February 2010
24 posts
2 tags
Google Reader Lets You Subscribe to Any Page on... →
This is great news. The chief thing that was bothering me about the wiki-news idea was the fact that if updates to an ongoing story were all consolidated into one “living,” ongoing story, it would be difficult for users to track updates.
RSS alerts users every time a new article is posted, but if all the updating is done on an existing article, users won’t be automatically...
January 2010
24 posts
4 tags
Social Media Analytics (YouTube and Facebook)
In trying to measure social media performance and cull lessons for improvement, here are the measures/data I’ve looked at so far and why.
Analysis proved harder for YouTube than for Facebook because the ability for videos to go viral makes it harder to identify trends and harder to do controlled experimentation.
Facebook Page
1) Number of fans over time: This measure is primarily just to...
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Custom Twitter, YouTube, MySpace Backgrounds →
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Crisis Commons →
My last post on Haiti coverage concluded that news organizations need to be partnering to provide the best coverage and best resources when a crisis hits, and that they need to have a plan in advance for how to do this so that they are ready to deploy in the chaos of breaking news.
I missed the Crisis Commons (@crisiscamp) project.
It’s not really a news organization project, except for...
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YouTube Makes Major Changes to Video Pages... →
From Mashable.
YouTube is about to emphasize related videos and search even further, meaning that understanding YouTube SEO is getting more important as well.
I’m still stumped by how YouTube analyzes related videos though. I understand that in theory it’s based on the title, description and tags, with ordering determined by some algorithm that also includes popularity and...
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“Odiogo’s media-shifting technology expands the reach of your content: It...”
– Create text-to-speech (TTS) podcast from RSS feed for iPod, iPhone, MP3 player and mobile phone
Not sure I would use this to create a podcast, as “near-human” is not the same as human, and the more real a podcast sounds the better in my opinion.
But something like this has obvious...
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Custom icons for Google Maps →
Literally today I was decrying the paucity of icon offerings on Google Maps (also my own failure to learn advanced use of the API, but that’s another story)
Here are some of the icons used on a map of Obama’s travels during his first year in office. The icons indicate what type of media is inside the bubble.
I should point out that I’m having an issue with this map in FF 3.0...
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iPhone News Apps Compared | Online Journalism Blog →
Extremely comprehensive look at a number of existing apps to evaluate what works and what doesn’t.
In line with the previous link about how to use objectives to drive UGC/social media activities, it seems that again it’s important to clearly define the objective of a mobile app. What do you want the audience to be able to do? (Obviously basing that on knowledge about what the...
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“A useful framework to draw on when thinking about how you approach UGC is the...”
– Technology is not a strategy: it’s a tool | Online Journalism Blog
I like this model, and the post has some good examples of how it is applied
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The Imagination Age: Brazil: Second Largest User... →
Target countries in East Asia/Pacific and South Asia are also in the top 12. However, the percentages are sooo small compared to the US.
Does this mean Twitter’s not worth it? I don’t think so. For me, Twitter is all about reaching out to niche communities interested in a particular beat (to consume/interact with content) and part of a particular beat (to aid reporting). So in...
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Top 40 Facebook Pages →
A list of the top 40 Facebook fan pages in terms of the level of interactivity and creativity they show. By The KBuzz.
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What Makes a Successful Facebook Fan Page (for a...
1) Rules
All normal rules of journalistic ethics apply. If you wouldn’t say it on air, don’t say it online.
2) General principles
—> Commit
—> Engage
—> Value Fan Engagement
—> Be Consistent
3) How often to post
You can spread updates out so that you carry on a persistent but unobtrusive dialog with your Fans. Post too often and your...
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Slideshare: WTF is social media or why news... →
Fun slideshow with some really interesting and catchy stats about how widespread social media is becoming…
What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later
View more documents from Marta Kagan.
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Innovative Haiti Coverage
MediaShift has a great list of news organizations providing good resources for following the news from Haiti and/or helping survivors. Many were able to quickly deploy innovative and useful projects.
I saw some unique ways to visualize information, both in terms of using info/interactive graphics and in terms of making it easier to digest large amounts of information. There were also some new...
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Facebook v. Twitter
Thinking today about the difference in how I use Facebook versus Twitter. Realized:
Facebook is for connecting with people I know
Twitter is for connecting with people I wish I knew
Will have to think about what this means in a broader context, and whether this is a common distinction people make.
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OpenStreetMap →
Alternative to Google maps
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SEO Tips for Search and Social Media
Really good, comprehensive presentation on all the factors you need to think about for SEO:
SEO & Social Media Explained
View more presentations from Dwight Zahringer.
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Too much information to follow? Build your own... →
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Do People Do Better on Facebook/Twitter Than...
In this post from September, Government 2.0 Beta asks: is it better for an agency or an agency head to be on Facebook?
Apparently, they’ve got Facebook fan pages for the agency and for Administrator Lisa Jackson, and are finding that Jackson’s page is growing faster than the agency page (although the agency page has 2x the total fans)
What this post doesn’t point out though is...
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SEO lessons from Google News: How to promote your... →
“First is fresh and new. It’s important to us that an article contain recent substantial information about a news topic, and it needs to be objective news to lead this cluster of stories. So press releases, satire, op-eds aren’t eligible to lead clusters.
Another factor is duplication and novelty detection. And that’s where we try to determine an original source of content from those that...
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Resources on Social Media Policies
Things to think about when writing a social media policy for a news org:
Journalism.co.uk - specific challenges that social media presents to journalism
Beta Tales - principles that social media policies should stick to
Mashable - 10 must-haves for a social media policy
Poynter - framework for a policy developed by Poynter working with Roanoke Times
Assessments of existing news org policies:
...
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Youtube SEO, Video SEO and Optimization Tips for... →
Also: Several factors believed to contribute to YouTube rankings…
title
description
tags
views
ratings
playlist additions
flagging
embeds
shares
comments
age of video
channel views
subscribers
inbound links (links from outside of YouTube pointing to your videos).
