Daily Mail tries to lure users with free international texts

Following the launch of their MailTXT texting service earlier this year, the Daily Mail has now announced that new users will get 50 free international SMS messages to any phone when they sign up.

The intention of the scheme is to ‘build a more interactive relationship with its readers’, a press release said.

According to the Mail, ‘tens of thousands’ of users have already signed up to the service.

Users are charged for the network connection, and a message from a registered user to another costs 1.4p, and 6.4p to a non-user. Users collect 0.5p in ‘MailTXT Credit’ for every message sent and received, and are encouraged to access the Daily Mail’s content and special offers from their phones.

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Spleak apps deliver politics and sport news to social networks

Spleak Media Network has launched two new applications for delivering short-form sport and political news to social networks.

SportSpleak and VoteSpleak will serve up news headlines and gossip to users on social networks and instant messaging services, who can then comment on the updates to their friends.

Both will function along the same lines as CelebSpleak, which offers ‘tattles’ or short snippets of celebrity news to users including content from Hearst’s digital titles.

Content deals for SportSpleak and VoteSpleak, which have been launched in time for the forthcoming Olympics and US presidential election, will be announced shortly, the company said in a press release.

Spleak’s applications, which currently have over 100,000 active daily users, are available on AOL’s AIM, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, Facebook, MySpace and through SMS alerts.

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Hello magazine launches mobile alert service

Hello magazine is introducing two new mobile services to deliver celebrity news.

Subscribers to MMS alerts will receive daily updates from Monday to Friday of the latest news from the website including an image, while SMS subscribers will be sent the latest headline.

“A launch of a mobile service has been long overdue, and I feel that it will be an important addition to our digital canon. A natural extension of a web presence is a mobile offering,” said Verity J. Smart, editor of the magazine, in a press release.

Users will be charged £1 for MMS messages and 25p for SMS, though monthly bills for each service will not exceed £23 and £10 respectively.

To sign up for the service users should text HELLO1 to 62233 for MMS alerts and HELLO2 to 62233 for SMS, or visit the mobile registration page of the site.

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Valleywag: Security hole in Twitter, others can send your direct messages

Valleywag is reporting hacks of social messaging service Twitter in which direct messages have been sent from people’s accounts without them knowing.

‘The messages trigger an SMS message and an email notification, but are not logged in either the sender or recipient’s direct message archive on Twitter.com,’ says the blog.

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Innovations in Journalism – Twittermeter

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 graphs charting keywords being micro-blogged on Twitter.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
My name is Greg Lavallee.  My day job involves web development for non-profits. I satisfy my development and data-oriented urges off the job, Twittermeter was one of a few little side things I did to keep my brain limber.

Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that allows users post short messages via SMS, web or phone and to ‘follow’ friends posts with alerts to their phone, IM client, or the web.

It’s popular amongst the techy set. Knowing that it has a pretty stringent demographic makes looking at what people are twittering about more interesting and that’s what the Twittermeter does. Site visitors can enter one or more words and see them graphed over time.

The programming behind it is a mash-up of multiple APIs from around the web – nothing too custom.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
The Twittermeter provides a graphical representation about what the tech-set is talking about.

Unlike Google Trends, which just measures what people are searching for, Twittermeter is able to capture what they’re texting each other about.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
Lots more. I’m redoing the system now to work with a partner who is already capturing similar data for a twitter search engine (Terraminds.com). I’d also like to track popular searches.

4) Why are you doing this?
Just for fun! I used to do a lot of data analysis and now I twitter a lot, so this was a good way to experiment with data visualization, data analysis and my urge to micro-blog.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Zero!

6) How will you make it pay?
I’m considering trying to have ads that run based on the search results, but otherwise it’s not really meant as a money maker… just a fun project to keep my mind working.

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Online Journalism India: Moblogging is citizen journalism in India

This week’s guest is Pramit Singh, blogger on the Indian new media scene and founder of Bighow.com. More »

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Evening Star breaks Steve Wright trial verdict on new SMS service

A new SMS news alert system from Ipswich’s Evening Star newspaper marked its launch yesterday by delivering the verdict in the Steve Wright prostitute murder trial.

Wright, who was yesterday found guilty of the murders of five prostitutes in the Ipswich area in 2006, is expected to be sentenced this morning.

Yesterday’s alert added another layer to the online coverage of the trial by the paper, which has featured live news updates, video and interactive maps relating to the case.

“We think using it [the SMS service] we were the first media outlet to deliver the verdict. We were also the first to deliver police-supplied footage of Wright being interviewed,” James Goffin, web editor at Archant Suffolk, told Journalism.co.uk.

The text message service, which is being trialled by the Archant title, will be used to cover large breaking news stories in the area and enables newsroom staff to send a message directly to subscribers from any computer or device connected to the internet.

To access the alerts, which will cost 25p to receive, users should text ESTAR ALERTS NEWS to 84070.

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