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.)
Related LinksTags: 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.
Related Links01 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!
Tags: new media, online journalism, Web2.0
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