05.18.10
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More Twitter research gives us an insight

Last week I blogged about research by Meeyoung Cha, from Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, and her colleagues that showed on Twitter, the number of followers you have doesn’t correlate to the influence you have.

Corroborating that is research from Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue Moon from the Department of Computer Science at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. According to Shiv Singh, in this second piece of research:

The researchers also analyzed the influence of Twitter users and found that there’s a discrepancy in the relationship between the number of followers and the popularity of someone’s tweets. This basically means that the number of followers is not the only measure of someone’s value.

Singh draw out seven points of interest from the research, some of which are interesting and some of which are blindingly obvious to anyone who’s spent any time on Twitter:

  1. Twitter users have 4.12 degrees of separation on average
  2. The reTweet is powerful
  3. 75% of reTweets happen within an hour of the original Tweet
  4. Followers != influence
  5. Trending topics are mainly news headlines or ‘persistent news’
  6. Only a minority of users have reciprocal relationships, and there are a lot of observers
  7. ReTweets spread quickly

Read the whole post for the Singh’s full analysis.

It’s good to see researchers digging into the nuts and bolts of social media. As I said about Cha’s work, those of us who’ve been in this area for a while have built up through experience and observation a set of instincts about how things work. We use heuristics to get a sense of how the whole system functions, but like any assumption built from personal experience there are risks that we are wrong. So it’s very valuable to have those assumptions tested by research which can then ground us in evidence rather than gut feeling.

05.17.10
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Making time

Amber Naslund writes a good post about how important it is to make time to experiment with social media and to explore what it can do for you. It’s very easy, she points out, to say that we don’t have the time, but “Here’s what you have to face down. You make time for what matters.”

Spot on.

The comments are just as interesting as the post, as people come up with reasons why it’s not just a matter of making time. People are overloaded, too busy, scared to step out of their comfort zone, the skill set required is hard to acquire. It’s easy to come up with excuses why some people won’t take the time to learn social media, but they are just that: excuses.

Here’s the thing: We waste loads of time simply checking our email inboxes. What about if you reduced your time in email and gave that time to social media instead? What about if you went to one less meeting each week? What if you used your phone to check up on Twitter and blogs and such, and used some of that dead time when you’re waiting for other things to happen?

It’s actually very easy to learn about social media. A quick search on Google gives an awful lot of stuff to start reading, even before one starts dipping their toes in the tools themselves. How much can someone learn just by reading round for 10 minutes a day?

“I haven’t had time” is an excuse we all use, but it’s not a reason.

05.15.10
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links for 2010-05-15

  • Reader Comments, Hawaiian-Style
    Kevin: Mark Potts looks at the community interaction on the new site Civil Beat in Hawaii. Only subscribers can comment. The site has already tackled the issue of civil unions, which usually would be a cue for a god awful fight on most sites. However, the discussion is polite. It's an interesting model where anyone can read comments but only subscribers can contribute to them.
    (tags: community paidcontent comments)
  • MediaShift Idea Lab . How to Use Ushahidi for Non-Crisis Projects | PBS
    Kevin: Juliana Rotich of Ushahidi talks about using the platform for non-political purposes. "How do we inspire active participation in a project that is non-political, and not related to a crisis?" The key? "To make it work, however, this kind of application requires aggressive marketing and online awareness campaigns, and mixing and matching online and offline initiatives."
    (tags: crowdsourcing ideas knightfoundation ushahidi pbs)
05.14.10
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links for 2010-05-14

  • Journal Register Co. Puts Digital Guys in Charge
    Kevin: CEO John Paton of the Journal Register Company is letting his actions speak for themselves. He has adopted a digital first strategy, and he's just announced the appointment of three digital execs to seniors posts.
    "The Journal Register Company has adopted a strategy of Digital First,” CEO John Paton said in a statement. “The appointments of Dan, Adam and Jon to these important roles with a focus on digital rather than print are indicative of our commitment to that strategy."
    (tags: newspapers strategy digital journalism)
05.14.10
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Where are your Facebook privacy settings?

Just in case you have lost track of where all Facebook’s privacy settings are hidden, the New York Times has crated an awesome infographic to shows just how well they are squirrelled away in different corners of the site. It illustrates beautifully just how difficult it has become to manage your privacy in Facebook, showing all 50 settings – which have over 170 options – spread over 10 different pages. Apparently, the company has had an emergency company-wide meeting to discuss the problem. Fingers crossed that some common sense prevails.

05.13.10
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links for 2010-05-13

  • WordPress 3.0: The 5 Most Important New Features
    Kevin: Brian Casel at Mashable has a look at five most important features in WordPress 3.0, set for release in June 2010. Those features include custom post types, menu management and multi-site capabilities. WordPress already was a very powerful blog CMS, and now it's starting to get sophisticated features that will appeal to a much wider range of online publishers.
    (tags: wordpress socialmedia cms mashable blog)
  • OutWit: Harvest The Web
    Kevin: A Firefox plug-in to scrape data from websites.
    (tags: firefox extension tools web semanticweb)
  • Google Believes Online Ads Could Be Worth More Than Print Ads by 2012 – The Awl
    Kevin: Some very interesting numbers if a very brief piece. What's unclear to me is where the table with the revenue and costs comes from. Is this a national average for US newspapers? However, what is really stunning is the fact that subscription revenue is only 3% of total revenue. That is utterly shocking. The other figure that is totally gob-smacking is that in print 52% of the costs come from production, distribution and raw materials. _52%_ That begs the question of when print will be completely economically unworkable. That day is not long off.
    (tags: google newspapers advertising economics print)
  • Poynter Online – How to Scrape Websites for Data without Programming Skills
    Kevin: Michelle Minkoff at Poynter's E-Media Tidbits highlights a great new tool for scraping data from websites. What is scraping data? Before the days of APIs, developers and hackers would often 'scrape' data from websites. This would take data, often from an HTML table, and output the data in a useful format such as CSV that could be more easily manipulated using data tools such as spreadsheet or database software.
    Minkoff writes: "It often takes a lot of time and effort to produce programs that extract the information, so this is a specialty. But what if there were a tool that didn't require programming?

    Enter OutWit Hub, a downloadable Firefox extension that allows you to point and click your way through different options to extract information from Web pages."

    (tags: data database firefox journalism programming research tips tools web screenscrape)
  • Crowdsourcing goes global: The NYT’s “Moment in Time” » Nieman Journalism Lab
    Kevin: The New York Times asked followers of its Lens blog: "Attention: everyone with a camera, amateur or pro. Please join us on Sunday, May 2, at 15:00 (U.T.C./G.M.T.), as thousands of photographers simultaneously record “A Moment in Time.” The idea is to create an international mosaic, an astonishingly varied gallery of images that are cemented together by the common element of time." It's a beautiful, simple call to action with a stunning result. As Flickr has shown, digital cameras have made amateur photo enthusiasts of us all, and we love to share our images both with friends, family and complete strangers.
    (tags: crowdsourcing collaboration nytimes photography)
  • Facebook Makes Ad Inroads but Still Trails Rivals in Revenue – WSJ.com
    Kevin: JESSICA E. VASCELLARO writes: "Overall, Facebook.com served 176.3 billion display ads on its website over the first three months of 2010, or 16.2% of the total, said comScore. Yahoo served 131.6 billion banner ads to Yahoo users, and Microsoft served 60.2 billion, according to comScore. The data don't include ads that Yahoo and Microsoft delivered to other Web sites through their networks, a major source of revenue for each."
    I'm curious whether the well documented competitive advantage in dwell time on Facebook is helping them sell advertising at premium rates, premium CPMs, or whether the dwell time is offset by low click through rates. Some people have posited that selling advertising on social networks is difficult due to people not wanting their social interactions interrupted by commercial messages.
    (tags: Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, advertising)
05.13.10
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The Wiki-fication of News: Topic Pages and collaboration

The concept of topic pages, living stories and the wiki-fication of news has been discussed for a few years now in journalism circles. However, now we’re starting to see this movement gain pace with not only examples on major news sites like the New York Times and the Spokesman-Review, a very pioneering local newspaper in Spokane Washington in the US, but also in a new breed of digital journalism start-ups.

For instance, Honolulu Hawaii-based Civil Beat (formerly Peer News), a start-up with support from the Omidyar? Foundation (of Pierre Omidyar founder of online auction site eBay)?, has recently launched with a focus five specific news beats: Hawaii, Honolulu, Education, Land and Money?. Omidyar wants to use the site to create a new kind of civic square for the 21st Century, and one of the features of the site is topic pages. For instance, they have in-depth pages on Honolulu Planning, Hawaii Student Achievement and Hawaii State Government Deficit. These topic pages are explainers that I would assume grow over time with new information. It’s not clear because much of the content is behind a paywall.

The paywall, or ‘membership’ model gives members full access to the site for $19.99 a month. I use the quotes, not necessarily to sneer, but because most people will see membership as a subscription. I suspect that the branding of it as membership is meant to highlight the community and engagement aspirations of the site. The journalists are referred to as reporter-hosts.

I might pay for a 15-day pass to explore the site a little further, but I do notice that the site has a lot of internal links but not many external links, at least from the content that isn’t behind the paywall. That might because of the very local nature of the content, it might be a strategic editorial choice or it might be the lack of internet proficiency by the reporter-hosts. It definitely is an interesting experiment, and it’s one that I will be watching closely.

Another context and community led experiment, Toronto-based OpenFile launched this week:

Structurally and editorially, the site is centered, as its name suggests, around files: topic pages-meet-news articles, focused on a particular problem or issue, that combine text, photos, video, and links — “sort of a multimedia package,” Craig Silverman (digital journalism director)? says.?

OpenFile has six core principles: Local first, always collaborate, keep tools handy, stay open, be useful and curate the conversation. They are good principles, and as Megan Garber says at Harvard’s Nieman Lab, it will be fascinating to see new media journalism maxims finally put into practice and tested. One thing that is very interesting is how editorially led this project is. The technology doesn’t appear ground breaking, although the design is pleasant and clean, but the editorial thinking is very forward looking. The key thing will be to see how this is put into practice. Not everyone take to this type of reporter-host, journalism as curation mentality natively. It isn’t something that most journalists were trained to do, and engagement is a difficult skill to train. The write up at the Nieman Lab is very comprehensive, well worth reading the full article.

Last week, I was at the European Alliance of News Agencies conference in Budapest, speaking about blogging and social media journalism. With news agencies suffering because their primary customers, newspapers, are suffering, many of the conversations had some element of revenue streams or new business models. It’s very interesting to see with OpenFile that they will be geo-tagging all of their content, something that I’ve advocated for a few years. Why would they make the effort? Wilf Dinnick, founding editor and CEO of OpenFile says:?

Because all our stories are geotagged, and we’re still focusing on local news, we will be able to deliver the major brands the opportunity to deliver advertising to very local levels?

Geo-tagging is available in many open-source content-management systems. With geo-tagging built into many camera phones and increasingly easy in digital cameras, it is now easier than ever to geo-tag content. It takes some thinking up front, but it’s a wise investment for the long term.

 

05.12.10
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links for 2010-05-12

  • Tips for HTML5, part 1
    Kevin: Journalism professor Mindy McAdams is taking a deep look at HTML5. Mindy is known for her excellent books on Flash, and this one in a series of posts about the new HTML standard. She's writing about the developments in the new HTML standard that will drive desktop, mobile and other device development for the next decade. She's writing for fellow educators and students, but this is invaluable for editors as well.
    (tags: HTML5 howto)
  • Google's plans for the news business – Editors Weblog
    Kevin: This is a summary of a James Fallows piece in the Atlantic magazine in the US looking at Google's plans for the news business. After interviewing several Google staffers, Fallow is convinced that the search giant is serious about helping newspapers. Emma Heald at the Editor's Weblog writes: "In Google's vision of making news sustainable, the first thing to note is that print is ignored. And a key element of the company's advice to newspapers is to continuously experiment."
    (tags: Google newspapers journalism innovation)
  • IS Twitter Parade
    Kevin: A rather stunning visualisation of Twitter from Japan.
    (tags: twitter flash web fun visualization interface inspiration)