14 Aug 08 InternetGuru, not a TweetSpammer

Courtesy of Sean Bonner:

Nice.

Tags: twitter

25 Jun 08 Buyouts 2.0

In an interesting twist, William M. Hartnett of the Palm Beach Post has been Twittering his buyout meeting.

Some highlights:

- No details yet on layoff severance package if buyouts don’t meet job cut goals. Just “less generous.” 9 minutes ago from web
- Guy in front row is staring at the ceiling. 7 minutes ago from web
- Separation pay taxed at normal rate, unless received as lump sum. 13 minutes ago from web
- They’ll be “exited” that day. Sounds menacing. 15 minutes ago from web
- Last day for buyout recipients: Tuesday, Aug. 12 16 minutes ago from web
- Max 52 weeks, for those here more than 26 years. 20 minutes ago from web
- Not quite enough for that yacht I was hoping to get. 22 minutes ago from web
- Two weeks of pay and benefits for every year of service. 23 minutes ago from web

What’s funny about this, and what so many others are doing right now, is that for once everyone has no fear about what they are putting online. The general consensus seems to be, “What are you going to do, fire me?”

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Tags: buyouts, news business, twitter

19 Jun 08 NY Times goes social, slighly endorses Firefox over IE

The New York Times has added a social feature to its site called TimesPeople (beta). While not a full-fledged social network, the new feature allows people to create a profile, add friends and share articles.

Its most clever ability is its interaction with social-networking behemoth Facebook. Users can connect it with an NYT Facebook application and when articles are tagged, they show up in their FB newsfeed. As the engineer in the video puts it, “this let’s people who normally wouldn’t be reading the New York Times see and read articles that they might find interesting.”

Again the NYT does it right. They created a new feature, not as an add platform or simply a revenue booster, but as a way to draw more people into the NYT Web site and get their content into the wild. Kudos.

EDIT: Oops, I kind of left this point out.

Right now the app seems to be Firefox exclusive, which may have been an intentional F.U. from the engineers to Microsoft, or it may just be because it is still in beta. Still, I thought that was an interesting choice considering IE still has a larger portion of the Web browser market share (though it is slipping more and more every day.)

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Tags: new media, social networking, Web2.0

16 Jun 08 Twittering your way into a new job

From the LA Times, this guy Twitter’ed his layoff from Yahoo! and it ended up landing him a new job. Sweet!

The embed code on the video wouldn’t work properly so I had to just do it as a link.

Still, it’s an interesting story.

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Tags: twitter, video, Web2.0

16 Jun 08 Online Journalism Review to cease publication

Yup, the OJR is going to stop the publication of it’s Web site. From Robert Niles in the final post:

This is the final post at OJR. After a decade, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication has decided to cease publication of the website. The archives will remain online, but there will be no new articles.

One of OJR’s goals over the years has been to help mid-career journalists make a successful transition from other media to online reporting and production. I’m pleased to say that USC Annenberg will continue to provide support in that area, through the Knight Digital Media Center. I encourage OJR readers to click over to the KDMC website and its blogs, if you are not already a regular reader there.

The decision to close OJR means that I have left the University of Southern California. But I am not going offline. I will continue to write, daily, about new media and journalism at my new website, SensibleTalk.com. I hope that many of you will click over and visit me there.

That’s a shame, I really liked OJR. Niles and his cohorts posed some interesting questions and had some great discussions on their site. I also liked the network and group feel of the site. It made you feel like you were a part of something.

But, the show must go on, as the cliché goes. Thankfully Niles will continue to blog on his own site so we online journalism geeks won’t be without his wise words and inquiries.

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Tags: journalism, new media, online journalism

05 May 08 The Monday-morning awesome

As if the last few days could not get any better, what with graduation, good times with family and friends, checks from the IRS and few other pieces of greatness that I am not allowed to mention just yet, I woke up to check this out.

I am officially the #1 ‘Steve Mullis’ according to Google. Oh yeah, it just got real.

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Tags: google, internet

01 May 08 Today is RSS awareness day

You know the geek demographic is taking over when they are starting to make holidays out of Web technologies. I for one welcome our new geeky overlords and look forward to toiling away in their underground server rooms. But I digress.

According to Daniel Scocco over at Daily Blog Tips today is indeed RSS Awareness Day. So if you or your newsroom are totally clueless about this RSS thing, what better day than today to hold a quick boot camp or primer on one of the most useful and simple Web technologies available.

Don’t feel like explaining it all, just send this video from RSSDay.org around to your team (it’s a little hokey but it gets the point across):

Then have them read Shawn Smith’s post from yesterday and they’ll be all set. Create a Feedburner account for your news organization, burn some feeds and start syndicating. With the final assimilation of Feedburner by Google it is no doubt going to become a more robust and useful tool over the next few months.

So there you have it, spread the word!

Related Links

Tags: new media, online journalism, Web2.0