the web moves toward its real-time future, Twitter is clearly becoming one of the most important ways for people to share content.

iTunes models for news? What publishers can learn from mflow An iTunes model for news may be a phantom, but publishers wanting to make money from content online can still learn from the experiences of the music sector. The latest launch in this area is the music sharing-and-buying startup mflow – a fantastic model which I think can offer a lot of ideas to publishers. Here’s how it works: You follow other people and see what music they’re sharing (‘flowing’). Visualising MPs’ Expenses Using Scatter Plots, Charts and Maps A couple of days ago, the Guardian’s @datastore announced that a spreadsheet of UK MPs’ (Members of Parliament) expenses had been posted to the Guardian OpenPlatform datastore on Google Spreadsheets. Just because, I though it would be nice to visualise the spreadsheet using some Many Eyes Wikified charts, so I had a look at the data, and sighed a little: in many of the spreadsheet cells was a pound sign, and Many Eyes doesn’t like those – it just wants numbers… So I went in to Yahoo pipes to create a pipe to tidy up the CSV output of the spreadsheet so I could pipe it into Many Eyes Wikified… and drew a blank: I couldn’t get the pipe to work (no CSV – just HTML (it turns out I was using the wrong URL pattern from the spreadsheet – doh!)). So I exported the CSV, reg-exped it in a text editor, adn uploaded it to create a new spreadsheet. (Which reminds me: note to self – create a tidy-upper pipe fed from the datastore and refactor the wikified data page to feed from the pipe…)

Twishitter: Twitter Apps Head Towards The Gutter It’s inevitable. A platform becomes popular, gains mainstream appeal, and the race to the bottom begins. We saw this happen with the iPhone, where a plethora of farting applications hit the store. But it happens, at least in part, because people enjoy the humorous, crude app every once in a while. The success that iFart and other apps of that ilk point to this — or at least to their novelty.

Real-Time News Curation, Newsmastering And Newsradars - The Complete Guide Part 1: Why We Need It The time it takes to follow and go through multiple web sites and blogs takes tangible time, and since most sources publish or give coverage to more than one topic, one gets to browse and scan through lots of useless content just for the sake of finding what is relevant to his specific interest. Even in the case of power-users utilizing RSS feed readers, aggregators and filters, the amount of junk we have to sift through daily is nothing but impressive, so much so, that those who have enough time and skills to pick the gems from that ocean of tweets, social media posts and blog posts, enjoy a fast increasing reputation and visibility online. Photo credit: dsharpie and franckreporter mashed up by Robin Good "What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don't have to pay attention to everything, but you don't miss the stuff you care about..."Ev Williams at a Girls in Tech event at Kicklabsvia Stowe Boyd's blog The Problem

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