Warlord Facebook

A regular heard problem; “I’m participating in several networks and have put my profile on Hyves (or some other local social network), Facebook, Linkedin, my Ning group and  I’m using Twitter, got all my photos on Flickr (friends only)…..” etcetera! Isn’t possible to have one place where all my (social) streams are aggregated? Isn’t possible that status updates are transferred automatically to all my ‘other me’s'? And can this be done without actually having to program? At this point the real DNA of the social media comes to the surface. Continue reading »

Journalism & Social Media

It was refreshing to listen to @heleenvanlier, social media journalist of the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, at the Viva la Focus Festival Groningen. This time not a keynote about philosophical or political implications of the use of social media, but practical guidelines for journalism and use cases instead. Her job is bringing the news out and pull the data in!

Bringing the news out: to Twitter, to Facebook and to Hyves (like every respectable newspaper is doing). More interesting is the other side of this coin; bringing the data in. It looks like the role of journalism is changing from creating content to invoke and filtering social data streams:

• Identifying trends (what’s going on).
• Finding sources
• Mashing: enrich editorial content with related relevant social media streams
• Following and initiate conversations: for example between politicians

Personal branding
If social media is becoming the main data source, the abundance and differentiation of this data needs adequate filtering. Although the field of semantic filtering is evolving, the relevance can best be assured by individuals (journalists). If filtering is becoming the most important role of journalism, it’s likely that the individual journalist is becoming the brand, more than the newspaper is.

Will future newspapers be mashups of social feeds filtered and enriched by individual journalists?

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• The Future of Social Media in Journalism (e1evation.com)
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• How journalism schools are teaching social media (reportr.net)

PICNIC 2010 @Groningen: To Be or Not To Be … That is the question!

Not a day goes by without a conference somewhere (in Europe) about ‘the social media space’. When I’m just ‘recovering’ from Emerce Eday in Rotterdam last week, I received an invitation from theFactor.e to watch realtime videostreams from PICNIC 2010 keynotes at their office in Groningen (which is about 190 km to the north of Amsterdam). It’s a big nice office but more important, nice people, some of them I know from my past when I co-founded this company. It’s a strange sensation; attending a conference without actually be there! Of course, it saves a lot of time and money, and the keynotes will be available on the internet shortly after. Listening to some excellent keynotes, I was also trying to experience the difference of being not there (note: do not confuse this with ‘not being there!’). Continue reading »