Tag Archives: social networking site

WSJ Digits blog: How Business Week is using Twitter’s API

Business Week has synced comments on its social-networking site, launched last year, with Twitter, using the microblogging service’s API.

Users of Business Exchange are being asked to leave comments of 120 characters, which will then be posted to their Twitter account with a link to the site.

Full post at this link…

Telegraph: Man sues friend over fake Facebook profile

A businessman is suing an old schoolfriend allegeding the friend created a fake profile of him on the social networking site Facebook.

Mathew Firsht, 38, is seeking damages from Grant Raphael at the High Court, claiming that the profile contained personal details and false information about his sexual orientation and political views.

Fairfax staff ‘too old’ for youth news website

Fairfax media’s digital arm has launched TheVine – a news, entertainment and social networking site aimed at 18-29 year olds, The Australian reports.

According to the report, Pippa Leary, Fairfax digital managing director for media, Fairfax staff will make some contribution to the site, which is also be linked to by the group’s Sydney Morning Herald, Age and Brisbane Times websites.

However, an editorial team for the site will be recruited and managed by project partner youth marketing company LifeLounge, as the Fairfax team is too old for the TheVine’s intended readership.

Facebook useful to local news? If it opened up the networks

The Guardian may be adopting strategies to make itself more Facebook-friendly but the lack of truly local geographical networks on the social networking site makes it more difficult for smaller papers to make great use of it.

The UK currently has 17 regional networks that users can become part of, here they are:

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The regional networks, which unsurprisingly centre on larger towns and cities, offer reporters a great ‘in’ to the online community on their patch. A reporter working for the Manchester Evening News, for instance, or one of its smaller titles in the Greater Manchester area is at a distinct advantage over a reporter working on a paper in a smaller town:

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Just a brief, cursory glance at the Manchester group throws up leads for several potential stories amongst its 500,000 plus members. The ‘See what’s popular’ feature and the discussion board make it a simple place to seed stories as well as one in which to ask for information and pick up leads. But where would you go if you lived in Burton on Trent?

Burton is a town in Staffordshire that – if you’ve defining it in terms of Facebook regions – is slap bang between Nottingham and West Midlands. Not much use then if you’re a reporter on the Burton Mail.

Burton has 103 groups related to it on Facebook – a lot of ground to cover for any hack – but like many other towns across the UK it has no network and Facebook doesn’t allow users to establish there own networks. Users have to make that request to the site:

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If Facebook gave it’s users the ability to create these networks themselves it would solve a lot of headaches, but don’t expect that to happen in a hurry. So come on reporters on papers in Burton, Derby, Reading, Cardiff, Norwich and the like. Get a campaign going to get your town recognised as a network on Facebook. It can make the day job a hell of a lot simpler.

Howard Owens offers guide (and prize) for ‘non-wired’ journos

Howard Owens, director of digital publishing at US company Gatehouse Media, has laid down a personal gauntlet to ‘non-wired journalists’ to encourage them to be more active online.

Listing the full details on his personal blog, Owens is offering a $100 Amazon voucher (around £50) to the first journalist to complete his internet assault course. The currently unofficiated hack must, amongst other things satisfy the following criteria:

  • Get a small digital camera and start uploading photos and making videos
  • Join a social networking site
  • Learn to Twitter
  • Use social bookmarking
  • Set-up a blog

Financial incentives aside, Owen’s ten-step plan is straightforward and low-cost – a simple way to nudge even the most reluctant editorial staff into action.

Popular in the US, but where are the UK widgets?

While US newspaper websites appear to be going ‘widget’-crazy, there’s a distinct lack of the things this side of the pond.

The way the US sites are using these gadgets shows the breadth of news subjects they can be applied to:

These type of applications can sit on your desktop or feature on sites like Facebook, which now encourages outside software developers to design applications for its users. Answering this call, the Washington Post has developed political quiz application, The Compass, for use on the social networking site.

According to the AP article:

Jim Brady, the executive editor of WashingtonPost.com, says widgets can boost a newspaper’s brand online, refer new readers back to the site and perhaps generate revenues through sponsorship deals.

Sounds like a plan.

Yet on a quick perusal, there don’t seem to be any on the UK’s newspaper sites. Why not?

Has anyone spotted any, anywhere?