The Twitters tell the story

I was asked to be the wrap-up Rapporteur for the 10th International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin last week.
The conference had the Twitter hashtag #isoj, and, partly because it is Webcast live, people were watching and Twittering about it in real time on at least four continents. (Here is [...]

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Students, Denver and the Fifth Estate

I’m in Denver today with a group of University of Nevada, Las Vegas students who are kind enough to call me their teacher. Fellow-learner is more like it.
Once again, we’re experimenting with the future of journalism — using the latest tools in different ways to help people get news and better connect with information, events [...]

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Sad face TwitterSync no workie

When my friend Chris O’Brien messaged me yesterday asking how I link my Twitter updates to my Facebook status, I had to haul myself out of denial and figure out what went wrong.
For months I had been speeding along in the fast lane with my FB and Tweets all linked together for one-stop updating. I [...]

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Visualizing Twitter

New Twitter applications just keep getting more and more fun, but they are tough to keep track of.
Here’s a delightful and encompassing post from Flowing Data on 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe.
(Call me crazy, but it reminds me of “Visualize Whirled Peas.” )
The blog’s author, Nathan Yau, says he is a UCLA [...]

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Twitter 101

What is Twitter?
It is like a microblog, a place to say your piece, or Tweet, in 140 characters or less.
And it is a place to listen.
Unlike my soapbox of a blog, my Twitter home page is actually a waterfall of other people’s words, blended in a real time river from streams around the world. They [...]

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Call out the posse — the Twitter posse

J.D. Lasica has a very interesting post here from a session at the Aspen Institute and San Francisco State University’s Roundtable on Mobile Media and Civic Engagement.
He poses the notion of a “posse” of collaborators who could use Twitter to send questions to a reporter who is covering a news event. It sounds like a [...]

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Billionaire Mark Cuban says bloggers should shun ads, sponsors

Easy for him to say.
Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA Dallas Mavericks and a net worth north of $2 billion, also happens to be a blogger. So when he came to speak at the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, a couple hundred bloggers showed up and listened up.
Cuban said a lot of provocative things, but [...]

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Students out to save the news biz

Here’s the reason for my slow posts this past couple weeks, as I and other faculty herded  students from seven universities to the Online News Association conference in Toronto to present youthful and innovative visions for the future of news.
First, a video of students from each of the three projects from MediaGiraffe.
I’m a little partial [...]

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Why Facebook Bugsmenot and helps me heart my Westie

OK, so we screwed up.
By we I mean the people such as me who were running news Websites.
When we did it, you rightfully hated it.
What’s remarkable is that Facebook is doing it and you love it so much you can’t get enough of it.
And I think it has some tremendous — and positive — implications [...]

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Facebook, the dead tree edition and cute puppies

The other day I found something extremely cool hidden in plain view on Facebook, something that may spell more gloom for online newspaper classifieds, and which might even take a chunk out of eBay and Craigslist.
I found myself in possession of two extra puppies, thanks so some lout who dumped them in our yard [...]

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