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

06 May 08 NY Times puts out the call for help on Myanmar cyclone disaster

With the death toll in Myanmar rising following the cyclone that devastated the area, the NY Times used its blog, ‘The Lede’, to put out the call for help covering the disaster. They asked for first-hand accounts, photos and even have a submission form for video.

Twelve hours later they had vivid descriptions of the devastation and pictures to accentuate those descriptions. Below is an account from Henry Webb, a lawyer from the U.S. that teaches in Vietnam:

About 3 a.m., when we were about 40 or 50 miles outside of Yangon, we started seeing the first trees and signs that had been blown down. (I did not sleep during the taxi ride — the Spanish couple slept off and on and I was afraid that if I went to sleep the driver might fall asleep as well — despite the fact that he was chugging Red Bull and coffee throughout the night.)

It took about two hours to cover those remaining 40 or 50 miles to the airport, and it was only in those last two hours — between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. — that we began to appreciate the amount of devastation wrought by the cyclone. There were long stretches where nearly every tree along both sides of the road had been blown down, split into, uprooted, etc.

Almost all of the billboards were shredded, and most other signs had been either torn apart or blown down, and I saw several street signs — like stop signs or yield signs (the writing was in Burmese script so I don’t know what they actually said) — that had literally had their metal poles bent in half by the force of the winds. Many streetlights were also blown down. Many of the buildings had been damaged, and there was wind-blown debris everywhere.

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This is the sort of “open-source” journalism that I think is going to push online content into the future. On the smaller scale news organizations could cover everything from city council meetings to softball games in the same manner, by allowing citizens to watch, report and file small pieces about what they see.

The eroding of the sense of community newspapers are supposed to build could perhaps be saved by again allowing citizens to be a part of the news process. No longer should they feel they are just being fed the news but that they are contributing to the overall process of distributing the news and spreading information.

This doesn’t meant that journalists have to feel like they are obsolete or that citizens are going to take over their paper. It simply means that by allowing the people to have an avenue to contribute then we have more eyes and ears on the streets. We still act as the filterers, the organizers and the distributors of the news.

We’ll have to wait and see how the NY Times and other organizations continue to cover this story and what they do with the content they get.

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Tags: nytimes, online journalism, social networking

30 Apr 08 Facebook, in real life

Disturbingly accurate and very funny. Via British sketch comedy collective Idiots of Ants.

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Tags: social networking, video

24 Apr 08 Facebook chat makes FB even more useful for journalists

You may or may not have noticed that social networking site Facebook recently launched its online, real-time chat service. The beauty of it is, much like Gmail chat, it is integrated into your Facebook front end with nothing to install and no changes to make. You can disable it, but it’s an opt-out feature rather than an opt-in.

Your “buddy list” is populated by your friends as they sign in and out of Facebook. You send them messages just like a third-party chatting client and they respond. Easy as cake (though it is a lie).

What can this do for (online) journalists?

While not having a drastic effect, it does open yet another door for quickly sourcing or touching base with anyone on your friends list. If you want to forgo a Twitter message or e-mail, spotting one of your friends, or sources, on Facebook can be a quick way to grab their attention. With the plethora of chatting clients and different services people have, there may be people on your friends list that aren’t on any of your chatting buddy lists (and who you may not want there either). This could serve to keep you connected without having to make a full-time buddy connection.

The real functionality will be if Facebook integrates a chat room function where people can either chat within groups, events or organizations without actually being friends with the other members. Or, being able to set up temporary, ad-hoc, password-protected and invite-only chat rooms for quick and secure Facebook “conference calls”. That would really make the chatting a robust and useful connection tool for anyone, but for journalists especially.

This of course would open the doors to all of the chat room problems of the old days such as trolls, spammers and guerrilla marketers. I’m sure the Facebook developers could find a way around that though, they’re a smart bunch.

Facebook chat, yay or nay?

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Tags: online journalism, social networking, technology

22 Apr 08 Let’s Tweet it out fellas (and ladies of course)!

Tara Hunt over at HorsePigCow has a great post called Tweeting for Companies 101. Her thoughts:

Twitter can be an amazingly powerful platform for connecting to your community as well as driving traffic to the various properties you want people to go. Having an event? Tweet it out! Launched a new bag? Tweet it out!

The key to Twitter is the level of listening you do as well as talking. It is definitely supposed to be an interactive program. And, in fact, this is where you build the majority of your Whuffie (aka social capital). The more you interact on Twitter, the more people will interact with you, which attracts others to you as well.

Though meant to be directed toward marketing companies and similar institutions, there’s no reason some of her tips can’t be appropriated for use by the journalism business. Considering the forced marriage between the two it seems more than appropriate actually. Hunt lists some corporate examples from JetBlue and Zappos and then gives a laundry list of potential uses for the microblogging platform. She also offers the advice in a handy PDF, so maybe you can print it out and unplug for a little while instead of just staying at the computer during your lunch break.

Check it out.

Oh, and be sure to also read colleague and Orlando Sentinel business/tech journalist Etan Horowitz’s post on why journalists should use Twitter.

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Tags: journalism, social networking, technology, twitter

22 Apr 08 MSNBC launches Election 2008 MySpace site

In an effort to tap into that ever volatile youth demographic, MSNBC has launched a MySpace page called Decision 08. Showing their age and how behind the times they are, doesn’t MSNBC know that MySpace is sooo yesterday’s news. Everyone knows that Facebook is the where it’s at with kids today.

Though I do have to hand it to them for being able to mask as much as possible that it is, in fact, a MySpace page. It almost looks like a standalone Web site, save for the always brilliant, exclamation point-laden comments at the bottom that are typical of MySpace groupies.

I wonder if MSNBC realizes that MySpace is owned by rival media conglomerate News Corp. Kind of sleeping with the enemy aren’t they?

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21 Apr 08 What is ‘Passive-Aggressive Newsgathering’?

Paul Bradshaw over at the Online Journalism Blog has written an excruciatingly long, yet incredibly informative, post about RSS, social media and what he calls ‘Passive-Agressive Newsgathering.’ In it, he breaks down RSS (syndicated content) and compares and contrasts it to its social networking equivalent. He even broke it down into a diagram:

He breaks down each element and what they mean for a journalist. The post is full of links, both outside OJB and within, and is a good primer for those not yet familiar with how all of these new tools can help a journalist. It is also a good read for the seasoned online journo as a refresher course.

Check it out, get comfortable and be ready to feel like you haven’t been using all of the pieces of your toolbox. Nice work Paul.

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Tags: journalism, media, social networking