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Internews: Journalists in the Middle East meet to discuss blogging and social media

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Middle Eastern journalists and bloggers have been meeting to discuss the role of social media in their countries. Tunisian and Palestinian journalists and bloggers have had discussions and their Egyptian counterparts are due to meet next week. This article on Internews says young Palestinians have more trust in social media than in traditional media. The post also discusses the development and importance of social media courses in Palestinian universities.

A week earlier [before the Tunis gathering], more than 40 Palestinian journalists gathered for a roundtable on the changes in social media and its impacts on society and journalism.

Several of those present said that young people turn to social media because mass media has failed to play its watchdog role. “Youth don’t trust the media in Palestine. It does not relate to them, it does not give a voice to the people. We trust information on Facebook more because it comes from real people,” said journalist Ameed Shihata.

#ds10: Ultraknowledge – search and visualising the news

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Why does search have to produce the same set of results that we always get?

One of Andrew Lyons’, commercial director of Ultraknowledge (UKn), opening questions at the Digital Storytelling conference last week as he talked delegates through UKn’s work with the Independent.

The Independent’s NewsWall, launched in January, is a new way of organising stories and navigating through them. It provides a “visual documentation” of a topic and what’s happened in that subject area. (Similar efforts are being made by Daylife’s technology and the Guardian’s News Zeitgeist.

When searched, the wall will return 30 picture-led stories as results, and figures for dwell time on the wall are proving interesting, said Lyons.

The next part will be the ability to save my search for a topic to my Facebook page and then only have it update when it’s relevant to me.

UKn can now start to produce sponsored NewsWalls around events such as the forthcoming World Cup or general election. It will also be opening up the archive of content available through the Independent’s NewsWall from two years to the full 23 years of its history.

UKn has already worked with other publishers to create more intelligent and visually organised search results pages, such as those produced by an initial search on Metro.co.uk.

But the firm wants to take this a step further, by helping news organisations build topic pages for breaking news items by cleverly tagging and organising archived work, and through its latest – and yet-to-be launched project – StoryTriggers – a way to help journalists and news organisations find new leads and spot breaking news trends.

Sometimes the story that you’re after isn’t on your beat, so how do you find it. But when you’re dealing with news its changing, fast – how do you SEO for this? How do you tag it and relate it to what’s happened in the past and what’s happening in the future? (…) We want to be an innovation lab for publishers.