links for 2010-01-31
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"I recently asked for help from anyone interested in the future (actually that should probably be futures) of journalism to lend a hand with a mini survey on journalism skills.
In total 75 kind people volunteered their time and effort to answer the questions. I’m going to get to grips with it and add my two pence/cents worth on it over the next few days." -
News companies in general can benefit from using Twitter (although The Guardian does seem to be unable to write a story about it without attracting buckets of comment-scorn) but there are some rules to follow I'd say, with Follow being the operative word. If your newspaper Twitter account has 4000 followers and follows 2 people, even if whoever runs it responds to @ messages, the impression is that it's not engaging, it's broadcasting.
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Of course, bloggers are perfectly capable of quality journalism without holding an National Union of Journalists membership card, but as it turns out the three bloggers that have been hired all come from a journalism background.
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The crowd was as good value as the panel, with many of Journalism.co.uk’s favourite media bloggers: organiser Patrick Smith; Adam Tinworth from RBI; Kate Day, head of communities at the Telegraph; Martin Stabe, online editor at Retail Week; and Jon Slattery… of the Jon Slattery Blog.
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Tom Allan, Hannah Waldram and John Baron have been based at the Guardian's offices in Kings Place this week to undergo training and will be starting work on their beats of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Leeds respectively from next week.
links for 2010-01-26
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The Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, has delivered a riposte to Rupert Murdoch's campaign to introduce paywalls to newspaper websites, claiming that it could lead the industry to a "sleepwalk into oblivion".
links for 2010-01-25
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Hyper-localism fits with the emerging trend of convergence, as consumers demand greater convenience for how they access and consume information. Existing technologies such as smart phones are already meeting this need, while the not-so-distant internet capable TVs of the near future will take it to another level. Just as satellite TV viewers pay for the packages that they want, internet users will become even more willing to pay for relevant content, which can be easily accessed via multiple-platforms.
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On two occasions, what I believe to be strong page leads were bumped down to filler status – money from Icelandic banks to be recovered by Bolton Council, and that Bolton schools are £2.6m in debt. Instead, snow was the favoured lead story, with at least four solid pages devoted to pictures of snowmen, igloos, snowbathers etc. over the four days.
links for 2010-01-23
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The mySociety chaps must be rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of a double whammy election year.
And in preparation, they have already launched Democracy Club where they are calling on volunteers to make the forthcoming elections "the most transparent ever".
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I started this list when I spoke to students at a high school journalism conference on how it is possible to do everything you need as a journalist by using free products. Since then, this list continues to grow! It can be helpful for anyone trying to do good journalism on a tight budget.
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Strategic positioning of volunteering widgets. Where you display a volunteering widget can help make the connection between volunteering and civic engagement. On web pages where you cover local civic news (such as school board meetings or city council meetings), experiment with placing a volunteering widget in the sidebar, or in a box positioned mid-story. It’s easy to treat it as a kind of public service ad, since widget code often comes in (or can be customized to fit) standard online ad dimensions.
Positioning a volunteering widget alongside your explicitly civic content (not just near stories about local volunteer efforts) implies the “you can take action” connection.
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you can’t knock the collaborative effort behind Animal Finders, the service based out of Oxford that helps people to report lost and found animals. There’s even, of course, a Google Map.
links for 2010-01-22
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I am not defending the decision by local councils to publish their own newspapers. I think there are dangers in this, but only if they take over from local newspapers as a main source of local information – which they won’t do, of course. However, I fully understand why exasperated local councils might want to tell their own story in the face of the aggressively negative slant given by many local newspapers.
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If the Tories win the General Election, Hunt made clear they would scrap the current plans for eight consortia to run pilot schemes for Scotland, Wales and England, using money from the government.
Third Thursday, First Round, Second Life…
Manchester Digital’s new monthly events programme kicked off at Rain Bar in the city centre last night with a stimulating couple of presentations badged as “No, but really!” Oli Aro from Manchester based Second Places revisited 2006′s platform du jour, Second Life. Had it, he asked, developed as predicted back then? Certainly the exponential growth of Second Life as a platform had slowed down, but more interestingly, a whole range of Second Life clones had developed using OpenSim. For those concerned about building their island in a world without barriers, for instance for those working on education projects or on enterprise projects, OpenSim has provided the answer.
Dave Mee, from Tandot and Manchester Digital Laboratory, then took us through 10 years of Augmented Reality in 20 minutes. AR “markers” were new to me – and it was fascinating to see some of the attempts to find appropriate applications for augemented reality – from a web cam mounted above a pool table helping you make perfect shots every time, to an online packing service where you can check if your items fit in different sizes of boxes.
There were regulars from the Manchester Digital community in attendance alongside some companies and individuals new to these events. In an admittedly packed digital calendar, these third Thursdays aim to cover a variety of topics throughout the year. The next event will provide advice for those wanting to enter this year’s Big Chip Awards.
links for 2010-01-21
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There’s more we could do with this, but really it’s about generating a community resource, and one that’s open data. So if you want to help build the first open directory of UK hyperlocal sites first open directory of UK hyperlocal sites , get over to http://OpenlyLocal.com/hyperlocal_sites and click on “Add your hyperlocal site“.
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As you would expect, women get fewer and fewer new messages as they age (which is a topic for another whole post!), but this decrease in new contacts is substantially slower for women with cleavage pics. A 32 year-old woman showing her body gets only 1 less message a month than the equivalent 18 year-old; an older woman not showing off gets 4 messages less, a large relative fall-off in popularity.
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This year already began with large companies and investors making moves into hyper-local news. At the same time, experiments with foundation money continued, such as J-Lab's Networked News project. J-Lab also announced another request for proposals for grants for community news startups with a deadline of March 1, and proposals that support or create local news sites have advanced into the second round of the Knight News Challenge. Winners will be announced in June.
Interesting Monday: An anarchic curriculum
Pictures: Hwa Young for Madlabuk.
If it was back to school for everyone last week, this Monday night had something of the anarchist’s curriculum about it, as the first “interesting Monday” took place at Madlab in the Northern Quarter. Wanting this great space to be for a wider community than hardcore coders, the idea of “interesting Monday” was hatched – probably on a dull Monday some time over the Christmas period. A cross between the “school of everything” concept, and a “TED for everyone else”, I was pleased to be asked to speak at the first event. “We think you might have an interesting topic,” Asa Calow emailed me.
First class was cookery. Fresh with his new Bible, “Dough,” Guy “I never cook” Dickinson was extolling his new found ability to bake bread. Fresh baguettes were handed out, whilst he showed us how to mix flour, water and yeast, and how to knead the resultant dough. After an uninspiring time with a Panasonic breadmaker, Dickinson was enthusing about the real thing – and the rapt audience included a couple of other bread enthusiasts who chipped in with their own take on making the perfect loaf.
I think we were all quite surprised that our first presentation wasn’t a talking head or a Powerpoint but something as primal as a man with a bowl and a bag of flour. The only powerpoint of the evening was a necessary one though, as Asa Calow talked us through the “maths of knots.” Mathematicians have a way of describing the world which is almost, but not quite, incomprehensible to non-mathematicians; and as the coolest dressed maths teacher that you’d never had, Asa did a great job in introducing us to the (only in maths) concept of the “unknot” (a circle), as well as describing the typology of knots, and how mathematicians had unravelled their secrets. The maths of knots was used in untangling DNA to quantum physics, and the Boy Scouts were not mentioned once.
My own topic, Victor Gollancz and the Left Book Club, had come about because when I’d first read about it – in a history of Gollancz publishing – I’d been fascinated. In 1936 the left wing publisher Gollancz created the subscription book club “The Left Book Club” to distribute political books to a wider audience. Some fifty thousand people joined up, and in the political ferment of the thirties, “left book clubs” sprung up throughout the country; though congregated mainly in the more prosperous south, the biggest group existed in Manchester. They published George Orwell (“The Road to Wigan Pier”), Arthur Koestler, and the first ever Western interview with Mao “Red Star Over China”. Over the next few years the club was a key conduit for political thought that indirectly helped lead to the 1945 Labour government. There were some interesting parallels with today, where an underwhelming left wing government hasn’t managed to engage with a politically interested citizenship.
If left wing thirties political though and knot mathematics had got the audience wishing for home time, the final session was Aliki Chapple’s “drama class”, where, clearing the space we undertook a number of exercises around “non-verbal communication.”
Exercises commonly used with actors were tried out on the bashful audience and an evening that none of us knew what to expect from, turned into something very interesting indeed. The next Interesting Monday is in February. All are welcome.
links for 2010-01-20
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Robin Hamman, a Senior Social Media Consultant at Headshift, mentioned that he gone through and found every single blogger who was active in St. Albans. He created a network of them, built out an aggregator in Yahoo! Pipes, and set about being seen as a member of that blogging community.
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In 2009, the stroudgreen.org had a total of 106,621 unique visits and 527,983 pageviews. 93% of traffic was from the UK and most of that was from London. We had one visit from Rwanda, one from Peru and one from Moldova.
links for 2010-01-19
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So Wyatt’s comment rings some bells with me and not just because he suggested the very route we’re taking in Lichfield. One of the main motivations for taking the decision was reading Manchester Guardian’s founder CP Scott’s values and centenary leader article. I’m sure this is at the top of every journalism student’s reading list but having never been involved in journalism until this past year I’d never seen it.
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I don’t think we’d be too worried if Michael had a different day job and, say, ran cookery courses in the evenings, though he might have to work out exactly how much oil he puts in his hummus. What about if he’d never earned a penny from cooking but made fabulous meals at home? Would his hummus taste any different?
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