Archive for category social media
1pound40 unconference – a couple of after-thoughts
Posted by Michal in journalism, social media on 15/11/2009
This week I managed to get to Thomson/Reuters’s swanky headquarters in Canary Wharf to take part in an unconference called 1pound40.
Some great minds – from journalists to social media specialists – spent the afternoon discussing the impact of social media on politics and news, among other things. Not surprisingly, Twitter became the main focal point of most of our sessions.
Whether we discussed the power of social media in changing politics or whether Twitter and social media in general can curate news, the discussions always became more general as we were all trying to define the influence of Twitter and other tools on our lives.
It’s impossible to summarise all our discussions and thoughts, but I’d like to mention two keywords that cropped up several times during the session and which will be quite important in our future discussion about social media. I list them here in no particular order of importance:
- transliteracy: not a new term, but an increasingly important one. I was lucky enough to share the table with professor Sue Thomas of Leicester University, who has been writing about transliteracy for years. Transliteracy is in my opinion a pre-requisite to a successful engagement with social media – or media in general. The ability to write, read and communicate across a wide variety of mostly digital, but also analogue platforms, and the ability to create value using the most appropriate tools and platforms for your needs is absolutely crucial. It’s surprising how many people who should be transliterate – journalists, for example – are still reluctant to embrace another medium and turn it into their advantage. Such approach is unsustainable and short-sighted. Period.
- curating content: in other words, trying to embrace the wealth of knowledge and information social media offer us. But how? Richard Sambrook asked whether Twitter and social media can curate news and provide a framework for trust. Yes they can, but with (sometimes severe) limitations. Should news companies like the BBC even curate content from Twitter? If so, how do you approach the issue of trust (by sticking to journalistic principles, I’d say – check, cross-check, verify – don’t just republish)? Curating content might be the way forward, but the biggest issue – after trust – is the volume of information. How do you cope with that? How do you filter it out? Twitter lists might be one solution, but Twitter is just one tool among hundreds available.
I’m hoping to explore the issue of content curation over the next few months, but your thoughts on it – or any of the above issues – are welcome.
(There are some pictures from 1pound40 over on my Posterous blog)
Do we control the tools?
Posted by Michal in journalism, social media on 08/11/2009
If you’ve ever used your mobile camera to photograph an event – be it a gig, somebody’s birthday party or a fellow passenger on the bus – and then subsequently posted the picture online for everyone to see, you must have asked yourself a question: is this morally ok to do that?
‘Cause if you haven’t, you might want to read this brilliant and rather shocking piece by Paul Carr, “After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth”. Whether you like Paul Carr or not, he’s made a few very valid points around the issues of privacy and morality of social media – and citizen journalists in particular – with two videos to back them up (warning: one of the videos contains graphic images of the final moments of Neda Agha-Soltan, killed during the Iranian election protests earlier this year). I won’t summarise the post here, please read it and draw your own conclusions.
Just don’t interpret Paul’s words as a sweeping statement which has little to do with reality. It isn’t. And I was reminded of it while reading this article about a man in south London, who brought traffic to a halt by threatening to jump off a building.
The incident lasted for hours and obviously attracted a large crowd. Some people shouted for him to jump. Others, as is obvious from the picture that accompanies this article, were filming or photographing the man.
Even without Paul Carr’s article I didn’t doubt for a moment that had the man jumped, the video would have been uploaded to YouTube within a matter of hours. Do you?
People in photos – Flickr's new function
Posted by Michal in photography, social media on 26/10/2009
Do you remember what you felt every time you realised your friend had tagged a picture of you on Facebook? And do you remember how you felt when you couldn’t do anything about it?
Luckily Facebook later added a bit of new functionality, which meant you could untag yourself.
And luckily Flickr has learned from Facebook’s initial cock-up. Its newest function is called “People in photos” and – much like its Facebook equivalent – allows you to tag someone by typing their name or drawing a box around their face and adding their name.
Luckily, the fact that you’ve done it will display in their Recent Activity stream, so they’ll be able to remove yourself from the photo. What’s more, once you remove yourself from an image, only you will be able to tag yourself in that image again. Nice touch.
Obviously, you can now set your preferences and define who, if anyone, can tag you.
Flickr has also updated the layout of your profile page, which now also features all the images, in which you’ve been tagged. There are also your favourites from other people’s photostreams.
Privately I will not be using the new tagging function at all – I’ve never used it on Facebook either. But if you’re using Flickr to share your entire social life (and many of us do), this will come useful.
Until, that is, someone tags that super-uncool picture of you from last year’s work’s Christmas do.
Posterous, here I come
Posted by Michal in social media on 29/09/2009
I’ve been using Tumblr for several months now as an alternative to a proper blog. Tumblr is a micro-blogging platform which allows you to write quick, short mini-blogs, usually focussing on multimedia, photography, etc.
I’m happy with my Tumblr, which I’ve been using as a replacement for this blog, which I’m hoping to relaunch soon on dzierza.com. But I also noticed many of my friends have been using Posterous, which in many ways is very similar to Tumblr, but its unique selling point is the fact that it allows you to post from everywhere via email and then repost to other services.
In other words, you can populate all or most of your social media properties by sending just one email. Send it and Posterous will take care of the rest by distributing the contents of the email to the sites you’ve defined on your profile. You can also select the sites you want to update/notify by simply modifying the email address, for example posterous+flickr@posterous.com, which will post a picture on your Posterous profile and add it to your Flickr photostream. Sounds clever.
Posterous has also quite a few other nice features, which I’m keen to explore, like automatic galleries created from individual email attachments. I’ll be experimenting with those and hopefully will post an update soon, comparing both services.
So for the next few months I’ll be using both Tumblr and Posterous, you can follow me on Tumblr here: michald.tumblr.com and on Posterous here: http://michald.posterous.com/
Don’t forget about the content
Posted by Michal in social media on 09/03/2009
In all our conversations about how to use Twitter, we seem to forget about one crucial thing – the content.
What you say says a lot about who you are. Granted, not everyone is on Twitter to spread groundbreaking ideas, analyse the world in 140 characters or offer you solutions to your problems.
But some people’s use of Twitter reveals a distinct lack of content. Or at least any meaningful content.
So maybe this totally unscientific list of my observations from using Twitter might give you some idea as tho what to expect – or who to avoid – when the following happens:
- when someone keeps saying ‘uh, oh – another 1000 followers, well thanks, but not sure why you’re following me, I’m so boring’ they probably are. Unfollow.
- then again some people will only talk numbers – numbers of followers, tweets, retweets, their position in the most retweeted charts, etc. Unless you’re an accountant and/or define your life by the number of people you follow, avoid.
- if the person you follow keeps talking about their cat only – perhaps they should get their cat a profile. Unfollow.
- Twitter is full of specialists. Or ‘specialists’. To become a specialist and to gain and share specialist knowledge takes a while. Or at least longer than ‘since last Tuesday’
- if someone follows you and they follow 2,000 other people, but have only one update: “Cheap Viagra/laptop/iPod” – do what you would do with an email with the subject line ‘Cheap Viagra”
- retweeting is useful, in fact that’s what makes Twitter uniquely fast. But retweeting absolutely everything all the time is like reading a newspaper aloud on a packed train. A bit unsocial.
- Twitpic is for sharing pictures. Drunken, fuzzy shots you took with your mobile while covering the lens with your finger make for great content only once in a while. Don’t overdo it.
Totally unscientific, purely empirical. Agree to disagree.
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