Steve Bridger has been kind enough to share his presentation about Flickr in the Cultural and Heritage Sectors. It's a really well thought out, beautifully presented set of slides providing many insights, and examples, to those trying to make the most out of photographic assets through sharing...
This morning I discovered that Amazon's Kindle now offers the ability to subscribe to blogs. If you're a blogger, and want your blog to be available through Amazon, the details of how to sign up are here.
I don't have a Kindle and can't vouch for how it looks, but I've already signed up to sell cybersoc content subscriptions (free 14 day trial, then US $1.99) through the service. I'm interested to see if anyone goes for the subscription and what they think of it.
Blogs through Kindle will be, I suspect, quite a nice way for bloggers with good, regularly published, niche content - such as Shedworking - to earn some revenue from their efforts.
One of the best things about my job is that I have various opportunities to inform and enthuse people about the benefits of using social media tools and services to support their existing processes. In order for social media to be genuinely useful, it has to become part of a person or organisation's everyday practice. If it's not, then it just becomes an additional burden - something extra they have to do rather than something that helps them to achieve their goals personal or professional objectives.
Readers who follow my twitter feed or dopplr updates will know that I've recently been traveling around the country a lot. Most of this has been to provide the 10 finalists of NESTA's Big Green Challenge with social media training to help them use photo-sharing, video-sharing, mobile phones, social networking and blogging to inform a wider audience about their work, reach out to new supporters and likeminded groups, and to better organise their own efforts. It's been great fun - I've met some wonderful people along the way, learned about some wonderful projects, and seen parts of the country I'd never otherwise have the opportunity to see. Here's a map showing where I've been or will be going over the remaining few weeks of the training:
I've also been authoring blog posts - a sort of beginners guide to using social media - on the Big Green Challenge Blog. Here's an index to the posts I've published thus far:
There are at least two more posts to come - blogging, which should appear next week, and finding and keeping track of content, which will cover social bookmarking, RSS and searching for blogs.
Slideshare doesn't seem to like the Below you'll find the presentation on mobile journalism I'll be delivering to students on the MA Magazine and Newspaper Journalism course at City University, London on Thursday. The presentation looks at:
• service providers - why do companies offer services which enable mobile content uploading and social networking?
• citizen journalism - what motivates people to "report" what they witness; what sort of content do they create and share?
• journalism - how are professional journalists and new organisations using mobiles?
• tools - what tools are available for documenting and sharing content online?
And at some point during the lecture I'm hoping to involve some professional mobile journalists - by mobile, of course....
This Thursday, and next Tuesday, I'm going to be doing a series of lectures and workshops with my City University MA Journalism students on using mobiles to capture and share content. In preparation, I'm seeking some editorial and technical help from you:
1) I need some interesting examples of mobile phones being used BY mainstream media (eg. Journalists who get paid to report)
2) some links to blog posts by journalists, citizen journalists or bloggers discussing how to use a mobile to create and share stories
3) Some cutting-edge examples of News of other content sites on mobile interfaces
4) the mobile settings - this is my technical question - I need to get my O2 pay and go SIM to work in my unlocked (formerly t-mobile) nokia n95 so that I can use it to demonstrate qik, flixwagon, zonetag, etc
I'll repost the resulting lecture, workshop agenda and links to student work here so that everyone can gain from helping out. Thanks in advance...
It appears that conference season has begun.
On Tuesday I moderated a panel about using social media to have "difficult conversations at Social Media Influence in London with panelists Headshift's Lee Bryant (my boss), Andy Hobsbawm from Agency.com and Paolo Valdemarin of Evector.
[Photo by Kris Hoet]
Today, I'm on two panels during the final afternoon of DNA2009 in Brussels. I'll be joining Laura Oliver (journalism.co.uk), Darren Waters (BBC), Katharina Borchert (WAZ) and Bart Brouwers (Spits) for a panel about twitter, moderated by Ben Hammersley and possibly being joined remotely by Jeff Jarvis.
Later I'm on an experts panel responding to questions about social media.
Follow it all on twitter...
update...15.17:
John Thompson, publisher of the excellent Journalism.co.uk, streamed the panel live. Here's the first of his four clips:
Thanks to Monty.de, I stumbled across this simple, well though out presentation about Twitter by @minxuan:
Over the years I reckon I've tried hundreds of social networking sites, blogging and micro-blogging tools, online participatory spaces, and content sharing services. In most instances I register, set up a profile, have a look around, and abandon all in the space of about a week.
So how do I gauge whether I'm going to stick with a service or tool for longer? Well, more than a few times I've jokingly said that I know a social media service is useful as soon as I get a free coffee or beer out of it. And, actually, that's about right. If I start using a site or service and can quickly find my friends and contacts there I tend to stick around because it's my network, not the tool or service itself, which is useful and valuable to me.
Recently, Twitter has been the service that's got me more free drinks than all the others combined...
--> Read the rest of this post over on the Headshift blog
UK internet measurement agency Hitwise recently announced that Twitter's traffic has increased a staggering 1000% over the past year and now exceeds that to Digg.
The Hitwise report reveals something far more interesting, in my mind at least - the way that twitter is driving traffic to other sites, in particularly those of mainstream media. From the PC Advisor article about the report:
Almost 10 percent of Twitter's downstream traffic goes to News and Media websites, and BBC News is currently the seventh most popular site visited after www.twitter.com. A further 17.6 percent of traffic goes to entertainment websites, while 14.6 percent goes to social networks, 6.6 percent to blogs and 4.5 percent to online retailers.
"As a source of traffic Twitter is still in its infancy, but it is becoming more important every day," commented Goad.
"A number of news sites, blogs, and video and picture websites
already rely on Twitter for a significant amount of their traffic."
The
most popular website visited after Twitter is Facebook. Britain's most
popular social network continues to pick up users and is now the second
most visited website in the UK after Google UK.
Yeh, you read that right - 10% of twitter's downstream traffic, that is the site that people go to after visiting twitter, is to BBC News. The article, unfortunately, is not clear whether this is a global or UK specific statistic but either way it's interesting because it demonstrates that, far from just chit-chatting the day away, people are discussing news and current affairs on twitter as well.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=15d971db-c14a-4e4d-a2dd-0f92d196d041)
Much has been made of twitter as a tool for finding eyewitness accounts and tracking discussion of breaking news and yesterday's airplane crash in the Hudson River was just one of a growing number of instances - along with earthquakes, terrorist attacks, celebrity deaths, mass redundencies and Steve Jobs stepping down - where many people heard about it first on Twitter.
I've been thinking a lot recently about how twitter has changed not just the way I hear about breaking news, but also how it's completely changed my entire internet content consumption pattern.
Six months ago, I started my day online with a visit to my RSS reader, during which I usually saved a few bookmarks on delicious. I'd then check facebook and twitter for messages from friends, colleagues and contacts.
Now that's all changed. I realised yesterday that I haven't looked at my RSS reader since Christmas or earlier, and that my number of delicious links has gone from maybe 10 a day to just a trickle. That's because I'm using twitter as a sort of human filtered RSS reader: most of the people I used to subscribe to I now follow and the people I follow tend to tweet about the best things they post or read. This means that, through twitter, I've probably increased the amount of discovery I do online - that is, stumbling across new sources of content rather than simply reading the same people saying the same things all the time. And instead of bookmarking to delicious, I've noticed that I'm now favouriting 5 - 10 tweets each day so that I can return to them later.
I found myself wondering if others are finding that they use twitter in the same way. The replies were split, with people following massive numbers on twitter (eg. 300+) tending to say yes, twitter is becoming just as important as RSS and delicious, or even supplanting them. But others disagree, generally saying that they do find good content via twitter, but this remains their secondary method of doing so. Here's the responses:
 | AnneBB @Cybersoc @playnice_nz @AnneBB still attached to my delicious may be couse new to twitter ;0) | |
 | mollybob @Cybersoc it's made my del.icio.us and aggregator use stronger because it's given me more resources. certainly no drifting here. | |
| ||
 | ||
 | craigmcginty @Cybersoc I feed own Twitter RSS feed, and keyword searches in Twitter, into GReader and then search this as a Tweet database | |
 | ||
 | ||
 | LesleySmith @Cybersoc Very much so, Twitter is much more simple to use! | |
 | robertbrook @cybersoc yes. | |
 | ||
 | ||
 | ||
 |
How do you use twitter? Is it as important as your RSS reader? Do you favourite tweets like you used to save bookmarks? Does following more people make you more likely to use twitter as a main source of links to new content? What's your view?
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=7bec199c-633a-4dca-8f9a-41c7e1ddb439)
Recent Comments