journalism | Maggie Fox

September 30, 2011 / Comments Off / Posted in: Blog, Social Media Roundup

As Facebook has been on our front page for the past two weeks,we feel like we’ve missed out some big movements in the social media world. We certainly have some catching up to do, so does Google.

On September 20^th, two days before Facebook’s f8 conference, Google+ announced it is now open to the public, and has 9 new features, which added up a total of 100 updates since it launched three months ago.

Hangouts on your phone finally works on Android(version 2.3 or greater) powered mobile phones. We can now video chat with friends from our Circle or join other people’s conversation while on the go.
Hangouts On Air allows us to speak to a large audience, or alternatively, view as a spectator.
Hangouts with extras include several net new functions which enable us to do things more than chatting.
- Share screen with our friends through Screensharing
- Draw, doodle or just scribble together on Sketchpad
- Google Docs is now supported on Google+
- Named Hangouts for when we want to join or create a public a private hangout about a certain topic
The Hangouts API is now available to developers to build new apps and games off of
Search in Google+ lets us search for relevant people and posts, as well as popular content from around the web

After Google+’s announcement, research estimated that the site has received about 15 million U.S visitors last week, which was 13 TIMES more traffic then the week before! Furthermore, according to a Google+ statistician Paul Allen:

“The growth rate has skyrocketed to rates we only saw during the first week of its field test”

Registered users on Google+ went up 30% in two days to an estimated 43.4 million – the biggest growth since its first beta launch three months ago.

Now let’s get back on Facebook, as today is the day Timeline is going to be rolled out to regular users (if you have signed up earlier). Be prepared!

Social Media Group’s upcoming webinar with Social Media Today!

We are proudly to present our next webinar with Social Media Today. Tom Foremski and Steven Rosenbaum will join us to discuss:

Is Curation the New Journalism?

Where journalists used to be the trusted agents for reporting on the ground and fact-checking stories before publication, every Web user is now a potential journalist. And as the deluge of user-generated information gathers strength, finding out what’s important to people in their private and working lives becomes more and more challenging. How to sort between truth, half truth and falsehood? Technical filtering can’t (yet) match human capacity to discriminate between useful content and garbage. This is the increasingly vital role of the online curator. The discussion will examine to what extent curation is becoming integral to journalism, and whether bloggers and tweeters can adequately play the the reporting role of journalists.

We’ll cover the following questions, as well as your own:

What’s the difference between curation and journalism?
How does factchecking work in the blogosphere?
What are emerging best practices for online curators?
Can the hive mind of the Internet match the formal editorial structure of a traditional news organization when it comes to producing accurate reporting and analysis of current events?

Social Media Roundup for September 24, 2010

September 24, 2010 / Comments Off / Posted in: Blog, Social Media Roundup

Its a bird, its a plane, its the Social Media Group roundup.

Google Search with My Location Experimental Ad: “Pizza. Pizza. Pizza.”

Via The Daily What:

Google just released this experimental ad to promote geolocation-enable mobile search in which a guy says the word “pizza” for ten minutes straight. Some intrepid soul who managed to tough out the whole thing reports that Easter Eggs abound:

Click on the basketball at 0:42, on the word “azzip” at 1:22, on the fire at 1:47, on the word “Florida” at 4:39, on the horse head at 5:49, on the dinosaur at 6:36, on Santa at 7:58 and on the toast at 9:06.

How long can you last?
[huffpo.]

Social Media for Social Good: Dan Savage Creates YouTube Channel to Help Gay Teens

Michelle’s pick this week is this incredible project:

(via Mashable):

Sex advice columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage has launched a YouTube channel called “It Gets Better.” He’s soliciting videos from fans who want to provide support and encouragement to gay teens who face adversity, discrimination and bullying in high school.

Savage announced the new channel today in episode 205 of his podcast. He’s also hinted on his blog that further explanation will come in the next issue of his sex advice column “Savage Love.” The channel was created after Indiana teenager Billy Lucas committed suicide in response to bullying from his classmates, who assaulted him with epithets and told him to go home and kill himself because he was gay.

Each video will feature a role model sharing personal experiences that illustrate that life for gays and lesbians improves beyond high school.

Twitter for real-time journalism: Did Mother Jones coverage take it too far?

Hasdeep pointed me to Phil Bronstein’s column at HuffPo:

Everyone’s a critic in the digital mosh pit. But the venerable and politically earnest magazine Mother Jones was accused last week of “retweeting rape.”

So what really happened? And is a “rape feed” something we shouldn’t do, just because it hasn’t been done before?

Mother Jones reporter Mac McClelland, currently in Haiti, decided to live-tweet her day spent with a Haitian rape victim trying to get medical care. The power and immediacy of the real-time, staccato exposition, punctuated with emotion … was unpleasantly jarring for some followers used to the magazine’s typically lengthy, contextual articles.

Data Mining of social networks: insights in social connections

This article about network data mining from The Economist captured Mark’s imagination:

“Of course, companies have long mined their data to improve sales and productivity. But broadening data mining to include analysis of social networks makes new things possible. Modelling social relationships is akin to creating an “index of power”, says Stephen Borgatti, a network-analysis expert at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. In some companies, e-mails are analysed automatically to help bosses manage their workers. Employees who are often asked for advice may be good candidates for promotion, for example.”

List of the Week: The Seven Best “Why Facebook is Down” Cracks

Over at GigaOm Mathew Ingram compiles seven of the most awesome cracks made during this week’s Facebook outage including this doozy: