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The reason the program used could be so accurate is that our word choices and character usages give us away. For example, females are more likely to use exclamation marks and smiley faces in tweets while males are more prone to include the word "google" in their Twitter posts:
Archive for July, 2011
links for 2011-07-28
links for 2011-07-26
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In this month’s DIGITAL REVENUE REVIEW (video below), we expose the choke points killing our companies from within.
links for 2011-07-25
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In some instances, hyperlocal websites or blogs are emerging, and some will serve this function, in part if not in whole. But the trend in these digital shops—as in legacy newsrooms—is to devote fewer resources to newsgathering, not more.
links for 2011-07-22
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“The one I want to tease right now is in-call advertising. The average length of a video call is going up — it’s about 27 minutes now — and you’re doing a lot of things in that time. If we’re talking, you’re not just looking at me, so we have a lot of opportunities there.”
Asked if that might involve ordering a pizza, for example, Bates responded: “Why not? Why not, because we have this intimate relationship, at the end of the call, I share an ad with you? Watch this space. We think this is going to be a very exciting area.”
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For 20 days in June, July or August, every council is legally required to open up its draft accounts for the public to inspect. By law, this annual display has to be advertised in at least one newspaper circulating in your local area, at least 14 days before it’s due to start.
In the past, if you didn’t spot this notice in your paper it was pretty much tough luck, and a matter of waiting for September when the audited accounts were released (although some websites, including Richard Orange’s Orchard News Bureau, do track the dates).
Now, thanks to Eric Pickles, here’s a list of exactly when council accounts are available to read. There’s even a search engine so you can place your postcode and find the draft accounts page.
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In general, the more ideological sites tended to be funded mostly or entirely by one parent organization-though that parent group may have various contributors. They tended to be less transparent about who they are and where their funding comes from. And they tended to produce less content-in some cases generating one or two stories per week produced by a single staffer.
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In some ways, the Enterprise Fund seems like a spin-off of the News Challenge, but aimed specifically at supporting for-profit companies that are compatible with Knight’s mission. The Enterprise Fund, which was officially approved in December, will be investing $25,000 to $500,000 in individual companies — roughly the same scale as what most News Challenge winners received. And the News Challenge allowed for-profit companies to apply for grants. But the Enterprise Fund comes with the potential benefit of a return on investment — which, if all goes well, could have the cyclical effect of boosting more Knight projects.
links for 2011-07-21
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Receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, or on a developing news story, a competitor, or the latest on a celebrity.
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One of the easiest ways to ensure valuable contributions on your site is to make people responsible by having dedicated, engaged, involved community moderators who have the power to delete comments and ban users (in the worst case) but also to answer questions and guide conversations for people who are unsure of appropriate behavior (in the best cases)
links for 2011-07-20
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The National Press Club presents the panel discussion "Up Next — Hyperlocal Coverage: Neighborhood Blogs, Community Websites, and the Future of the News" as part of its "Get It Online" series.
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For example, if you have a reporter covering a huge parade, a bike tour, travelling along the coastline, taking a wine tour across the country, or you want to collect reader photos from a highway closure — really, the use cases are endless — an easy way to get interactive, live content from the field is through a Flickr map. And, you can accomplish it all from email, with no extra apps or training required.
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Through Chalkboard local businesses can:
# Offer unlimited real time updates or deals to consumers within one mile of their location
# Connect with consumers through mobile devices
# Add feeds to social networks including Twitter and Facebook
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# The threshold for news is lower. Misdemeanors, not just felonies, constitute news.
# Stories unravel in real time. Editors post updates as they come in rather than wait for a fully baked story.
# "Google juice" makes micro news have a macro afterlife.
# Ethical decisions are as open to community feedback as the stories themselves.
# Attachment to the community is valued more than dispassionate detachment.
links for 2011-07-19
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Hyperlocal websites, now numbering in their thousands, have been popping up in communities around the UK. Ranging from neighbourhood forums to parish newsletters, these sites are increasingly places where people turn to find out, publish and share news about what's happening in their community. Moreover, research suggests that these sites are adding democratic value to society in a way that many mainstream papers struggle to match with two thirds of users feeling more able to influence decisions locally.
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Increasingly, some of the more established hyper-local groups in Edinburgh are realising that it is not individual blog posts that matter – it is building a sustainable relationship with a local audience and developing it into a community of ‘engaged’ citizens that matters.
And having got over the ‘gee, isn’t this neat’ phase of wonderment at the technology and what you can do with it, this means asking some tricky questions. Who is it that “owns” the audience a site has developed? What is the most sustainable tech platform for it? And who ultimately makes decisions about the sites long-term future and aims?
Ten sites for local sharing
I’ve recently being doing some research into sites that make it easy for people to share stuff.
The things to be shared could be news items or pictures of something happening right where you stand.
But equally important are those occasions for sharing items that are useful for everyday life – tools for gardening etc. which might be too expensive to go out and buy, but being able to borrow from a neighbour would make sense.
The ten sharing services I’ve outlined on this spreadsheet approach the question in different ways so I’ve attempted to identify those differences with a basic description and outline of the Unique Selling Proposition.
If you use any of these services– or know of any better ones – I’d be interested to hear about it. What do you value about the service? What would you like to see more of? Please feel free to add information into the spreadsheet or let me know via the comments below.
My search for sites looking at connecting local people like this is continuing, in part, as work I’m involved in with the site www.n0tice.com (more on that here). If you’ve previously signed up for this, you’ll have n0ticed (sic!) that it’s out of view at the moment.
Don’t worry it’s not for long, there’s plenty of work going on behind the scenes and soon there’ll be a beta version to use. I’ll keep you updated on progress.
Picture on this page is by Britta Bohlinger and viewable on Flickr here.
links for 2011-07-14
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Organizing a community requires bringing community members together and enabling them to connect with one another and create interesting stories to be shared with other members of the community.
links for 2011-07-13
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What if you could really let your fingers do the walking? What if you could find stuff, near you, literally at the touch of a finger? Then, maybe act on it, scheduling your life, buying things and sharing your finds and plans with others?
That’s the dream that the MediaNews’ new made-for-the tablet, TapIn taps into. Potentially – and I cannot emphasize that word too much — it may become a prototypical product for the news industry, pointing a new way out of the hollowing-out landscape into which the news industry has meandered.
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Finally, you should host hangout sessions with your readers and reporters and sources. At least try it. It may prove to be unwieldy and you might go back to something like UStream or CoverItLive chats. But I think it would be great to have a reporter interviewing a source or answering questions, either on one screen or on separate screens in different locations, and allowing the readers to participate real-time and not just as a chat room. It might be slightly awkward, and you might get the one crazy person who interrupts, but you’ll have that anywhere. It might produce some interesting conversations and even break some news, though.
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To re-quote Annie, quoting Katie …the aim “is to unite bloggers (from all sectors) in a joint endeavour to share lessons learned and create a bank of long but not forgotten blog posts that deserve to see the light of day again”.
Life is sometimes easier with a little structure and there are rules to the project:
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There’s just this whole level of news that’s important to people that’s not really being covered. Neighborhood-level, quality-of-life, that sort of thing. That’s the role we’re trying to fill.
