Heavy duty online distribution

For those of you who are serious about maximising the distribution of your content online you should check out Graham Holliday's excellent slideshare on his Kigali Wire project:

Publishing Kigali Wire

View more documents from Graham Holliday.

Social media roles and anonymous blogging

Media creates social media roles

BBC appoints Alex Gubbay to the position of BBC News Social Media Editor. He'll take up the job in January.

(I notice that Ruth Barnett, former Twitter Correspondent, at Sky News has also had her job title renamed at some point - she's now Sky's Social Media Correspondent.)

Congrats to everyone.

Instant Twitter reaction from past and present BBC staffers on Gubbay's appointment seemed to be positive (although putting out anything else other than that probably wouldn't have been too clever).

A BBC insider (should have) said: "Everyone was pleased that during this particular appointment process Gubbay found out he had got the job before the rest of the world."

Anonymous blogging

After successfully uncovering Night Jack and Girl With a One Track Mind, The Times and the Sunday Times are continuing their campaign to systematically 'out' every anonymous blogger on the Web.

Ok, I jest. That's not strictly true.

In this latest case, Belle de Jour, who led a secret life as a blogging prostitute, did come forward to the Sunday Times voluntarily to reveal her identity as research scientist, Dr Brooke Magnanti.

You do wonder how voluntarily the voluntarily bit was though given that: "...she decided to reveal her secret because it was making her paranoid, and she feared that an ex-boyfriend might reveal Belle’s true identity".

And according to India Knight "nearly every media organisation in Britain has thrown its resources at outing her".

And in a Twitter update Belle de Jour said she went to The Sunday Times "willingly" after the "Mail had their reporters warned off my work premises by the police".

Hmmm...it sounds like Dr Magnanti unmasked herself under no external pressure whatsoever.

It's all making me nervous. How long will it be before The Times family track down my anonymous blog?

Discussing Twitter and Journalism at Reuters

I'm just back from the Amplified 1pound40 conference at Reuters where we were discussing how social media impacts politics, news, and the arts.

Christian Payne (@Documentally) recorded the discussion on our table about Twitter and journalism which included a few thoughts from me and some more interesting ones from other people:

Links from the Archives: 1996 - 2001

So my two day absence at a teaching course turned into a two week blogging absence. Afraid I had an allergic reaction to something I did that day and spent far too many of the following days hardly eating.

Been recovering and catching up in the meantime hence it's all been quiet on the blogging front.

Thought I'd stick up a few links I've saved from years gone by in relation to the BBC, blogging etc over the next few posts. A little history slot if you like.

1996

• The BBC's 1996 budget website. (That's a reference to the Chancellor's budget, rather than the website's quality. Which for the time I imagine was far less 'budget' than it seems now.)
  

1997-8

• Current research: a data set of the emerging links in the blogosphere.

1999

• Dismissed MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson demonstrates the potential of the Web to frustrate existing information gatekeepers by ignoring a government D-notice and publishing a list of alleged MI6 agents on his Geocites website. (BBC website)
  

• A BBC report by 'Internet Correspondent' Chris Nuttall includes a reference to "contributors to a discussion on the Slashdot Weblog". I reckon it's one of the first uses of a weblog as a source of information on the BBC website. If you have any earlier references, let me know.
  

2000

• BBC's h2g2 project invites 'researchers' to keep a blog. The project aimed to "be an unconventional guide to life, the universe and everything, an encyclopaedic project where entries are written by people from all over the world." And it's still going apparently.
  

2001

• While then leader of the Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy, is criticised for not updating his website, a commenter on this BBC article called Nick Jordan suggests politicians should start blogging: "It seems to me that many politicians would find a weblog a useful thing. Tools such as Blogger and Greymatter can take most of the pain away from updating regularly."

• BBC news E-Cyclopedia lists new additions to the news lexicon including the word weblog which it describes as: "a log of webpages a surfer has visited and recommends. In 2001 the term also came to mean public online journals where cyber diarists let the world in on the latest twists and turns of their love, work and internal lives. 'The majority...are not all that interesting,' says weblog-tracking psychologist John Grohol."
  

• Political Correspondent Nick Robinson, or somebody on his behalf, explains what 'newslog' is to the BBC's online audience. It was the first major high profile experiment with news blogging at the BBC: "Many [blogs] consist of links to other websites of interest, often with a comment added by the owner of the weblog. But some weblogs adopt lives of their own right, becoming unfolding diaries. Nick Robinson's aims to having something of both of these - news about and links to things that have happened, and his own take on those events."
  

Links for today on the BBC, blogging, journalism and Twitter

I'm being taught how to teach for a couple of days, so they'll be no blogging here for at least two days. I'm sure all 1.3 people (on average) who read this blog every day will be gutted. In the meantime here is what I've been reading:

BBC

• BBC to upgrade sign-in service with a move to 'a shiny new one' called BBC iD. This appeared on a number of BBC blogs from what I could make out including this Cycling the Americas blog. Let's hope this guy isn't blogging while he's cycling - that would be plain dangerous.

Blogging

• More key findings from the State of the Blogosphere survey 2009 via the Online Journalism Blog. Though OJB missed a couple of key stats (IMHO) on blogs as sources which I covered the other day. But then I missed loads they covered because I didn't cover it all...
  

• More interesting blogging research at LabforCulture.org.
  

Journalism

• Power to the (Twitter) people and the rise of mob journalism. What does Twitter's role in the Jan Moir and Trafigura stories point to in the future? Thought-provoking as usual from Adam Tinworth.

Twitter news (in a luxurious excess of characters)

• Deleted tweets will now remain deleted, (tipping the balance in the endless struggle over the definition of 'deleted' towards 'it has gone - for good' and away from 'it has been moved to the recycle bin'.) Sounds odd you might think but it used to be all too straightforward to access 'deleted' tweets. This change apparently has something to do with the Twitter-Microsoft-Google deals and no doubt ruins the fun of people who used to regularly check the deleted tweets of MPs, celebrities and other famous tweeters for screw ups. But then just how embarrassing could a 140 character mistake be?

• "Twitter was the great excuse of the Western media" during coverage of the disputed Iranian Election according to Iason Athanasiadis. Harsh, I'd suggest. But it's a view.

Revisiting Moldova's 'Twitter Revolution'

I've written an update on the so-called 'Twitter Revolution' in Moldova for the Media140 blog. You can find it here.

I'll probably cross post it to my Frontline blog in the near future (changing the error in the first sentence in the process. Frustratingly I can't do anything about it on the Media140 blog and I believe the person who could do something about it is on a train heading for Bath. Ah well.)

My previous pieces from April when it all kicked off can be found here and here.

Technorati's State of the Blogosphere

While some of us are having a (one-sided) debate on Twitter about the value of Technorati's 'State of the Blogosphere' (and Technorati itself), I'm ploughing on anyway and picking out a few bits that interest me from the first part of 2009's offering - Who are the Bloggers?

Background

• "Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, conducted an Internet survey from September 4-23, 2009 among 2,828 bloggers nationwide."

• "Representing 72% of the respondents to this survey, hobbyists say that they blog for fun. They don’t make any money from their blogging - and only some would like to do so."

Adoption of blogging by mainstream media journalists

"As the concepts of blogging and mainstream media continue to converge, it’s not surprising that there is quite a bit of overlap between the two entities. Despite being perceived by some as enemies of the traditional media, bloggers actually carry a journalistic pedigree. 35 percent of all respondents have worked within the traditional media as a writer, reporter, producer, or on-air personality."

Blogging is not dying and Twitter has made a difference (shock)

"With the blogosphere filled with several different growing groups, there are also several trends on the rise. Professional bloggers grow more prolific, and influential, every year. Twitter and other social media represent one of the most important trends affecting the Blogosphere this year. The blogosphere is also further insinuating itself into the traditional media’s historic turf, as seen most clearly in coverage of the Iran election protests. With more areas of involvement, and more ways to tell the story, the blogosphere is strong - and only getting stronger."

Blogs as sources

• 35% of all respondents said they get more of their news and information from blogs than from other media sources. (This is interesting. These people are bloggers themselves so presumably far more likely to be aware of blogs as a media source than the 'general public'. Yet nearly two-thirds still get more of their information from sources other than blogs. Also worth asking how much of the news and information on blogs owes something to other media sources.)
  
• 46% of all respondents said blogs are just as valid media sources as traditional media
• 69% of all respondents said blogs are getting taken more seriously as sources of information
• 62% of respondents claimed to have been quoted in traditional media.