Web 2.0 and 3.0, Social networks and Journalists

Using social bookmarking and other social

networks to monitor your beat

bookmarking sites do much more than act as an alternative store for your ‘favourites’

•use them to:•monitor trends;•track breaking news;•monitor new web content; and,•get leads.

delicious is much more than a web-based ‘bookmarks’ folder.

You can organise and search your bookmarks by ‘tag’You can subscribe to specific tags to monitor

Get notice of pages bookmarked by others in your networkSearch and monitor pages bookmarked by other users

Get notice of interesting links sent by other users

By keeping track of what other people are bookmarking in a ‘network’.

Once you’ve configured this, you can sit back and let the links come to you.

Del.icio.us allows you to ‘check what other people are bookmarking’

•search for a tag such as ‘FOAF’

•find an important page

•click on the ‘people button which shows how many people have bookmarked this page.

Creating a network is easy and is not like the ‘friend’ facility on social networks

•here, you can see who has saved this link

•you can explore their ‘public links’

•and add them to your ‘network’

You can then look at all of the bookmarks being saved

by everyone in your ‘network’. You effectively create a

network of expertise to monitor your specific areas of

interestSearchable by tag

The ‘subscriptions’ tool allows you to monitor all

bookmarks posted to delicious with a specific

tag.

These are my current subscriptions.

You can also create tag ‘bundles’ to monitor posts with a combination of tags

What about other web 2.0 tools for monitoring and tracking news?

Problem is: One study has found that 13% of internet references in scholarly articles become

inactive after only 27 months.

Furl.net offers similar tools

and also saved pages

You can save links

Network through subscriptions to other

users

Organise your links by topic and tag

But, you can also:Join and network with ‘groups’

Receive automatic recommendations

And, importantly, save entire web pages........

Here is my archive on privacy issues.

I can access any of these via links to the

source page or....

I can access the actual page saved to Furl’s

server.

Here is my saved version of the top

bookmark.....

This is an exact copy

of the original page.

Delicious saves links.

Use Furl when you need to be sure that you won’t lose the

page you want to save.

Note the URL: locates the cached version of this page - not just a link to the source.

‘Recommendations is another Furl feature.

Based on your own archive of saved

pages, Furl makes recommendations from pages saved by other

users.

It also recommends Groups you can join.

TwitterThe microblogging phenomenon......

A great social and professional networking tool. But how can journalists tap this resource?

Twitter is:A multi-device short messaging service:

(Your messages must be shorter than 140 characters)A news headline service:

A networking tool:

A way to feed blogs to new audiences:

A way to track breaking news:

A way to keep track of

messages in time and space:

Twitter is - what you make it.

But there are enormously helpful tools that journalists can use for research.....

Keep track of experts and commentators on your beat by ‘following’ key people or key blogs:

The blog Mashable has more followers than BBC news.

Track breaking newsTechnology News.

When iGoogle was revamped a few days ago, it was

easy to track comments and reaction via a

simple keyword search.Track what trusted

contacts are saying about

developments as they happen

Posts on Andy Murray’s

success at the Madrid Masters

on Sunday...

....within seconds of the

win

Instant reaction to events, sports tournaments, news....

Get reports from the scene of news stories .... as they break

‘Twitter breaks the news cycle down to seconds, allowing instantaneous distribution of breaking news as it breaks - faster even than blogs or

television.’ Read Write Web. 2008Early heads up on Traffic

chaos:

And other events such as floods, fires and storms.

Citizen journalism tweets from the scene of major incidents:

Such as the Californian wild fires in 2007The St Louis earthquake in 2008

(St. Louis Bloggers Guild)

The UK earthquake in February 2008.

Major fires.

Twemes.comHashtags have evolved as a

way of tagging words so that

people can follow twitters

on specific subjects.You can search for them in

Twemes.com and follow them in RSS.

Use specific search terms to find interesting and current developments:

Here I was looking at tweets that mention FOAF..

Twitter can be a good source of breaking news but is also a good tool for broader research:

Twitter mashupsUse plugins and other tools to get more out of Twitter.

For example, the Fresh Logic Studios ‘Twitter Atlas’

Geocodes tweets as they happen on an interactive global map giving information on events, fuel prices, traffic and wifi etc. and

locates the tweets and mashes these with other feeds such as Flikr

Pinpoint tweets and twitter users.

You can also find Plugins and other tools that will:

Help you find other people who post on the same subjects:

Twitpic allows you to post pictures with your post:

For more mashups see: http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Mashups

RSS FeedsRSS allows anyone with a web presence to

publish a feed of changing site content.

It is an ideal way for site owners to distribute news.

As journalists, we can exploit RSS feeds so that the information we want comes to us without having to visit dozens of sites newsgathering.

Dozens of guides to RSS exist.

What I would like to cover here are tools that make using RSS easier and more effective.

What is “information overload”?

I agree with Clare Shirky: “If you have the same problem for a long time - maybe it isn’t a

problem, maybe it’s a fact.”

“Information overload is just filter failure”.Use RSS effectively. Monitor your feeds, filter

them. Fine tune the results. Revise your strategy.

Accept that your filters need maintenance.

Your RSS Reader should do a lot more than just collect feeds.

Choose your reader carefully - it will save you countless hours in the long term

Let’s look at one in some detail.....

Newsfire for Macs is a good RSS Reader with some excellent

features for journalists. These are just a few

of the dozes of

feeds that I use

Newsfire will group feedsI can subscribe to Twitter feeds..

And read whole posts

without leaving

the reader

But, most importantly, you can set up smart feeds to filter your subscriptions..

Which lets you set rules for which posts are included

Yahoo PipesYahoo Pipes is the most powerful way to build a single feed made up of dozens of other feeds and

data.

The site does have good

instructions but it does take time

to master.

“combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it.geocode your favourite feeds and browse the items on an

interactive mappower widgets/badges on your

websitegrab the output of any Pipe as

RSS”

This pipe was created to track a brand mentioned in social media sites.

This pipe was created to turn YouTube tags into an RSS feed.

Use Pipes when you need to monitor various sources of news from a variety of diverse

sources. But you’ll need time to configure this option correctly.

Questions?