NPR’s On The Media show has Andy Carvin discussing how a ‘new kind of journalism’ has been created by social media reports from the Arab world. Carvin has been vetting sources and trying to verify individual tweets from the Middle East and North Africa since the recent uprisings began.
Listen using the embedded player below.
The Canadian House of Commons has issued MPs with Blackberry devices and encouraged them to tweet and post messages on Facebook during their parliamentary work.
According to the Canadian Press newswire, about half of Canada’s MPs are already avid social media users and others are setting up new accounts as elections near.
It is expected that the move will improve public access to information and encourage debate.
Mainstream media drives a large number of trending topics on Twitter, according to a new study by Hewlett Packard.
The HP research analysed more than 16 million tweets over 40 days last year, finding that mainstream media accounts belonging to CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Sky, Reuters, the Telegraph, the BBC and El Pais were among 22 accounts identified as the source of the most retweets related to trending topics.
Full study on HP at this link and embedded below.
Al Jazeera has started paying for tweets to promote its English-language Egypt coverage in the US.
Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog compares the move to newspapers using Google Adwords to drive traffic to their sites – except that the sponsored tweets can be replied to and re-tweeted just like any other.
Twitter’s media team says Riyaad Minty, head of social media at Al Jazeera English, is operating the campaign like a news desk.
It also claims that Twitter has helped drive Al Jazeera site traffic up by 2,500 per cent in the last month and that the English language version is on course to triple its number of followers.
Technology site Mashable has launched a new personalised news service: Mashable Follow.
Mashable founder Pete Cashmore says the move is part of a shift away from a “purely editor-driven news site” to becoming a “true news community that seeks to engage our readers in the news process”.
Beyond personalization, we believe that curation is the next great wave in news, and empowering our community to choose the news of the day is the ultimate aim of the Follow project.
There is a lot of so-called ‘noise’ on social media networks. A lot of stuff in general. But it is, at times, a great place to find leads or information about stories.
In part two of a series on “social searching”, Nicola Hughes of Data Miner UK has posted a useful guide to some of the tools you can use to cut through all the noise and find what you are looking for, including Topsy, Kurrently, socialmention, and Twitter’s advanced search options.
When you’re chasing something specific then go to Twitter’s advanced search. I’m not sure why it’s not in a more convenient place on the Twitter site itself. This gives you loads more options especially location, people and even language. By far and away the best resource for big breaking events.
See the full post on Data Miner UK at this link.
See part one – Social searching: what’s out there? – at this link
Benjamin Cohen, technology editor at Channel 4 News, has blogged about the experience of being sent the latest, personalised edition of Wired magazine.
Well, personalised for some. “Opinion formers” around the UK have been sent a copy of Wired, titled “Your life torn open”, with personal information about them splashed over the front cover. Cohen was shocked by the information that they printed – and it is shocking at first. But then it is all publically available through Facebook, Twitter, Companies House and the Land Registry.
What’s shocking though is seeing all of this printed in black and white (or yellow in this case). Everything was available from Facebook, Twitter, Company House and the Land Registry but it shows the information is so readily available. It also shows how powerful these resources can be for private detectives or government agents.
Independent.co.uk has been doing its social media homework by the looks of things, with a report from the Wall suggesting that Facebook referrals to the site are up by 680%.
According to the post, Twitter referrals are up by 250%. The site’s digital media editor Jack Riley puts the growth in part down to being one of the first big sites to integrate the Facebook Recommend and Like buttons.
Another nice touch is the paper has started to allow readers to get their news through social networks in categories that reflect their interests and the Independent’s breadth of output. For examples this means you can like individual writers in your news feed or if you’re a footie fan you can like its coverage of your particular team.
Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog has an interesting look at user-generated content and comment moderation, and the stories they can produce.
Bradshaw looks specifically at Sarah Palin’s Facebook page, which has been subject to strict moderation in the wake of the assassination attempt on Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. He points out that the decisions to remove certain comments and let others stand can be seen as representative of the page owner’s stance and could potentially give rise to a story.
Bradshaw also warns that trawling through comment threads on political pages is not the same as treading the streets. What you see there is not unadulterated content, it is closer to carefully edited campaign material.
Worth reading in full.
Full post on the Online Journalism Blog at this link.
Lost Remote has a post on another media issue to emerge from the Giffords shooting: the spreading of inaccurate claims on Twitter that Giffords had died, and subsequent removal of tweets by news organisations.
WikiLeaks suspects that Google and Facebook may be under pressure from the US Government to reveal information relating to the whistleblower’s site or its members.
The claim follows a court order issued by the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in December and published by Salon.com [PDF], which ordered micro-blogging site Twitter to hand over information about five accounts associated with WikiLeaks, including one belonging to Julian Assange.
WikiLeaks tweeted on Saturday:
Note that we can assume Google & Facebook also have secret US government subpeonas. They make no comment. Did they fold?
The subpeona issed to Twitter claims that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe the site had information “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation”. This information included IP addresses, contact information, private messages and the addresses used to access the accounts, allowing investigators to establish potential connections between users.
Despite being ordered to the contrary, Twitter notified those targeted by the subpoena, WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp, Bradley Manning and Icelandic collaborator and MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir. It is over the request for Jónsdóttir’s information in particular that Iceland has requested an explanation from US authorities.
Assange’s lawyer, Mark Stephens, said in an interview with Channel 4 News that the U.S Department of Justice is seeking to target not just WikiLeaks’ main collaborators but also the organisation’s 634,000 followers on Twitter in an “intimidatory” act.
Yesterday, The Telegraph’s Shane Richmond commented that the news of this subpoena may change the way people react to social networking sites:
There’s also a risk that cases like this one will deter people from using social networks to express controversial opinions.
What has come out of this weekend’s events is the contrast in the types of information and their availability and use. As both Richmond and Stephens note, WikiLeaks’ publishing of classified government information reflects the reporting journalists have done “for years”. The American DOJ’s demand of personal details, however, may impact upon how individuals share information in future. Richmond highlights the warning Columbia students were given regarding public online discussion of WikiLeaks, but could similar discussion soon hold risks for journalists?