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This is more a call to action for the blogging community to be as legally aware as they are SEO-savvy.
Of course, not everyone should have to take a law exam before they are allowed onto WordPress. That defeats the object of Web 2.0.
What I am arguing for is as the blogging community slowly self-organises legal advice, or a place where a blogger could find it, is an overdue must.
links for 2009-11-18
November 18, 2009 by sarahhartleylinks for 2009-11-17
November 17, 2009 by sarahhartley-
YouTube Direct empowers news and media organisations to easily connect with these citizen reporters, and use the power of our platform to cover the news better than ever before."
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Perhaps most significantly, blog posts now have a longer life span. In 2007 tracked posts saw 94% of engagement within the first day and 98% of that first day's engagement happened within the first hour. In 2008 that number fell to 83% within the first day and in 2009 it was a mere 64%. Thus Postrank concludes that 36% of reader engagement in the top blogs happens after 1 day. "While the real-time web is all about lowering the latency," Grigorik says, "the pervasive nature and number of people engaged in their communities and conversations (the Social Web) is helping with information discovery. People are worried that the real-time web will destroy their readership as everyone just gets distracted by the newest shiny thing on Twitter, but the numbers show something very different. It's so easy to spread information now that it lasts longer and finds more niches – this trend is helping content travel further."
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So I ask: If citizen journalism activities were to stop tomorrow could professional journalists replace them?
links for 2009-11-16
November 16, 2009 by sarahhartley-
Accessible Twitter is an alternative to the Twitter.com website. It is designed to be easier to use and is optimized for disabled users.
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Up and down the country, newspapers and publishers are throwing away that chance to interact directly with the audience, and therefore become part of the online community which should be interestd in the content. In short, some newspapers are simply shouting their content online.
The papers which make the most out of Twitter etc are those which encourage their reporters to go on there – not just on Twitter, but on LinkedIn, Facebook and so on – and make connections.
Musings on the week: A north-south social media divide?
November 13, 2009 by sarahhartley
Inside #1pound40
Two very different experiences this week have had me musing on whether there’s a north-south divide in how social media is used.
Looking first at the #1pound40 event in London. It was an intriguing concept – for just £1.40, the opportunity to share knowledge and ideas with some of the leading lights of the social media UK whirl.
There were Tuttlers, journalists and broadcasters; there were geeks, students and marketing types; the venue was impressive (Reuters in the Daily Planet like environs of Canary Wharf) and the whole event had an air of expectation.
Something was going to happen. SOMETHING IMPORTANT.
So, a couple of days later, why do I still have this niggling feeling that, if something did happen, I must have missed it?
Perhaps this feeling was in part provoked by my experience the night before at Leeds Social Media Surgery.
Leeds surgeons
The surgery was an opportunity for charities and not-for-profits to come and find out about social media and see if it could help them in their work. I spent the evening talking about blogging with a woman who wants to provide the opportunity for interaction via a blog for workers in the mental health sector, as well as hearing about an impassioned campaign to help Palestinians where I was able to offer some basic advice about libel. In this setting, the social media tools were just that – tools to be utilised as part of a wider aim.
Back to London and what was described as ‘a curated unconference’, the purpose of our gathering was to explore issues raised by social media – questions such as if Twitter was a force for good, whether journalism was being democratised by the tools of web 2.0 and my old favourite – who can be called, or call themselves, a journalist?
Unlike other ‘unconference’ events I’ve been to, there were no sessions or pitches and instead small groups at tables discussed the issues between themselves before sharing their individual pithy conclusions via Twitter.
(As an aside, oddly for an event which ended up being monopolised by talk about Twitter, the backchannel wasn’t always in evidence – in fact when it was projected behind the panel at the end of the event it proved to be such a novel intervention that it completely distracted both panelists and audience!)
As the sessions concluded I took stock – had I learned anything? No. Had I contributed to anyone else learning anything? No.
It felt like we were all saying the same thing, speaking the social media speak. The digerati in full flow – agreeing with one another.
Some of the topics touched upon digital inclusion and the potential for political engagement through social media, but while we were talking, tweeting and pontificating, who was actually listening? What do the views of a bunch of always-on wired meeja professionals in London have to do with delivering news and information services to people working in tough but essential spheres such as the mental health sector, or living in areas where broadband access is still an aspiration not a reality?
That’s not to say it wasn’t an enjoyable event – I caught up with some people I haven’t seen in a while, put some faces to Twitter avatars and met some completely new people I’m sure I’ll enjoy following. As a meet-up, it was most conducive.
But all in all, for me at least, it was an afternoon inside the echo chamber, the reverberations of which will probably not even reach Islington, let alone Leeds.
There’s some other coverage of these two events that I’ve seen, as follows;
* The Guardian’s Mercedes Bunz gamely attempted a live blog of #1pound40 here and here.
* Leeds Social Media Surgery organiser John Popham summed up the evening here.
* The echo chamber is one of the topics which Christian Payne (AKA @documentally) also discusses in this audioboo which considered the psychology of Twitter.
* The Business Two Zero blog discusses the £1.40 event and also provides plenty of links to other views from the day.
links for 2009-11-10
November 10, 2009 by sarahhartley-
The two papers returned very similar results. In four weeks, Sussex Express produced an average of 4.15% of council news in its news pages and The Argus, an average of 4.46% over five days.
links for 2009-11-09
November 9, 2009 by sarahhartley-
Students on the MA Online Journalism have been putting their knowledge to the test with a new website aimed at providing news around Birmingham's city centre area.
The site – Hashbrum.co.uk uses an innovative design created by Alex Gamela that combines a map of Birmingham with a slideshow of multimedia material as ways to navigate to articles.
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Your Blog is the most important part of your Social Media strategy. If you don’t already have a Blog start one today. It’s that important.
links for 2009-11-07
November 7, 2009 by sarahhartley-
We really are about process. Journalism and news is a process that doesn’t begin and that doesn’t end. When you think like that, I think you open up your world to collaboration. One of the lessons from Google is that it always puts out new products as a beta. And it says: “This is unfinished, it’s imperfect, help us finish it!”
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Where will traditional newsrooms be in 18 months? If they’re continuing to bury their collective heads in the sand, the future will be bleaker than the last 18 months. And God knows, that’s been bad enough for 1000’s of journalists in the UK already.
links for 2009-11-06
November 6, 2009 by sarahhartley-
7. Money sitting in the council’s bank from planning applications
When I used to cover local government, I always thought it seemed a bit like blackmail for a council to grant planning permission but only if a developer handed over cash for public improvements. Such a deal is know as a Section 106 agreement (catchy, eh?) and while councils have to discuss in public at meetings about such deals being made, they don’t have to announce when the money’s spent. So the Worcester News used FOI to find out how much was in the Section 106 pot at Worcestershire County Council. Answer: £2.7million. Some questions to be answered there, it seems.
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It’s a big change in mentality for some journalists. I’ve been to several events and meetings recently where hacks have insisted people will have to pay for news “because journalists have to eat”.
This is upside-down thinking. People don’t buy iPhones because Steve Jobs needs to eat. They buy them because they are an innovative product which satisfies a demand people are willing to pay for.
And so it must be if journalists are to be entrepreneurs.
links for 2009-11-05
November 5, 2009 by sarahhartley-
But, on an average day, none of them match the frequency of output the BBC had proposed – nine extra short news, sport and weather reports for each of its 65 regions.
Grappling with debt, lower revenues and real long-term threats to their survival, it’s understandable that publishers’ new media investment in 2009 hasn’t exactly matched previous years. But consumers that missed out on the video news promised by the BBC have a right to ask: where is the video news the newspaper industry promised?
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Blogging helps because it enables you to write and express your ideas. My goal is to write on my blog everyday about something either relevant to journalism, something going on in my life, college – anything that can help me express myself. I feel this is a good outlet for expressing my views and opinions.
