As soon as I saw the news of explosions in Jaipur, India, I headed off to tweetscan to see what it pulled up, finding yet again that twitter is becoming an indispensible tool for journalists and others seeking immediate first hand, eyewitness accounts of of breaking news story.
Twitter user 2s was 20 feet away from one of the Jaipur blasts:
Perhaps I'm not the first to spot this, but dopplr, a social networking service that allows users to store and share their trips, has added a carbon footprint calculator (here's mine).
The flaw in this is that it most people are unlikely to input their daily commute and other small journeys that people frequently take but tend not to view as interesting enough to post on dopplr.
Also, the service dopplr uses to make the calculations appears to assume that all journeys are made by plane rather than forms of transportation with lower carbon emissions. But, for the global jet-set at least, it is a useful way of seeing at a glance the impact of longer flights and other journeys.
Dragan Varagic is describing the Balkan blogosphere at (g)local 2.0: "In Serbia there are maybe 20,000 bloggers... maybe 50 who are very good bloggers."
The most popular of these blogs websites in the Balkans can have as many as 150,000 visitors per day. [Added Correction: Dragan informs me that he was quoting figures for websites, not blogs. Blogs, he tells me, can get as many as 1500 visitors per day.] There are busy blogs and influential blogs, according to Varagic, and they aren't necessarily the same.
Dragan's presentation walks us through all the different blog tracking
and ranking tools - technorati, alexa, bloglines, google blog searches
for links, linkhounds, Brendan Cooper's PR Index,
etc - most of which he says are indicative of traffic and influence but
none of which are able to give the entire picture on their own. Who is visiting is also important.
Based on Technorati rank alone (approx 92,000) the most influential blog in the Balkans is Borja.org. Dragan's own blog is 6th. But in Dragan's opinion, and he's a leading regional expert in blog tracking, the "most influential" blog in Serbia is probably mooshema, which ranks 3rd out of Balkan blogs on technorati. What I find most interesting about Dragan's research is that although some Balkan blogs are getting large numbers of visitors, they aren't getting very many inbound links - so even the top blogs would rank way behind cybersoc.com.
Paul Bradshaw, who contributed to (g)local 2.0 yesterday via Seesmic, has been doing his own research on the leading UK Journo Blogs. Cybersoc appears in the top five on each of the different rankings he's Paul's looked at - technorati, page rank, alexa, google results and "blog authority", a combination of Alexa and PageRank.
Varagic ends his presentation by saying that metrics related to number of links aren't so relevant, but their combination can give us some answers. The lack of standardised measurement techniques is a problem but by combining the use of different buzz tracking tools and techniques, you can start to understand where particular blogs sit amongst their peers. He says that the key to becoming more visible online is "to know who influence the influencers" to become more visible.
Stats p0rn is useful if PR or Search Engine Optomisation are you're business - as they are for Varagic - and it's kind of fun for us Journo Bloggers to see how we're doing within our peer group, but I'm still quite skeptical of validity or usefulness of this type of information for most bloggers. Personally, I'd prefer to have a small number of highly engaged regular readers who take what they see here and do things with it than thousands of visitors and thousands of random links.
[You can track blog posts, flickr uploads and tweets from (g)local 2.0 using this buzz tracking pipe. ]
I'm done giving my keynote at (g)local 2.0 in Skopje, Macedonia. I'll upload my notes later but you can find my slides on flickr already. Paul Bradshaw also contributed to the early morning session via seesmic video from the UK - check it out, he makes some good points about creating a distributed web presence by turning processes into content.
Niels Hendriks from Limburg University is giving a presentation about HasseltLokaal, a local citizen journalism project in Linburg, a small city in a largely agricultural area of Belgium. Concentra, the newspaper partner for the project, has always had a focus on region communities - in 1955, Frans Theelen said it should not be a newspaper title, but a programe for the people of the province - eg. community journalism.
The project gets 2200 visits a day, have 30 voluneers and 30 organisations who publish around 7 pieces of content per day. Their policy has been to publish everything, afterall it's tagline was "news for, by and about the people". For contributors it usually starts slowly, publishing text or photos about an event they'd seen. They held workshops to try to help people create more creative content.
One of the problems they had was with contributors wanting contributor cards but then, when given them, abusing those cards by, for example, having a meal then showing the card for a free dessert prior to writing their review.
The project was initiated by the Research and Development department - the IT people at the newspaper group. The journalists didn't respond well, with some feeling their professional status was being threatened, and the project's leaders couldn't find a viable business model. Moderation was costly, funding ran out. Experiments with advertising to keep the project going put them in conflict with the marketing department. BUT, the project did help increase the paper's willingness to accept articles and photos from readers. So some conclusions:
* each individual needs some identification with the brand ( "let them be proud" )
* find correct balance between empowering and empowering citizen journalists
* not every individual has enough self confidence to contribute
* find room for experimentation within traditional media organisations
I've created an aggregation to help track the conference backchannel.
The source is here (and you can subscribe via RSS). If you're not used to pipes, make sure you click on the list tab to see all the content it pulls up - http://pipes.yahoo.com/cybersoc/glocal20
I've posted a few times before about turning processes into content but wanted to try to pull it all together in a new way - combining it with the presentations I give that talk about unsustainable models of audience engagement and participation - in advance of the keynote presentation I'm giving at (G)local 2.0 in Skopje on Thursday morning.
"How long does all that blogging take you?"
It's a question I'm frequently asked but still find difficult to respond to because it's equally true that I spend my entire work day, and none of my work day, blogging. That's because I have integrated social media tools and techniques into my job in a way that makes it possible for me to turn the process I undertake into content.
Over the years, news and media organisations have come up with several models for encouraging audience participation and submission of content. The build it and they will come model involves the creation of online discussion spaces where audience members can participate in discussions, occasionally meaningful, with others. The send it to us model is used to gather what the media industry calls user-generated content, or UGC, usually in the form of photographs and eyewitness accounts of breaking news stories or comments about a programme, story or article.
Both of these approaches are resource intensive and carry very real technical, editorial and legal risks. These approaches also don't scale well - as usage, and user numbers, increase, so does the amount of resource required. Ironically, the amount of "noise" also seems to increase so greater participation can actually lessen the editorial link, and thus value, between participation and the programme, article or other content.
But there is another reason why these approaches don't scale well - because most media organisations still think of websites as something additional to their other content channels, as if they have a programme with a website hanging off it. Last year, Kate Adie, one of the BBC's more widely recognised news correspondents, illustrated this point well when she told the European Broadcasting Union's Michael Mullane,
"You are blogging to a peer group - that's all right - I can understand there is a demand for that. But journalists shouldn't have any time to blog - there are too many stories waiting to be told!”
It's obvious that Adie, and I'm sure many others at the BBC and other companies primarily in the business of journalism or broadcasting, wouldn't see creating content for the website as something that's part of their role. The website is something different. Something tacked onto the back of their programme or other content.
We've all heard or seen it before - "That's all from us here in the studio but if you want further information, or would like to comment, visit our website at w - w - w ..."
This all changes when the website, and indeed social media, is part of the production process from the start. Effort put into engaging with the audience becomes part of the programme. It becomes not an additional burden upon the shoulders of already overworked production staff, but an essential part of the programme making process. In this way, blogging and social media takes all day and yet takes no time away from programme making at all. As I said in a recent post,
"Social media isn't something you add to a website, it's something you do. When I look back over the social media projects I've been involved in over the years, it's obvious that the key variable upon which success, or failure, is dependent is to what extent to which social media has actually been integrated into the overall editorial proposition."
In addition to the online community and send it to us models above, many media companies - indeed, organisations and businesses engaged in just about any kind of business - are increasingly using existing third party social networking and content sharing services to engage with audiences (or consumers). There are two ways to do this - as something additional which, in time, will become burdensome for staff whose time could probably be better spent elsewhere, or through the integration of social media into the production process, generating (and widely distributing) content along the way.
Using social media as part of the production process makes it more authentic, honest and ultimately successful. It's also sustainable - even if journalists and production staff spend all their time doing it, it's equally true that it takes no time at all.
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