Twitter tops BBC for monthly traffic, while BBC Online click-throughs exceed 10m

More than 50 million people used Twitter last month – an increase of more than 7 million from June, according to new data.

The website, which attracted 51.6 million unique users in July, now outranks the BBC and Craigslist in terms of monthly visitors. It has also become one of the top 50 most popular websites in the world, according to the research by comscore.com.

Meanwhile BBC Online’s controller Seetha Kumar reported in a BBC blog post that the number of click-throughs experienced by the site stands at 10-12 million each month.  The blog, posted as a response to the BBC’s first online ‘open meeting’ on August 14, revealed that users were dissatisfied with BBC Online’s use of external links.

Kumar said: “We want to establish new and richer connections to the wider web where they are editorially relevant and meet our public purposes. We know that our users want us to do this and it’s a process that we take very seriously”

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Obama’s digital guru (aka Thomas Gensemer) at City: “Email is still the killer app”

Obama digital campaign ‘guru,’ Thomas Gensemer, has attracted a fair bit of attention with his arrival in London – check out the Guardian G2 feature and this article at TimesOnline, for example. A Guardian video can be watched here at this link.

Gensemer, whose company Blue State Digital built the Obama website and managed the online campaign, was also speaking at City University on Tuesday evening: at an event entitled ‘Obama’s (not so) Secret Weapon: the role of the internet in the 2008 US Presidential Election’.

His talk officially launched the journalism school’s new MA in Political Campaigning and Reporting. A video of the event can be watched here.

Etan Smallman was at the event, and shares his report with us here:

Plain old-fashioned email is the key tool for successful political campaigning in the digital age, the mastermind behind the Obama digital campaign, Thomas Gensemer, told an audience at City University this week.

Thomas Gensemer, managing partner of Blue State Digital, who built the highly acclaimed online operation, dismissed the impact of social networking in favour of ‘the simplicity of email’.

The message is ‘use tools, not gimmicks’, Gensemer said. “For all the talk of social networking, blogs, and mobile applications, email is still the ‘killer app’. Our email list of 13.5 million individual email subscribers was the backbone of the campaign,” he added.

“This is not a story about technology; this is not a story about Facebook or Twitter. This is about dynamic, personalised, two-way relationship via email,” he said. Gensemer said that more than a billion emails were sent out to over 13.5 million email subscribers throughout Obama’s presidential campaign. It resulted in my.barackobama.com raising half a billion dollars in donations.

The mainstream media is ’still included in the cycle’, Gensemer said. “It is often that you’re bypassing them to get to the audience, and then encouraging the media to tell the story to the audience. You’re inverting the relationship a little bit. They don’t serve as the filter any more – when you have the engaged constituency online, you go directly to them.”

Gensemer, who previously worked in the UK on Ken Livingstone’s unsuccessful London mayoral campaign, is currently expanding his operation to the UK political arena by opening an office in London.

Some organisations still believe their audience isn’t online, he said. “It’s no longer the case in the ‘first world’. Even people over 70 – the ’silver surfers’ – they’re out there. They’re willing to do something for you. They just need to be asked. This isn’t just about college kids. This isn’t just about bloggers in Westminster.”

“It is not about magical technology,’ he said, arguing that the key components to successful online campaigning are transparency and authenticity: “You can’t fake it,” he added.

“Do you really believe that the average MP is Twittering?” he asked. “Do you believe that Barack Obama Twitters? I’ll tell you, he doesn’t.”

New social media crazes like Twitter ‘tend to distract,’ Gensemer said.

“It tends to be from shiny object, to shiny object, to shiny object. For organisations that need to invest in deep personal relationships with a variety of people, just doing that sort of scattergun approach is dizzying.

“It burns through political capital pretty quickly because it doesn’t really talk to the people it’s trying to talk to,” he said.

“The lesson of the Obama campaign is to use tools to facilitate a message – don’t use gimmicks. None of this would have happened [just] because somebody was Twittering.”

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NMA: UK government signs up for new media lessons

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Digi bears’ picnic: live streaming from Amsterdam

Get your rugs out in the office, today’s the first day of PICNIC 08, the ‘cross media bonanza’ in Amsterdam, from 24-26 September. This year’s theme is ‘Collaborative Creativity’.

The speakers’ line-up is eclectic, and includes people such as Kara Swisher, co-executive editor of AllThingsDigital, Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of globalvoicesonline.org, and Genevieve Bell, anthropologist for the Intel Corporation.

For those who have to munch their jam sandwiches on their own and can’t get to the Netherlands, follow online. There are RFID games, online social networking, a mobile application, a widget, a live feed, live report aggregated content, and blog, all available from the main site.

Live streaming can be followed throughout the three days.

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Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – trawl Facebook groups for local news

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Innovations in Journalism: Flock’s social web browser

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today, it’s the evolution of the browser with social browsing software from Flock.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hi I’m Evan Hamilton, community ambassador for Flock.

Flock is a software company that is building a unique, social browser off of the technology that powers the Mozilla Firefox.

It takes browsing to the next level by integrating a number of social networking and media services.

While you can still surf the web normally we also bring in updates. Photos and videos from your friends show up in the media bar at the top of the browser, your friends appear and update within the people sidebar, and myworld collects all your online information (feeds, favorites, media and friend updates) in one place.

Additionally, we make sharing great online content easier by allowing you to drag and drop photos, text, and links from any website (or your media bar) to friends in the people sidebar, web-mail, blog posts, and comments.

Flock will automatically embed or link to this content. It also integrates with services like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Gmail.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Journalists spend most of their time collecting research and then compiling it into stories. Flock makes it incredibly easy to have the latest news at your fingertips for consumption and collection.

Its feed reader will pull in updates from whichever websites you wish (assuming they have an RSS feed set up).

Found a piece of content you want to file away for a later story? Flock comes with a “web clipboard” to which you can add photos, videos, text and links to use later. Grab whatever you find compelling on a page and drop it into a folder for the article you’re working on, then access it later.

It’s all contained within the sidebar, not on your hard drive, so you can collect whatever you need before posting your blog or using it in your article.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
There’s much more to come. Flock 1.2 will be coming out shortly, which introduces more integrated services.

Later in the year, Flock will be updating to the codebase powering the yet-to-be-released Firefox3. Beyond that, Flock has many plans to innovatively improve upon your web browsing experience.

4) Why are you doing this?
The web has dramatically evolved in the last few years, but the web browser has not. Web pages are no longer the only destination on the web; now we have photo and video objects, friends, and pieces of information.

Traditional web browsers require you to view this content within the context of a web page, but Flock provides a unique view of this content that makes it easier and faster to consume and share the things you love.

We felt that nobody else was stepping up to really support the next generation of the web, and so we decided to build on the fundamentally sound Firefox technology and build a browser that supported our activities on the new web.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Totally, 100 per cent free. Flock does not and will not cost you any money.

6) How will you make it pay?
It makes money the way all web browsers do: through the search box. Flock has a deal with Yahoo! in which any search that leads to a user clicking a sponsored link generates revenue.

This is unobtrusive and established, and is only the first of many opportunities for Flock to share revenue with partners.

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BBC stance on pulling images from social networks

The ease of availability of a picture does not remove the BBC’s responsibility to assess the sensitivities in using it, according to the editor of BBC News online.

Writing on the BBC Editors Blog, Steve Herman stated that the question of the ethics of pulling pictures from social networking sites has bee raised by colleagues during an editorial standards meeting.

As a result of that meeting a newsletter is produced, he wrote, summarising  discussions circulated to staff to offer guidance.

The advice offered to BBC reporters is that because material has been put into the public domain does not necessarily give the media the right to use it, primarily because the BBC would bring significantly greater public attention than would normally be expected.

The newsletter added that consideration on the original context and the impact of re-use to those who may be grieving or distressed must also be applied.

Legal, copyright and accuracy of the image should also be at the forefront of reporters minds when considering use of images from social sites.

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Spinvox launches voice to social network application

Spinvox is launching in Europe an add-on to its voice-to-text technology that will allow voice-driven social networking from any mobile phone.

The new gizmo will allow users to file post to Facebook, Jaiku and Twitter, according to a post on the relaunched Spinvox website:

“Social Networks through SpinVox is launched today as a key element of the new, state-of-the-art SpinVox website. People can create an account on www.spinvox.com, where they can manage one, two or all three of their networking sites from one, personalised page. In addition, accounts can be set up so that one voice-powered contribution can be posted automatically to all three networking sites. SpinVox expects to extend this capability to other well-known social networking and micro-blogging sites in the coming months.”

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News organisations and images from social networks

The use of pictures from social networking sites to illustrate news stories seems to be a growing practice among news providers across the media.

Yet an internal memo from the BBC, quoted by Media Guardian, raises the ethical and legal implications of using these images:

1) context: these images are published by users for the intended audience of friends and others within their network and not for the wider world to scrutinize.

2) copyright: who owns the copyright to these images – the user or the host site? Not likely the news provider.

While Steve Herrman on the BBC’s Editors’ blog has been posting for a while on the ongoing ethical debate around this issue, many social network users may not be aware of what happens to their copyright when they submit photos to networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Facebook’s terms and conditions on user submitted content are initially rights-grabbing (the emphasis below is mine):

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

Yet the terms go on to state:

Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but this means while the user still ‘owns’ content, such as the photos they submit, Facebook can license these images out. As such news organisations would do well to steer clear of using these images without a licence and tempting Facebook into a legal battle.

For the user, however, it comes down to trust: trust that their content won’t be licensed in this way by the social network. Shouldn’t Facebook be doing more to ensure that this doesn’t happen with or without licence, for the ethical reason stated above?

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Poynter to launch online groups network

Poynter Online – the digital offering of journalism training centre the Poynter Institute – has announced that plans are underaway to launch its own network of online groups over the next few months.

According to the Poynter Evolution blog the groups will be ‘not exactly social networking, not exactly professional networking’, but tailored to Poynter Online’s audience. Content will come from users of the site as well as resources produced by Poynter staff.

The idea is to associate the groups with Poynter’s columns, blogs and seminars so that regular readers and contributors have a space for discussion. Other groups dedicated to broader issues in journalism, as well as those connecting journalists by geography, ‘beat’ and reporting interests will follow.

However, the blog post suggests that nothing about the groups has been finalised as yet, and Poynter’s existing group on Facebook – which has 5,848 members and counting – will be used to sound out ideas.

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