Less Is More: Using Social Media to Inspire Concise Writing Overview | How can online media like Twitter posts, Facebook status updates and text messages be harnessed to inspire and guide concise writing? In this lesson, students read, respond to and write brief fiction and nonfiction stories, and reflect on the benefits and drawbacks of “writing short.” Materials | Slips of paper with brief stories (see below; one per student), computers with Internet access Warm-Up | Before class, select six-word love stories from The Times’s Well blog, in the post itself and in the reader comments, to share with students. (You can find more stories in the same vein at the Web site Dear Old Love and Smith Magazine’s Six-Word Memoirs.)
Seven Trends in Social Change in 2012 As a founding director of the Solutions Journalism Network, a strategist for the new $1,000,000 TED Prize, and a journalist myself, it is my job to pay attention to the kinds of creative responses that people all over the world are pioneering to address some of the world’s most difficult problems. Whether I’m speaking to students creating the first microfunding initiative at a high school or researching one of the 2,000 nominees we received this year for TED Prize this year or co-curating an exhibition on public interest design, I’m looking through a lens of solutions—what’s working and how is it working? How do we know? Where else might it work? At what scale? After doing this kind of work in one form or another for a decade, I realize that I am most useful to the world as a pattern keeper.
Facebook Tells Salman Rushdie He Has to Go By His Given Name, Ahmed Rushdie - Alexis Madrigal - Technology This is the sort of thing that makes you wonder what real names policy is all about. Today on Twitter, Salman Rushdie detailed his adventures with Facebook's name police. "Amazing. 2 days ago FB deactivated my page saying they didn't believe I was me. I had to send a photo of my passport page. THEN... they said yes, I was me, but insisted I use the name Ahmed which appears before Salman on my passport and which I have never used," Rushdie wrote.
What is Lean Just-in-Time Recruiting? The process of identifying an organization’s talent needs and identifying, acquiring, and retaining talent for those needs is essentially human capital supply chain management. A supply chain is a system of organizations, people, technology, activities, information and resources involved in moving something of value (a product, a service, or a person) from a source to a customer/consumer. Conventional supply chain activities transform natural resources, raw materials and components into a finished product that is delivered to the end customer. Should journalists confirm information before passing it along on Twitter? On Thursday many journalists unknowingly perpetuated a hoax that CNN had suspended Piers Morgan due to the British tabloid phone-hacking scandal, sparking a conversation about whether journalists need to slow down before tweeting. Others have chronicled the spread of the rumor, including TheNextWeb and Ross Neumann with a Storify. But as people were issuing mea culpas to their followers, Reuters’ Felix Salmon wrote a provocative post on his Tumblr blog, suggesting that Twitter is more like a newsroom than a newspaper. Rumors happen there [on Twitter], and then they get shot down — no harm no foul. … In the newsroom, we say things like “did you hear that Piers Morgan just got suspended?”
Can Twitter Promote Itself into Profitability? It was a tweet like many others from Starbucks, promising free refills to customers who brought in reusable tumblers on Earth Day. But the message came to users in a different way — it appeared at the top of Twitter search results pages, even for those who weren’t among the coffee giant’s followers. And there was a tiny tag in the corner of the update, outlined in yellow and reading “Promoted by Starbucks Coffee.” The ubiquitous Seattle-based chain is one of the first guinea pigs in an effort by Twitter to generate revenue from the micro-blogging service. The new ad system was unveiled last month with five participating companies, including Best Buy electronics stores, the Red Bull soft drink company, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, airline Virgin America and the Bravo TV network. Twitter Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo recently told Reuters that the San Francisco-based company hopes to add hundreds of new “Promoted Tweet” partners into the mix by the fourth quarter of 2010.
Government backs down on plan to shut Twitter and Facebook in crises The government has climbed down on plans to ban suspected rioters from using social networking websites in times of civil unrest. The home secretary, Theresa May, told social networks at a meeting on Thursday that the government had no intention of "restricting internet services". Research in Motion (RIM, the maker of BlackBerry), Facebook and Twitter were summoned to the meeting with May after David Cameron signalled a clampdown on the sites following the recent riots in England.
Twitter Simplifies Its Branding Strategy, Introduces Single Blue Bird - Mike Isaac - Social Throughout the company’s history, Twitter’s branding has consisted of a handful of icons, each distinct in its own way while remaining recognizably Twitter-esque. There’s the lowercase “t” symbol surrounded by an app-like square, the familiar bubbled text of Twitter spelled out in full, and, of course, the company’s little blue bird mascot. But more than one icon can be too many. At least, that’s the philosophy Twitter Creative Director Doug Bowman seems to espouse.
Twitter study casts doubts on ministers' post-riots plan Analysis of more than 2.5m Twitter messages relating to the riots in England has cast doubt on the rationale behind government proposals to ban people from social networks or shut down their websites in times of civil unrest. A preliminary study of a database of riot-related tweets, compiled by the Guardian, appears to show Twitter was mainly used to react to riots and looting. Timing trends drawn from the data question the assumption that Twitter played a widespread role in inciting the violence in advance, an accusation also levelled at the rival social networks Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger. The unique database contains tweets about the riots sent throughout the disorder, which began in Tottenham, north London, on 6 August. It also reveals how extensively Twitter was used to co-ordinate a movement by citizens to clean the streets after the disorder.
Twitter business model My recent article that asked readers how they would react to Twitter announcing a one dollar per month subscription rate raised many interesting responses and questions. At the time of writing, about 63% of voters said they would pay this low subscription rate for a better, more professional service, which for Twitter is, I think, encouraging. Many readers felt that Twitter would be better if they implemented a premium subscription service on top of the existing free platform. Those who subscribed could receive additional features and tools, such as A bigger share of the APISpam filtersA better personal message systemA way to edit posted tweets
Search for Twitter’s business model almost over: old tweets show in search - Stephen Waddington Changes to Twitter’s search function to include the most popular conversations around a search term may signpost the way to future revenues for the social network. It was all going so well. Just when you got your head around a social network the rules change. Overnight the networks seemingly make wholesale shifts to their functionality with little warning.
Boston Globe creates a Twitter board for the newsroom There once was a time (cue the piano music, sepia tones, and Ken Burns effect) when one of the major components of newsrooms was the Teletype machine, a novel technology that delivered dispatches from the tiniest reaches of the United States and the farthest corners of the globe. Newsrooms outgrew the technology, or at least grew into newer, faster technologies, like Twitter. Which could explain why the Boston Globe newsroom now has a funky bank of monitors that displays Tweets throughout the day, as well as headlines from their websites (more on that in second). DLD 2012 – @Jack Dorsey: “Twitter Has A Business Model That Works” Earlier this fine Sunday afternoon, Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey took the stage at the DLD Conference, the annual pre-Davos meeting of minds held in Munich, Germany. In an interview with not one but two journalists (Holger Schmidt from FOCUS Magazine and Techonomy’s David Kirkpatrick), Dorsey talked a great deal about Twitter and a little bit about Square. Dorsey didn’t reveal anything spectacular about either company, emphasizing once more how Twitter is not your traditional social network (here’s my counterpoint) and that its business model works, thanks very much for asking. He also talked about how Square is looking to expand outside of the United States and why 2012 will be a pivotal year for Twitter in Germany. Below are my notes – some of Dorsey’s responses are slightly paraphrased.
The Jekyll and Hyde problem: What are journalists, and their institutions, for? Jay Rosen, in his 1999 book What Are Journalists For?, shares a story which I think is of vital importance for those trying to understand the debate about “news gurus” kicked off this week by Dean Starkman in the Columbia Journalism Review. In his book discussing the long, strange career of an idea — the idea of “public journalism,” the notion journalism was better when it remembered its primary professional obligation was to public life — Rosen recounts the moment when the idea became (momentarily) corporate stunt. In 1995 the Gannett Company, then as now the largest US newspaper company as measured by circulation, took out a front page ad in Editor & Publisher, writing: “WE BELIEVE IN PUBLIC JOURNALISM — AND HAVE DONE IT FOR YEARS.” The ad went on to simultaneously praise and domesticate the public journalism movement, attempting to borrow, as Rosen puts it, the movement’s upstart legitimacy in service of some dubious corporate aims.