Hurricane Twitter

The Biloxi Sun Herald twittered Hurricane Gustav. The Wilmington Star-News twittered Hanna.

Leslie Wilkinson twittered the July 30 earthquake in California. She was among the first in the nation to do so.

So obviously, news organizations and individuals are seeing the power in Twitter.

Plenty of examples exist on how to use it, and plenty of people have written about the mechanics.

So try it out. Create an account and follow some of these people to see what's going on: @ckrewson @robyntomlin, @andrew_dunn, @saragregory, @shanbow, @smalljones, @romustgo, @johnrobinson, @cnewvine (AP!), @rmathieson, @acarvin, @CNN_Newsroom, @SNOhurricane, and even @frankdeloache in Salisbury.

Read @andrew_dunn's case study of Twitter during Hurricane Gustav. Check how @ckrewson separates his "personal brand" from a professional brand at @PhillyInquirer. @KaylaC does the same separation in Charlotte with @WCNC.

Beyond those mechanics and examples exist some intriguing points about networks, community, professional and personal brands and separating the two, boundaries among parents and children and managers and employees, self-awareness, self-obsession, transparency, privacy, the Dunbar number (Google it), signal-to-noise ratio....

Start thinking about all that while reading Clive Thompson in the New York Times magazine on digital intimacy.

I could go on. But I won't right now, because I crave some real face-to-face community. But let's talk about it more. And try it.

Connecting the dots

The lead story in The Observer today was a good old-fashioned pork-barrel project with a new twist. The Associated Press Managing Editors Association created a project to train reporters in how to use new online research tools through the Sunlight Foundation. The Observer's McClatchy's Lisa Zagaroli participated and reported on government pork projects in North Carolina.
It's a step forward for the group of newspaper leaders, especially since the Sunlight Foundation is led and funded by new media people: Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, and Pierre Omidyar, founder of EBay.
We live in interesting times.
And a second connect-the-dot: The Observer's Forrest Brown spoke Saturday in Greensboro for the Society of Professional Journalists' Citizen Journalism Academy, about reporting and writing basics. I haven't talked with him about it yet, but have it on strong (Twitterfriend) authority that he was good and funny. I can't wait to hear more.
So connect the dots, and think about the nonprofit, nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation's mission. They seek to use:
“new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. We are unique in that technology and the power of the Internet are at the core of every one of our efforts."

And another thing: A relationship button?

See how easy it is to add Twitter to a site?

OK, so I'm coming a bit late to this whole Twitter thing and am still trying to figure out its appeal potential ...

But, imagine if every reporter were texting updates from meetings, from crime scenes ... from the newsroom. And all those Tweets were collected on a page on Charlotte.com ... Talk about the latest in breaking news!

We all know frequent updating draws users back to news Web sites. With enough of the right people contributing to a Twitter stream, you can't get much more frequent than this...

Thoughts?

Hat tip to WCNC's excellent Twittering of the election. But does it just have to be for "big nights"?

Lessons and links from science bloggers

Bloggers from the 2008 N.C. Science Blogging Conference have returned from last weekend's chilly event to their homes and keyboards, sharing their presentations, photos and thoughts online. What's so cool is that anyone can continue to learn from this conference from the comfort of their own monitors, wherever they might be, and whenever they can.

In addition, the conference has a heavy dose of participation from the
smart minds at Science Blogs, supported in part by Seed magazine. The networked circle of science represents one new way of aggregating and filtering information beyond the traditional methods of big-company media sites. NYU media professor Jeff Jarvis has made much of Glam for doing the same thing (perhaps with a larger emphasis on advertising and content that attracts ads). Glam doesn't impress me; its college fashion blog can't hold a candle to the Daily Tar Heel's The Good, The Bad and The Fab.

Oh but wait. We were talking journalism and science, not fashion.

I respectfully submit that Science Blogs serves as a better model for distributing, sifting and making findable strong content than sites like Glam. Ads play a supporting role, rather than being the goal.

And conference organizers are also demonstrating a new model of sharing strong content with "reverse publishing," creating a downloadable or paperback book of the best science blog posts of 2007. You can read the background of how the idea came to be at Bora Zivkovic's A Blog Around the Clock. The "publisher" of the compilation is Lulu, and the editors are Zivkovic and Reed Cartright, with input from the readers of Zivkovic's blog.

But back to the conference. The main jumping-off point of the group is a wiki.
Below are random links gleaned from various conference bloggers. They're filtered through what I find interesting and not too far above my head. Most bear a relationship to journalism; some don't. Of course, your mileage may vary.

How to report scientific research to a general audience
From Cognitive Daily, out of Davidson.
(Alternate title: How to report anything to a general audience.)
My favorite line:

"Visuals need the same treatment as words."

Peer-reviewed research
(How to dig through all the crap to find the ponies.)
(Or how wearing a badge can change the life of your blog.)
Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research
Research Blogging


Citizen Science
(Who knew? We thought it was all about us, the journalists and citizen journalists.)
Purple loosestrife detectives and reporters, at the U.S. Geologic Survey.
Cornell University's Citizen Science toolkit from a citizen science conference.

Public Library of Science and one of its online peer-reviewed journals, PLOS One.
Again, who knew?

A ring of science blogs
(Fix a big cup of something and stay awhile).

Politics
Questions for the next president.

PDF organization
Organize all your pdfs and papers as if they were songs on Itunes. Unbelievably valuable for people in distance-learning classes, but only if they're smart enough to have Macs. At Papers.


The Institute for Southern Studies
I remember this group from my days as a student journalist in Georgia. It's great to see they're still producing research galore. One of their most recent reports is about the "devastating costs" North Carolina is suffering from war, and it comes after the launch of the N.C. Military Foundation, a public-private entity to lure more defense contracts to North Carolina.
This site is worth digging into, keeping in mind the organization does have an agenda. It's intriguing to think about comparing its research with that available through The Sunlight Foundation and Taxpayers for Common Sense at Earmark Watch Dot Org.

Flickr groups to identify plants
(These will change my life and possibly put my aunt, The Plant Oracle of the Mountains, out of business).
ID Please and What plant is that?

Invasive species blog
(And you thought mussels only stopped development.)
Invasive Species.

From FaceSpace to network neutrality

Final class projects for Deb Aikat's global communications online class at UNC are in (mostly).
If you're up for reading class papers, you probably can find something interesting from this most diverse class. Classmates link to each other, and the blogs have abstracts about the topics, so you can dig around as much as you like or come back later. Full papers are linked pdfs.

Subjects include:
Hip Hop as a voice for youth in the global village
Supporting Network Neutrality
Collecting Secrets: A look at Internet privacy issues
Digital communications in the K-12 curriculum
Newspapers: Here Today, Here Tomorrow
Social networking issues
The impact of citizen journalism on mainstream media
Paying for News
E-Government
Newspapers: Adapt or Die
Democracy for Mexico's Press?
Child pornography and Internet regulation
Arab film censorship
Animal rights activists and communication technology
Planned Parenthood: Federalizing an Idealogy
Flaws in an International Nutrition Icon: The Food Pyramid

Local calendars: Our neighbors want them

As the busy holiday and art seasons approach, and as the political year of 2008 nears, our neighbors are crying out for decent social calendar tools.
Someone, or several someones, will figure out the right tools, and then steal our ads or find another way to make money from it, if we're not there first.
I could include many links of what some papers are doing, but the reality seems to be no one has it right yet. Let's keep looking and sharing.
If we share information, we can evolve faster.

More praise for Fort Myers

The Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press, which seems to be an incubator for new ideas at Gannett, won APME's first Innovator of the Year award for its "culture of innovation." This is the paper that has mobile journalists armed with laptops, audio recorders and wireless Web connections out patrolling neighborhoods for "hyperlocal" news. The paper also earned a lot of buzz (on this blog and elsewhere) for its crowdsourced story on sewer problems.

I like the idea of both these things -- allowing community members to get involved with investigating a story and unleashing reporters from their desks. But, man, it seems Fort Myers is getting a lot of traction from one story a year ago and a lot of ribbon-cutting stories. (Have you heard of other crowdsourcing success stories? Know of any people who admit to being devoted readers of hyperlocal news?)

Am I being too cynical?

(Oh, the other finalists for the APME award: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle. The AJC was nominated for its newsroom overhaul. The D&C got the nod for its RocDocs, which gives online users access to data, maps and investigative reports assembled by the newspaper.

More Bridge Observations

I'm posting this one for Tommy Tomlinson:

"Hey y'all,
Howard Weaver actually has a good idea on his blog about how to do a project on crumbling infrastructure in our community, with the aid of readers who take photos of bad bridges and such. This would be a really cool experiment for us.

http://editor.blogspot.com/2007/08/instant-public-service-project-just-add.html.
~~~~
Back to leslie: Richmond did a similar idea right after the collapse, where you could go to their site and find bridges in your neighborhood. I don't remember it being searchable, but maybe I'm just not looking in the right spots.

Flickr and the MN bridge, part ii

I sent a few of the photo editors the link to the bridge collapse slideshow on Flickr. Gary O'Brien, photo editor and tech guru, had an interesting take on the photos. While I was completely amazed by the quality of the photos that were posted by average joes, he pointed out that there may have been issues around media access. Gary wrote:

"Judging from their surroundings and the taglines, I'm guessing the majority of these weren't taken by citizen-journalists. I think this is mostly the work of a couple of firefighters, first responders or their friends - someone who has access to places the media isn't allowed.

This is increasingly a problem across the country - often, media photographers (as we know from past experience) are harrassed, while non-journalists are left alone or even allowed special access. A recent local example is the funerals of the two slain policemen - a fire department photographer had prime access, even to the point of creating a distraction to the mourners, while I was 300 yards away. We never saw those photos, nor did the public. ...

It makes me uncomfortable that we're now cut out of the equation in these situations and the best photos from the event are being made and edited by non-journalists who are public servants or their friends. They have a dog in the hunt - we won't see anything but what they choose.

I would like to see the work trained professionals could have done given this level of access. So would the rest of the world. "

Citizen Journalism and the MN Bridge

Good summary from Cyberjournalist.net on the citizen journalism that was going on around the collapse of the Minneapolis bridge.

Highlights:

• Twitter was a very quick way for people to keep track of loved ones immediately after the collapse.
• Citizen journalists were surprisingly competent, both with quality and volume of reports and with the quality of photos and video. That's not to say that there wasn't bad stuff. There was.
• Photos are the best example of what the public can do. Check out Flickr (more on that in another post. A photo editor had some interesting perspective on those photos).
• "The eyewitness blog posts, the on-the-scene photography, and even the handheld and cell phone videos complete with their jerky motion and blurry, overcompressed images, all contribute far better than the mainstream media, to giving you a more accurate sense of being there."

Flickr and MN Bridge photos

I can't seem to look at enough photos of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. When I looked at the Star Tribune site late Wednesday night, there weren't a whole lot of reader submitted photos or stories. Today's a different story. Not as many on the Strib or TwinCities.com sites, but Flickr's seeing all kinds of reader submissions.

Check out the Flickr slideshow.

Pro-Am Journalism

This week, Wired's online site is publishing the inaugural project of Assignment Zero, Jay Rosen's "pro-am" journalism project. It was an experiment in building an Internet newsroom with professionals and citizen journalists working together.

As an editor on the project, I'm probably a bit biased. Most of the heavy lifting was done by Rosen and a group of 3 or 4 people who pulled everything together. That, of course, is a danger of opening up the floodgates to anyone: Someone has to control the gates.

But, it's an interesting topic. I learned a lot about some of the "crowdsourced" projects taking place online -- from iStockphoto to collaborative stock picking.

For more information, see Assignment Zero’s site.