Posted to Twitter & Twitpic

For any reporter and editor when an important event occurs — especially a local one — watching Twitter and/or Friendfeed is a great information-gathering tool. Yes, as Scoble notes, there’s a lot of noise and you don’t necessarily know who to trust. But the more you use Twitter and/or Friendfeed, the more you’ll come to know the people who you follow — so over time you can pick up a sense of what sources of instant Twitter/Friendfeed news you might trust.

Anyone can do this, of course. When the US Airways plane crashed into the Hudson River earlier today, lots of people posted to Twitter, or added eyewitness photos to Flickr, or other social networks. For an editor sitting in a newsroom overseeing coverage of this event, monitoring the social media stream of eyewitness reports could be a useful addition to the staff reporting arsenal already assigned to the crash and calling in details.

Scoble is a fan of Friendfeed, and it is indeed a useful service for something like this plane crash, since it scans a number of social media outlets. For example, check out this Friendfeed search for “Hudson crash”, which includes all sorts of stuff — from short reports by people who witnessed the crash, to an eyewitness on a ferry who took a close-up of the plane being evacuated and posted it to Twitpic via a Twitter post. (The photo became so popular that it overwhelmed the tiny Twitpic service.)

I think Scoble is correct in saying that the now wide popularity and use of services like Twitter and Friendfeed are the front lines of news. Most of the time for unexpected events, like plane crashes, eyewitnesses are going to be there before professional journalists.

A new role for journalists is to tap into this instant stream of eyewitness accounts. Editors can perform a public service by filtering out the best and most accurate of these early “citizen” reports, saving online users the trouble of combing through all the junk to find the nuggets.

While the app is still in its early stages, its developers are adding new features, including “social” ones where you can share your workout stats and maps with all other Runkeeper users or just your friends who also use the app.

Runkeeper developer Jason Jacobs explained in his blog post how this can make you fitter and a better athlete. He describes taking Runkeeper out on a run and for the first time sharing his results:

“The whole time I was running, all I could think about was all of you seeing my results and wanting to put in a good showing. Whether ‘all of you’ is one person or millions of people that are actually seeing these results isn’t so important. What is important is that, because I knew I would be making this data public, it lit a fire under my butt to push myself harder! This is exactly the feeling we are trying to harness — using the power of social to motivate the individual to train harder.

Most amateur athletes, including those of us who do it just to stay fit and not so much to compete, know how hard it is to keep up the training routine and schedule without some social pressure, like a running buddy who you don’t want to let down. Digital social media also can make you a fitter, more disciplined athlete!

Something I noticed some time ago with my teen daughter is that e-mail is used in limited ways. She and her friends mostly communicate via social networks (MySpace and Facebook, in her case) and phone text messaging and instant messaging on the computer. If I send her an e-mail and want her to read it, I need to alert her to check her in-box.

However, with the 11-year-old, e-mail is big. The “big” social networks haven’t caught on with her and her friends — though they do get into some social networking activity via sites like Neopets, Club Penguin, Webkinz, etc. Of course, technically you’re supposed to be 13 to get a MySpace account. And Facebook accounts you can’t get unless you’re at least in high school, so that’s a big part of it.

So this is just a little tip for anyone targeting kids with content or services. When you hear that today’s kids don’t use e-mail so much and that it’s a communications preference more for the older generations, remember that that generalization doesn’t apply as much to the pre-teen crowd.

For more info about kids’ and teens’ online habits, check out this new research funded by the MacArthur Foundation.

“I couldn’t agree more with your assessment. I am a 25 year-old news junkie and Web content delivery manager for a weekly newspaper company in Philadelphia. Personally, I am able to consume most of my ‘news’ from the home screen of my iPhone.

“That includes the NYTimes and NPR apps for iPhone, a Digg app to see what the Digg community is pushing, CNN to tune into what’s considered ‘news’ by one of the big cable players, and Google Reader (any number of Web design & tech blogs, newspaper industry sites, Reuters, about 2 dozen other sites I read).

“But what I find myself tapping just as often as Google Reader or NYTimes are Twitter and Facebook. You’re right; it’s addictive. In a few seconds, I can see what friends are tweeting or posting as their ‘status’ on Facebook. It’s even called a ‘News Feed’ on Facebook.

“Before reading your column, however, I hadn’t thought of it that way — these status posts and tweets are just as much news to me as headlines about the Iraq war or tech news.

“Newspaper companies will have to find a way to leverage this. You correctly point out that the ‘open’ nature of (most) social networks and their API’s should help enable this. I would also add that recent moves towards a universal log-in (OpenID, etc.) should also make this vision of ‘news’ closer to a reality.

“Hopefully publishers will catch on before it’s too late.”

I don’t get it. It strikes me that the best model is incredibly simple, and powerful: Insert a “TwitterAd” entry every 50 entries or so. Kunz thinks “users would rebel.” I doubt it. That’s a minor price to pay for a free service, and most folks will understand that it’s a necessity for the service to continue to serve them.

And if you don’t like the ads, then pay an annual fee (say, $20) for the ad-free version.

There’s been concern that advertising in social networks doesn’t work that well, but that’s not a concern here. I’m reminded of something I learned in doing some Eyetrack research a few years ago for the Poynter Institute. When ads were put directly in the editorial flow of content, they were seen and acknowledged much more than when off to the side.

And when an ad is designed in the same way as surrounding editorial content (color, font, etc.), it’s noticed even more. “TwitterAd” tweets would fit those criteria and my educated guess is that the ads would be incredibly effective, especially if Twitter adds contextualization to the mix (or select-the-type-of-ads-you-want schemes a la WeatherBug).

I think this points out a problem and an opportunity for newspapers. Problem: they don’t offer people the micro-local and personal news and information that makes a difference in people’s lives. Opportunity: they need to offer the micro-local and personal news and information that makes a difference in people’s lives.

Do I really mean to get THAT local? Yeah, I do think there’s great value in a digital monitoring system that brings me news about people I know, my neighbors, my neighborhood, schools my kids attend, organizations I belong to, interest groups (e.g., sports, hobbies) that I belong to or follow, etc. I mean individuated, personalized news feed.

That exists to a degree already on Facebook, since personal news from my Facebook friends gets fed through my Newsfeed there. Local news organizations might use that as a model, developing individuated-news services that monitor news from a wide variety of sources — even Twitter, the micro-blogging service/social network.

For a while now I’ve been advocating that local news organizations, especially newspapers, start doing a better job of tapping all the great sources of information about their communities: local bloggers, institution websites and newsletters, government agencies’ websites and databases, etc. Yann’s misfortune, and how I found out about it, reminded me that Twitter and other similar services also are a source of “news” that can be monitored and leveraged by a reinvented local news organization when it makes a commitment to individuated news for its community members.

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.

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.

]]> http://steveouting.com/2008/05/08/distributed-acts-of-media/feed/ 6 http://steveouting.com/2008/04/07/tweetscan-journalistic-tool/ http://steveouting.com/2008/04/07/tweetscan-journalistic-tool/#comments Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:54:24 +0000 Steve Outing http://www.steveouting.com/tweetscan-journalistic-tool.html 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!

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?