cybersoc.com

glocal 2.0 day two: dragan varagic on tracking balkan blogs

  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. ]

glocal 2.0 - skopje, macedonia

  glocal 2.0 - Skopje, Macedonia 
  Originally uploaded by robinhamman

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

blogging takes all day, blogging takes no time at all

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.

rangers use twitter & blogs to tell story of protecting wildlife in east africa

Rangers in the Mara Triangle area of the Masai Mara are rather busy these days - trying to stop illegal poaching, worrying about colleagues shot by poachers and, now, twittering and blogging.

Those of us who have been following them recently got word today, via twitter, that Ranger Leyian, who was shot last week, has been given 6 pints of blood in hospital where he's currently under observation.

They've already got some press for their efforts but certainly deserve more. Follow @maratriangle on twitter or visit their blog to find out what they're doing to save African wildlife and to learn what you might do to help.

[update: Since blogging this, the Mara Triangle rangers have friended me on flickr and facebook. They're really trying to get the most out of social media - very cool.]

interesting debate on transparency and journalism

Two weeks ago, Mayhill Fowler, who had gained access to a fundraising speech by Barack Obama because she had previously donated to his campaign, rocked Obama's campaign by posting audio of his controversial speech about blue collar Pennsylvanians.

Fowler's recording captured Obama as he "described blue collar Pennsylvanians with a series of what in the eyes of Californians might be considered pure negatives: guns, clinging to religion, antipathy, xenophobia."

Fowler was, it transpires, not just an Obama supporter but was also one of the bloggers following the primaries for the Huffington Post sponsored citizen journalism project, Off the Bus, stirring much debate within journalism about whether some things can and should be off the record, and raising questions about transparency.

In response to this debate, the Guardian organised a debate between Jeff Jarvis, a leading proponent of citizen journalism and journalistic transparency, and Michael Tomasky, the Guardian's America editor. I  highly recommend reading the whole debate on Comment is Free but, if short of time, I've excerpted a few of the bits I particularly enjoyed below:

Jarvis thinks we should be concerned about the effect that giving and receiving access can have on journalism:

"I believe the rules you long to carry into the new world are inherently corrupting for journalism: We journalists have long traded in the currencies of access and exclusivity with the powerful. But the price we pay is complicity in a system of secrecy. That's what off-the-record talks and unnamed sources add up to: secrets."

Tomasky argues that, sometimes, keeping things off the recorded and sources anonymous actually gives journalists greater, less inhibited access to stories. And he's not convinced that having legions of people recording and publishing the news is inherently better than the existing model:

"But I admit that I'm a little less persuaded that it's such a great and necessary thing that we know every single word public people utter. People say dumb things and things they don't really mean. They misspeak. Whether constant recording of such missteps, and the inevitable intense fixation on them, will over time serve the public interest and help voters make more "informed" decisions is not yet settled in my view. That it will lead to more "gotcha!" moments on the campaign trail as candidates are caught saying naughty things isn't a particularly stellar claim to make for the blogosphere, which actually does far more important work in the areas of media-monitoring and community-building. "

But Tomasky isn't an old school "mainstream media vs the bloggers" - he sees real value in what bloggers do:

"What I like about the blogosphere is that, at its best, it elevates the debate. Mainstream journalists would think I'm out of my mind to say that, but it's true - there are, for example, all manner of policy experts with blogs who shed real light on substantive questions, or bloggers with the intellectual chops to make really interesting and important observations about something happening in the news."

Jarvis' main argument seems to be that anyone who observes and tells a story can, if they remain transparent about any potential sources of bias within their report, make a positive impact - with the results of their efforts becoming "one more ingredient in what it turning into a bigger and bigger pot of journalism stew." For Jarvis, it's not important who or where the story comes from so long as the highest amount of transparency is evident in it's presentation.

For Tomasky, the fact that Folwer got in the door because she had made a campaign donation and then, once there, began acting as a journalist is problematic. There is, he argues, a difference between being a witness and being a journalist. He doesn't, however, explain exactly what he thins that difference is.

Both Jarvis and Tomasky agree that transparency about any possible source of bias, and of how access to a story or it's actors has been gained, is essential to the validity of the final product. Whether we call that product "journalism" or "someone's account", the crux of disagreement between Jarvis and Tomasky is, to me, entirely academic.

conference and events i'll be speaking at

I'm going to be speaking at quite a few conferences and events over the next few months. Do drop me a note if you're speaking at or planning to attend one of these:

• 17 April - BBC World Service, Spanish Section (BBC staff only)
• 08-10 May - Keynote at (G)Local 2.0, New York University of Skopje, Macedonia
• 12 May - Meeting with Paul Bradshaw's students at Birmingham City University (UK)
• 22-23 May - Conference twitterer (seriously) at the European Broacasting Union's RN08: The Future of Radio Journalism in the Digital Age, Paris
• 29-30 May - Presentation at Embracing New Media in Your PR and Corporate Communications Strategy, Amsterdam
• 04 June - Presentation at Social Media Influence (formerly Blogging4Business), London
• 12-16 September - Organising and Moderating a Panel on Social Media for International Broadcasting Conference (IBC), Amsterdam

some useful twitter apps for journalists

Here's a couple of twitter applications which could be useful for those working in journalism or broadcasting:

PollDaddy makes it easy to create and run multiple choice polls on twitter. To use it you simply author a question, set up the answers you want to make available and enter your twitter username and password. Here's my first experiment...

GroupTweet makes it possible to set up groups, allowing members to send a single direct (private message) to reach everyone following the group. This could be useful for production teams, or those working on a networked journalism project, to communicate more easily and privately using twitter.

I've also been using tweetscan to keep track of the use of various keywords (in particular @Cybersoc so I don't miss any replies and, when I'm at a conference, I integrate the conference tag into my RSS aggregation) and twitterlocal which I've been testing on my blog about life in St. Albans.

[PollDaddy link, like quite a lot of the good things I come across these days, thanks to Paul Bradshaw who has a rather good blog about Online Journalism.]

uk political bloggers charged over stats porn

Jemima Kiss, a friend of mine over at the Guardian, seems to have kicked off quite a blog storm with an article challenging the visitor statistics disclosed by Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, two of the UK's most widely known political bloggers.

In the comments you'll find Guido, Iain, Tim Ireland, someone from messagelabs and a host of others all taking bites out of each other over something the vast majority of bloggers and web publishers have known for a long time - website visitor statistics aren't particularly reliable or meaningful.

KingOfMyCastle hits the spot with a comment making this point rather nicely:

[Note: "stats porn", as appears in the title of this post, has nothing at all to do with pornography and is a term used by bloggers to describe the navel gazing that they often do with regards to visitor statistics for their own and other blogs.]

pulling your social media together to form a social map

Loic Lemeur discusses the different social media services and tools he uses as he takes us on a tour of his social map:

Spotted thanks to Adam Tinworth who has a rather good blog covering journalism and social media.

bbc manchester blog: end of the project is a great starting point

[note: I cross-posted the following on the BBC Manchester Blog a few minutes ago...]

The BBC Manchester Blog will be closing on Sunday. When Richard Fair and I launched it in August 2006 we had high expectations, not just of the blog itself, but of how the blog would help us to trial a new model of how the BBC and other broadcasters could engage with what the industry calls "user generated content". Our first post explained:

"For years, the BBC has been looking at ways to engage more directly with it's audiences. We've promoted email addresses on air and asked for photo submissions, we've stuck comment forms on the bottom of articles, we've spend countless hours building message boards and community platforms, our staff have reviewed and approved millions upon millions of messages - and what have we learned? That all this is expensive business.

In the past, whenever the BBC has sought to do something with user generated content we've built new platforms, taken on the role of managing all the content that floods in, asserted some rights over that content (although not ownership in the vast majority of cases) and, some would argue, exposed the BBC to legal and moral risks. Furthermore, doing things in the old way had a bit of a sting in the tail - if a service really took off, and sometimes they did, the BBC would actually face increased costs because our services often don't scale well.

This project is an experiment in doing things a bit differently. Rather than building platforms, we want to help people create their own stuff on existing third party (non-BBC) platforms. Instead of contributors sending us content members of staff here at the BBC sifting through that content in a bid to find the good bits, we're simply going to ask contributors to tell us where they're publishing their content online and we'll keep an eye on it. The BBC won't claim any rights over the content and won't own anything..."

Our new way of doing things raised quite a few eyebrows with some, at least initially, skeptical of our motives, and others excited by our attempt to try something a bit different.

As part of the project we ran a blogging workshop and organised some informal blogger meet-ups. And then you invited us to yours. We read your blogs and invited some of you to read your posts on the radio. We quoted from and linked to your posts and many of you linked back. Basically, we did what bloggers do through their blogs and comments and links - we had a conversation.

We have yet to write the final review of the project, in part because our time to work with the model came to an end a long time ago but the blog has carried on under a different guise. That said, below we've provided a brief summary of some of the key things we've learned from the project:

• Being part of the community by participating as equals, as opposed to participating as a broadcasting organisation keen for new content but not interested in the community, brings with it many editorial and personal rewards.
• Even if you use time saving tools such as RSS, social bookmarking and technorati, sifting through content and write posts that quote from and link to the best bits.
• People don't necessarily blog or post content about the topics, stories and events that media organisations might hope they would - and, in our experience anyway, rarely post about news and current affairs.
• As a stand-alone proposition, the amount of staff time and effort spent was high in comparison to the quantity of content generated and size of audience served. But, when we were able to use the contacts and content we found through the blog on-air that equation immediately changed. That is, in resource terms, the blog was costly as just a blog but much more efficient as a driver of radio content.
• The best way to get noticed online is links and the best way to get links is to give good links yourself. That is, you have to play by the established rules of engagement and, online, that means linking prolifically.

Many of the ideas, tools and techniques we used as part of the BBC Manchester Blog have since been embraced by other BBC Blogs, websites and programmes. Indeed, word about the model we created for the BBC Manchester Blog has traveled far and wide, sometimes taking us with it, influencing a number of interesting projects elsewhere.

As for Richard and myself - well, we'll probably keep on blogging and, with any luck, will keep in touch with some of the great people we've met through the BBC Manchester Blog.

We'd like to thank all of you who took notice of or participated in the BBC Manchester Blog. You'll find links to some great Manchester blogs in our sidebar.

Finally, we'd like to say a special thanks to our good friend Kate Feld who, for a few months at the beginning of the project, became the BBC's first ever local on-air blog reviewer. If you want to delve beneath the surface of Manchester Kate's blog, Manchizzle, is at the very epicenter of the local blogging community.

Best wishes - and happy blogging.

Robin Hamman and Richard Fair