• BBC – dot.life: Hi-tech hacks
  But it looks as though some broadcasters are going even further in getting the audience to do the journalism. Vincent Giret from France 24, a trilingual news channel running services in French, English and now Arabic, described an experiment called "The Observers". The channel has recruited about 2,000 people from around the world who send in short video reports – everything from footage of a bomb going off in Baghdad to an Irishman giving his views on the Thierry Henry "main de Dieu" incident.
  (tags: blog journalism multimedia technology)
• How Google Wave is Changing the News
  Using Google Wave allows newsrooms to reach out to their audiences and invite their active participation on news stories. In the process, waves become a vehicle to create an engaged local community who can also play a role in the newsroom. That may redefine how news is gathered, reported and presented to its audience, blurring the boundary between newsroom and community bulletin board.
  (tags: googlewave participation socialmedia tools collaboration email google newsletter wave beatblogging)

• BE LEGAL: Six things a hyperlocal blogger really should know about the law « The Dan Slee Blog
  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.

  (tags: media blogging hyperlocal bloggers defamation legal libel)

• YouTube Direct service to link citizen reporters and news organisations | Media | guardian.co.uk
  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."
  (tags: youtube)
• How Blogging Has Changed Over The Last 3 Years
  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."
  (tags: blogging blogs statistics stats)
• Don’t Save Journalism – Save Honest Communication
  So I ask: If citizen journalism activities were to stop tomorrow could professional journalists replace them?
  (tags: journalism citizenjournalism)

• Accessible Twitter : web accessibility for the Twitter.com website application
  Accessible Twitter is an alternative to the Twitter.com website. It is designed to be easier to use and is optimized for disabled users.
  (tags: tools web2.0 social web tweet microblogging application disabled access)
• My “speech” to the Society of Editors conference « David Higgerson
  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.

  (tags: socialmedia twitter #soe09)

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.

• Blagetty Blogetty Bragitee!: Hyperlocal is here to stay (Help Me Investigate)
  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.
  (tags: hmi, hyperlocal helpmeinvestigate beatblogging)

• MA students start hyperlocal blog
  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.

  (tags: students hyperlocal birmingham beatblogging)
• 7 Reasons Why Blogs Are Vitally Important | Social Traffic Espionage
  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.
  (tags: blogging blogs)

• Jeff Jarvis: The Future of Journalism is an entrepreneurial, collaborative Process — CARTA
  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!”
  (tags: collaboration jeffjarvis journalism)
• Social media makes inroads to older audiences « Bristol Editor’s Blog
  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.
  (tags: socialmedia twitter)

• FOI Friday: 10 things we’ve discovered this week thanks to the Freedom of Information Act « David Higgerson
  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.

  (tags: newspapers beatblogging council)
• Thinking of a journalism start-up? Here’s a checklist « Adam Westbrook
  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.

  (tags: journalism business resources ideas)

Next Tuesday will see the first Social Media Surgery held in Leeds – so what can you expect to find going on?

I spoke with Leeds organiser John Popham about the launch event as well as an old-hand at these surgeries, Nick Booth of Podnosh in Birmingham.

John: ” People were asking me questions about social media things but this has really come about because I was at the first year anniversary of the surgeries in Birmingham which happened about three weeks ago and people were asking why we weren’t doing it in this region.”

So he’s started it!

Nick explains how it’s worked in Birmingham: ” They are aimed at small charities, community groups and active citizens.  They are resolutely informal.  Volunteer surgeons pitch up and we sit them next to people who are trying to make a difference in the places where they live.  They talk to each other, share skills and go perhaps help people set up web tools.  The beneficiaries are welcome to come back time and again to get more help.”

He also offers this recipe to the event.

The Leeds event will be formulated in much the same way and John has already heard that other Yorkshire locations are interested in setting up similar events in Huddersfield, York, Sheffield and Hull so next week’s event could be the first of many.

Sharing some of the experience from Birmingham, Nick says a year of the surgeries in the city have raised awareness in the city about the potential of social media for social good.

“We have also helped to stitch together a few more squares in the patchwork quilt of very, very local blogging. That quilt will, eventually, prove a real democratic asset to the city.  We didn’t keep track of every group that has been helped – because at the beginning it was very informal.  We know of 22 sites we have helped set up – about half of those are still busy.

“We have also helped a lot of people who were already using the web.   We know that the idea has spun off to places as far a field as Sydney, Barcelona and soon South Africa plus surgeries cropping up in a growing number of town/cities in the UK.”

To be in at the start of all this, the Leeds Social Media Surgery is at Round Foundry Media Centre
Foundry Street, Leeds, LS11 5QP from 5.30pm – 7pm on Tuesday, November 10 . Map here.

See you there!