The events surrounding the reporting of Michael Jackson’s death last week bring up issues with news reporting that I think are worth discussing.
Granted, this discussion isn’t new, but it’s interesting, at least to me.
Twitter offers a new channel to reporters, due to its immediacy and network effects, i.e. it’s very quick to publish and easy [...]
Twitter has a pretty impressive list of news stories its users have broken and covered more accurately than mainstream news outlets.
To name a few:
Hudson River plane crash
Iranian election riots
Several earthquakes in multiple countries, e.g. Southern California, Mexico City
Wildfires every year, e.g. Fall 2007
Terrorists attacks in Mumbai
Virginia Tech shootings
The immediacy and speed of updating Twitter when [...]
I’ve been yammering on about trust as the key component to encouraging participation in online communities for a couple weeks.
Today, Facebook opened its walls to allow search engines to index anything you publish, meaning the layer of trust can be removed, and all your updates *could* be released into the wild.
The change has been rolled [...]
The debate about whether FeedBurner’s inclusion of FriendFeed subscribers is a good or bad thing has me thinking how to determine a person’s reputation and influence.
As I keep saying, trust is the key component to New Web. Without trust, it’s difficult to build a community around anything.
Reputation and influence are the next big things in [...]
Did anyone notice a larger than normal bump in their FeedBurner stats last week?
Last week, the FeedBurner numbers shot up from about 1,000 readers to more than 1,500. I’m behind on my reading, but so far, I haven’t seen this covered anywhere but on the FriendFeed blog.
Some movement in subscribers is common. However, this was [...]
Last week’s post on the 90-9-1 rule was pretty popular. It bounced around Twitter and FriendFeed, and thankfully, Disqus’ Reactions feature allowed me to track comments on it.
So, like any good blogger, I’m going where the traffic is.
The 90-9-1 rule interests me for a number of reasons beyond the obvious applications it has to driving [...]
It’s been a while since I blogged over here, the last few months have been intense adding new members to my team in the national security group. We’ve been working on some really great projects that I’d love to talk about but I’d have to kill you. There is something new on the horizon that [...]
You’ve probably heard of the 90-9-1 rule of communities, outlined here by Jakob Nielsen.
If not, here’s the summary:
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
News over the past couple weeks underscores this theory. First, [...]
I mentioned a few weeks ago that OraTweet, Noel’s mirco-blogging package built in APEX, would soon be released to the public after he made some tweaks to get it production-ready.
Today, he unveiled it. You can download OraTweet here.
It’s provided free of charge, as-is, and requires Oracle 10g or 11g and APEX 3.1.x or higher. [...]
I’m so far behind on my reading, having been on vacation and currently attending WebVisions.
Still, I noticed a post to the Disqus blog from last week announcing their support for sign-in via Twitter. You may recall they also support Facebook Connect, which I enabled back in March, and now you can also use your Twitter [...]
Update: Twitter founder Biz Stone has posted exactly the explanation we (all 3% of us) wanted, and I completely understand the hurry to rush out without fully thinking through the loud ramifications of the squeaky 3%. Kudos.
You’ve probably heard about the Twitter @replies fiasco by now.
Marshall has a good recap and explanation of the “fix” [...]
Wow, that’s a lot of shouting for one headline.
I’m not at COLLABORATE 09 this year, and right now, as Spring reminds those of us in Portland why it’s so lush and green in the Summer, I think I’d rather be in Orlando where it’s in the mid-80s and sunny. Then again, like most conferences, most [...]
April was a big month for Connect, if you consider 195,000 pageviews and 11,000 unique visitors big anyway.
If you’re Facebook or Twitter, that’s a slow morning, but for our little network, which has a capped number of possible users somewhere around 80,000, it’s gangbusters.
Since January, Connect has been growing each month, and I wonder [...]
Many of us work for a large company that may or may not condone the use of Twitter at work.
You probably spend a third of your day a work though. So, how can you keep up with @oprah, @THE_REA_SHAQ and all your other Twitter friends?
Tweet with Spreadtweet (h/t Silicon Alley Insider), the Twitter client that [...]
The title sounds pretty highbrow academic. It’s funny to me.
Anyway, I just read that according to ComScore, Twitter grew 131% in March.
Insanity.
That number doesn’t include international or client-based usage. While I read through my feeds today, I got five new follows, all from people I don’t know. Oh, and there’s the whole Aston Kutcher vs. [...]
H/t to Joel Garry for the AYB reference.
As I mentioned when I enabled the new Disqus Social Media Reactions feature earlier this month, comment aggregation is all the rage with bloggers. Commentary and discussion that used to be centered squarely in the comments on a blog can now happen in a bunch of other places [...]
I like geolocation.
At first, it seemed pretty creepy, but now, there’s a lot of potential for geo-based features that are both and good for you.
I write about geo-services quite a bit, and I’m a fan of services like Fire Eagle and Shizzow and BrightKite and all the others. They all have one problem for me [...]
I suppose I blog a lot about Disqus because we’ve been using it here for a while. I’ve gone back and forth about whether we should keep it, especially after WordPress introduced threaded comments.
Although I’m not in love with the idea of a) not owning the comments and b) taking a performance hit on every [...]
Did you catch the announcement yesterday that the OpenWorld 2009 Call for Papers is on like Donkey Kong?
The call lasts until April 19, and it sounds like the Suggest a Session program on Mix will be renewed in June. The OpenWorld blog offers some tips on proposal submission:
Give your paper a clear and concise title.
Create [...]
I always find it noteworthy when a handful of stories about a single company or service pop up within a day or so.
Usually, none of them alone is all that interesting, but as a collection, they sometimes form a story that I find blogworthy.
This time it’s Google’s Web Search.
Totally weird to see that in print. [...]
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