TimesPeople, the new “social” feature of NYTimes.com, is intriguing. It’s early beta (Firefox extension), so I’ll forgive it for being a little awkward to figure out. Here’s a CNET interview with the developers:
A key element is finding your online friends also on it and sharing recommendations. I tried letting it look for people in my Gmail address book (which is huge) and it turned up zero folks who’ve also installed TimesPeople plug-in. I could use some “friends” to try it out. Hint, hint.
I encourage you to take a 6-minute break and listen to this Seesmic video essay by Paul Bradshaw, senior lecturer in online journalism at Birmingham City University (UK), as he talks about new distribution models for news. It’s important stuff.
Y’know, in the decade and a half that I’ve been involved in new media/online journalism and covering it as a journalist, I often find myself covering themes. In recent years I’ve ended up writing and thinking a lot about “citizen journalism” and “social media.” Right now, the theme is the distributed web, just as Bradshaw emphasizes in this video.
If you want to know what to focus on in 2008, this is your clue.
I just discovered Tweetscan, which is a cool little service that aggregates Twitter posts for user-selected topics. You can go to the site and type in a search term, then see recent tweets (that’s what you call Twitter posts) that include your term.
Jeff Jarvis noted this over the weekend and used the example of a spring snowstorm that was disrupting travel at London’s Gatwick airport. Tweetscan’s search of “Gatwick” turned up lots of tweets by people stranded and bored at the airport, posting to Twitter from their laptops or cell phones.
What a nice journalistic tool! Next time you’re covering something that can be tracked with a common term, search Tweetscan and you may find eyewitnesses’ accounts. You can contact these people via Twitter for follow-ups. Sweet tweets!
If you’re anything like me, you’ve got some domains sitting around gathering dust (and costing annual renewal fees). In my case, projects that didn’t work out, or projects that were envisioned but never got off the ground, are the reason.
I’ve got a couple domains that I think are pretty good names:
Clearmail.com
AthleteMoms.com
Clearmail.com is from a long time ago, when spam wasn’t yet a huge problem and there weren’t many solutions to it available yet. I hooked up with a couple other folks, including a software developer who had a good idea (we thought at the time). It didn’t get off the ground. And I also wonder why I got involved, since it was a bit outside my expertise and interests.
There aren’t many domains left with “mail” in the name. Could anyone use this one? Make an offer (please!).
AthleteMoms.com I think is a great domain for someone wanting to target that demographic niche. Any takers?
The great promise of the Internet is that it empowers the voices and knowledge of so many people, and smart entrepreneurs and others can harness that to do great things. Wikipedia is the classic example of the potential: An army of volunteers, not paid a cent, have created a living encyclopedia that has become an essential and highly trafficked resource.
I think that the news industry — probably mostly due to cultural reasons that limit innovation when it comes to tapping the resources of the human web (the “we’re the professionals, we know best” mentality) — has been largely blind to the opportunities that are present.
Now is a good time to take a look at what other industries are doing to tap the collective intelligence. A GREAT example is this video from Google of Luis Van Ahn giving a talk on this topic. The solution to finding an army of non-paid online users to catalog images on the web — so that doing an image search on Google by typing in words will bring back accurate results — is stunningly brilliant.
Watch this video and see if it doesn’t get you thinking in new ways.
No sooner had I finished off a draft of my January Editor & Publisher Online column (probably to be published next week) on how news organizations must learn to share their content any- and everywhere, than did news of ESPN’s WidgetCenter arrive on my radar screen. (I think it launched last month, but I must’ve missed it then. I’ve added it in to the column.) It nicely confirms the wisdom of my advice in the column.
Check this out. ESPN is now offering widgets that you can put on your blog, website, social network profile, or wherever. Here they are embedded in this blog item.
Don’t you get tired of big corporations that are just friggin’ clueless when it comes to the Internet and marketing? I’m going to pile on along with Matthew Ingram, who comments on a boneheaded move by Hasbro and Mattel to clamp down on the Scrabulous application for Facebook.
The story is that the toy companies want Scrabulous — which is one of the top 10 most popular external applications on Facebook and was created by independent developers — to be removed by Facebook. While the companies are within their rights to demand that, they are profoundly stupid if they follow up on this.
This is another in a long line of instances where a dinosaur-thinking corporation thinks it needs to clamp down because someone is damaging their trademark, when actually the Scrabulous application is helping them sell more Scrabble games!
Ingram has the best suggestion: If the toy companies (which share the rights to Scrabble) are concerned, they should buy Scrabulous from the developers and hire those guys to keep it running. Shutting it down would be a collosally bad move.
Perhaps Hasbro and Mattel will come to their senses. As it currently stands, they look like D,O,T,I,S,I. (That shouldn’t be too hard to unscramble.)
(One last thought: It’s possible, I suppose, that Hasbro and Mattel are more calculating that I’m giving them credit for. The publicity machine ramps up, then they “save the day” by purchasing Scrabulous rather than shutting it down. They look like good guys after all. .. I think that’s unlikely, though; in that scenario they still look clueless and nasty for the short term.)
The topic is the transformation of Internet marketing. (To my news industry readers: Don’t ignore this; it applies to you, big time.) Crowther’s premise is that social media and social networks have given companies one of those rare openings to take advantage of in getting to the top of search engine rankings and driving tremendous online traffic. The window may only last a year or a year and a half, but for those willing to learn how to do social marketing — and do it properly — there’s a tremendous opportunity.
Crowther likens 2008 to what it was like in 1997, when if you knew what you were doing, it was relatively easy to get to the top spots of online visibility for whatever niche you were in.
I spent the last couple years working in social media with my start-up company, and when our initial strategy faltered, we transitioned to trying to utilize the platform we created for social media and social marketing purposes for media and brand companies. We didn’t succeed well at that, and my company died.
Perhaps my colleagues and I weren’t the most brilliant salespeople in the world, but that wasn’t the main problem. (I’ll ‘fess up to not being much of a salesperson, but that wasn’t the case with my colleagues.) What we ran into was resistance to the very notion of social networking and social media as being something companies wanted to explore. They wanted to wait and see before putting any effort or resources into social media or social marketing. (I’m generalizing, of course, but that was the response enough of the time to make me very frustrated by the resistance to what is an obvious sea change.)
I urge you to view the StomperNet video. If you don’t think it’s relevant to your media company, well, maybe you’re in the wrong business.
(Yeah, Crowther is trying to sell something: his company’s advisory services. But you can get a lot of great free information from this video and accompany free PDF report without paying him a dime. So I have no hesitation in recommending this.)
I’m definitely hooked on Facebook, and I think that when the company opened up to third-party applications, that was a brilliant move. But the applications thing does get to be annoying.
Today, a Facebook friend sent me some “Good Karma.” Hey, that’s nice. But, in order to “receive” it, I have to add the Good Karma application to my Facebook profile.
Since I already have 47 applications installed (though not all of them are visible on my Facebook profile), I declined my Good Karma. I’m definitely suffering from application overload, since new and cool ones keep coming out — and I keep trying them out. I periodically go through a winnowing process to keep my Facebook page at least someone under control.
Have we already reached a point where it’s nearly impossible for any application to succeed in capturing a large audience because there’s so much competition?
Over at STLToday.com, Kurt Greenbaum’s Twitter project is live: Today on Highway 40.
The idea is to use Twitter to document the driving and commuting experiences of people as a key arterial in St. Louis is closed for a long reconstruction period. Greenbaum, who is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s social media director, recruited 10 people (plus himself) to use Twitter to file short (140 characters) reports about what they encounter in the weeks before the shutdown and the week after. The road closes on January 2.
This will be interesting to watch. But I’m also looking out for a good example of using Twitter for a big fast-breaking story. I’m not sure how this will work for a more drawn-out story that can be planned for. It’ll work fine, of course, but will the content be interesting enough to engage the audience? Let’s see!
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