Trinity Mirror has made an out-of-court settlement with the British National Party after a breach of copyright in an article published last November.
The piece included a picture of BNP West Wales party organiser Roger Phillips, taken by a party official, which the BNP said was taken from Facebook without permission.
According to analysis from ‘social media scientist’ Dan Zarrella, the best time for publishers to send articles via Facebook is the weekend:
While I found less articles posted on the weekends those stories that were published on the weekends tended to be shared on Facebook more, on average, than stories that were published during the week. The reasons for this probably include the fact that more than half of companies in the US block Facebook, so people can only use the social network at home, on the weekends. Additionally, the mainstream Facebook audience does not use Facebook for work.
There’s more on his methodology at this link.
According to All Facebook, the unofficial Facebook resource site, the social network has this week been awarded a patent for: “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network.”
Essentially it includes the generation of feed stories followed by the limiting of viewers of those stories. As many avid followers of the social networking space know, the feed (also called the “stream”) has become one of the central components of online social activity.
A post on Mashable looks at the possible impact of this patent on other social networks and their news feeds, suggesting:
If Facebook can make news feed a Facebook-only feature, then it drains the usefulness of countless social networks while boosting its own. However, the process of exercising that patent would get very ugly, and we’re not sure if Facebook has a lot of incentive to jump into the snake pit and incur that type of PR damage.
Steve Rubel responds to criticism of the Associated Press for redirecting its followers on Twitter to stories hosted on its Facebook page rather than on the AP’s own or partners’ websites.
As wires like AP and Reuters syndicate their content everywhere, they have struggled to build any kind of meaningful relationship with readers (…) The AP is now changing the game for news by not only going where attention spirals are taking us but by also using their content to curate a conversation on Facebook and – above all – build relationships.
An article on ReadWriteWeb suggests that Facebook has become the biggest ‘news reader’ online – more people are using the site to read news feeds than services like MyYahoo and iGoogle.
Facebook itself has been pushing its audience to use the site in this way by encouraging users to become fans of news organisations and then creating a list that only displays updates from those news sources, says RWW, which goes into detail on why it thinks Facebook could become “a world-changing subscription platform”.
Elsewhere, Hitwise has some stats in response to RWW’s story which suggest that Facebook was the fourth biggest driver of visits to news and media sites last week in the US.
Mathew Ingram is sceptical about an experiment in which five French journalists intend to limit their sources to social media for a week.
Put simply, the French project is a farce and a sideshow. All it risks “proving” is that some journalists – and their masters (the experiment is being sponsored by the French public broadcasting association) – are as clueless as anyone else about Twitter or Facebook and how those services can benefit journalism.
I have just received an invite to the “BBC News, stop talking about SNOW!” Facebook group. It looks like some people think the BBC has taken Frozen Britain a little too far. The blurb:
We have BBC News 24 on in our media office every day. My colleagues and I are slowly losing the will to live, due to the BBC’s constant coverage of the weather. We, surprisingly, are aware it has been snowing. We are also very much aware it is cold. But we don’t need to see people of varying ages from a range of people around the UK talking about how cold it is, and how much they enjoy having a day of school. Or, for that matter, people texting in telling us how cold/snowy/inconvenient the weather is. We are very much aware. There are only so more pictures of snow in different places in the country that we can take. We’re now turning over to Sky News.
The alternative latest news from the group?
It’s still snowing in parts of the UK. It’s cold. Some kids are off school, some adults are off work. Some people have made snowmen. Some roads have been gritted. Some haven’t.
UPDATE (14/12/09): I’ve been told by the Guardian that while its clippings service is integrated with Facebook Connect, it isn’t planning to spread this throughout the site. The site’s principles are Open Web and so wouldn’t align itself with just one provider, the Guardian said.
From last week, but an interesting development: Facebook has announced that the Guardian will soon integrate Facebook Connect across its site.
Facebook Connect lets users of the social network bring their Facebook profile and connections to any site or application. For example, integration with Facebook Connect on the Guardian could mean a user logging in with their Facebook username and password to add a comment to an article; this comment would then also appear on the Facebook news feed.
This move could also give the Guardian valuable insight into users’ behaviour and profiles.
“The Guardian Jobs third party databases were hacked back in October and it would be great to see the newspaper using this as an opportunity to use Facebook Connect for this and other services instead of just commenting,” writes the Next Web.
Consider this a trailer for a bigger piece I’ll be posting from the World Association of Newspapers’ (WAN) conference currently taking place in India on how news organisations across the globe are using social media in their newsgathering and distribution.
An interesting case study Journalism.co.uk caught up with was Vietnamese news site VietNamNet. The site breaks certain stories to its Facebook group before publishing it online.
There are certain reasons and benefits of doing this, one of the team behind the site told me: firstly, raw, unedited footage can be posted to Facebook without complaints, while the website requires more editing; the Facebook community is more ready to comment and interact, as well as drive the story forwards.
The site has different responsibilities in terms of what it publishes on VietNamNet and on Facebook and the social network can allow for more freedom of discussion, he added.
More to follow on this from Journalism.co.uk…
All #WANIndia2009 coverage from Journalism.co.uk at this link.
It has the finances, audience figures and tools to do so, but would the social networking site want to get into the news space?
Arguably it’s already there as a ‘niche news aggregator’ within networks of friends, writes Econsultancy’s Ben LaMothe.
But are there further opportunities for Facebook in local news reporting from journalism students and editing/curating vacancies for redundant journalists?