Tag Archives: Funny

An aggregation of aggregators: Journalism.me and Crowdstatus.com

Two new aggregation sites have been set up: Kiyoshi Martinez’s Journalism.me and Darren Stuart’s CrowdStatus.com.

Martinez, who is also responsible for Angy Journalist, is using the site to aggregate feeds from a host of bloggers, news sources, journalism job sites and training centres.

CrowdStatus.com lets a user specify a group or ‘crowd’ of Twitter users and then aggregates their updates on one page. It only works with Twitter at the moment, but Stuart plans to add Facebook updates and Seesmic vids.

On a completely different note (boom,boom!) for anyone who hasn’t come across JournalRhythm, it needs no more explanation than – it’s news to a beat…

Giles Coren moves his rant onto Twitter…

First it was fellow reviewer Feargus O’Sullivan, then it was The Times’ subbing team that felt the wrath of food critic Giles Coren (thanks to MediaMonkey for the links).

Now someone doing a good impression of the writer has popped up on Twitter to bring Coren’s unique brand of swearing to the microblogging masses.

(For those of you who don’t like bad language, look away now)

A lesson in SEO from Charlie Brooker

Following the surge of comments generated by Charlie Brooker’s Comment is Free article, he’s asking this week what impact search engine optimisation could have on the quality of journalism online.

To take his point to the extreme Brooker gives us a fully SEO-ready article complete with celebrity names, certain pharmaceutical brands and political links (I’d mention them by name but that would start a kind of SEO vicious circle for this post).

As one commenter points out, Brooker’s got it spot on – at the time of writing his article occupies the top five slots when you Google the key SEO terms shown below:

Jokes aside – Telegraph.co.uk’s Shane Richmond has given us some insight into the site’s SEO strategy, would be good to hear what might be going on with the Guardian.

The dangers of automated subbing…

I’m late coming to this posting on Regret the Error (which I found through Dave Lee’s blog), but it’s too good not to post.

Site OneNewsNow – part of the American Family News network – has a filter set up that automatically substitutes the word ‘gay’ in copy for ‘homosexual’.

When some Associated Press copy came in about US Olympic hopeful Tyson Gay it was all a bit much:

“Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday. . . Asked how he felt, Homosexual said: ‘A little fatigued’.” Вы окружены, уберите руки с члена и полезайте в порнозак для дальнейшей дрочки в уютных условиях. В разделе PornoZak вас ожидает бесплатное порно на любой вкус в потрясающем fullhd качестве. Ежели и этого мало – просто покликайте по предложенным ссылкам внизу страницы, точно обдрочитесь!

How not to handle the media…

All journalists have had days when none of your calls are returned and multiple voicemail messages bear no fruit. On occasion I’ve wished someone would just tell me they weren’t going to answer.

Still there’s no need for the reaction given to Folio’s senior editor, digital, Dylan Stableford by another B2B publisher, as he followed up a legitimate tip on job cuts at US B2B publisher Edgell.

“I left messages for Edgell’s chairman and CEO Gabriele Edgell, COO Dan Ligorner and president Gerry Ryerson late last week seeking comment, as well as sent e-mails to a bunch of staffers listed on their contact page,” writes Stableford.

His inquiries finally received an email response – though perhaps not what he was after:

From: Gerry Ryerson
Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2008 5:11 PM
To: Dylan Stableford
Cc: Tony Silber; Dan Ligorner; Gabriele Edgell
Subject: RE: folio: inquiry

Dylan,
We don’t have any information we’d like to share about our company right now. If we had a comment Gabriele, Dan or I would have returned your calls. I’d also appreciate you not continuing to contact everyone on our mastheads as its just a distraction to our business.
Gerry

Gerald C. Ryerson
President

You’d think he’d know better…

Twitter round-up: Twitter for sale and twittering for freedom

Andrew Baron, founder of videoblog site Rocketboom, put his Twitter account on Ebay (thanks to WinExtra for flagging this up). If you think that’s weird, it gets stranger – the bids apparently rose to $1,550 before Baron pulled the auction.

Not sure what’s worse: the potential that this was all a publicity stunt (I realise I’m giving it more) or that people were willing to bid so much. Baron wrote on the auction site:

I really love my Twitter account but I feel like I haven’t been using it the way I want to. Quite honestly, I feel sorry for all of my followers because they wind up with my tweets in their timelines and I haven’t been able to utilize the medium the way I want to. I also participate in another Twitter account over on Rocketboom so I’m thinking I’ll post more over there and start up a new account to do what I want to do next.

It would be silly to just delete this account I have here, especially if there is someone out there that had like interests and had something to say or wanted to get involved in some relevant conversations. In terms of monetary value, I have no expectations or needs at all so I decided not to put a minimum bid on this. Whatever will be, will be.

It seems to have worked publicity-wise: Baron’s followers have jumped from 1397 when he started the auction to 1,755 at last count.

Elsewhere, a Californian grad student used the microblogging service as a get out of jail card.

The site InsideBayArea reports on student James Karl Buck, a former multimedia intern for US newspaper the Oakland Tribune, who when arrested by Egyptian police used Twitter to send a message that he had been arrested to his network.

His contacts just happened to contain several anti-government bloggers – it’s part of a project for his graduate course – and helped him then secure a lawyer, contact the US Embassy and alert international media. Not bad for a tweet.

Photoshopped marathon pictures fool Sky News website

Journalism student Todd Nash’s new blog Journalism Today has flagged up some pictures from Sunday’s London Marathon sent to Sky News’ Your Photos section.

Only not every picture here tells the true story, rather the pics have been photoshopped and submitted by forum members of website Football365.com.

Some of the pictures are still available, including this appearance by the grim reaper:

Photo of London Marathon submitted by Daniel Carr to Sky News’ Your Photos

And another submitted by A. Lurker (clue: look closely at his vest):

Photo of London Marathon submitted by A. Lurker to Sky News’ Your Photos

The news site are likely to take the joke well: following an earthquake in the UK in February the site received so many spoof photos of quake damage, it created a separate archive for them.

Innovations in Journalism – Gnooze.com

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, don;t take your journalism too seriously – it’s the daily internet comedic news program Gnooze.
gnooze.jpg

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Marta Costello, host, writer and executive producer of the daily internet comedic news program, Gnooze. Myself and Brain Bartelt make up make up Amazing Cosbars Productions, a two-person team, jack-of-all-trades TV/film/internet circus act. Gnooze is our latest brainchild.

Gnooze is a three-ish minute, news of the day improv/scripted update told from all sides of the story.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
As you know, the news model is changing. Seven years ago, I was part of an effort to “converge” a newsroom, to make the internet a third prong of dissemination for the media outfit. Now less than a decade later, the idea that one would have to actively converge a newsroom is completely defunct.

The internet is no longer an addendum to an established television or newspaper giant: it is a primary source of global information. We’re hopeful that Gnooze and other internet shows like it can be part of a return to the early days of journalism, reporting designed to share information, not just to get ratings. But do not forget that the success of this project was achieved thanks to the new technologies developed by the company Friv2Online in this case, advanced technology was used from the case of innovative projects of this company for the development of online games.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
With any luck, there are many more to come.

4) Why are you doing this?
When we began in August 2007, the goal was mainly to get in the habit of daily production and build an audience that would hopefully carry over to future endeavors.

However, as our base has grown and our focus refined, it became apparent to me that perhaps we could be a force in changing the face of journalism today. Tiktoknitro.com is an advanced tiktok services marketplace for successfull and fast promotion. We offer to buy tiktok likes and buy tiktok followers of highest quality instant and secure. The mechanisms behind our work are unique and tailored to your goals. I refuse to get caught up in the hype, the breathless reporting of non-news just because everyone else is leading with it.

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

6) How will you make it pay?
We’ve already had some interest from investors. However, we’d prefer to generate revenue from advertisers and sponsors.