All entries tagged: social networking
A café-shaped conversation
A great conversation has been going on at my previous post, with participants including:
- A musician/entrepreneur who runs a hyperlocal social network in Fort Dodge, Iowa
- A mountaineer/futurist who speaks and consults globally on new media matters
- A newspaper editor in Waco, Texas
- The president and publisher of “the most widely-read magazine in America” (a 32-million circulation newspaper supplement), based in New York City
- The CEO of a Alabama newspaper holding company operating in 150 communities
- An arts reporter/blogger in East Bay, California
- A New York print evangelist/entrepreneur/educator
- A Rhode Island consultant specializing in brands, organizational communications and enterprise technology design
- Plus, yours truly, tucked away in snowy Vermont, and some of his fellow Nieman bloggers located at Harvard and Johns Hopkins
It was as if we all bumped into each other at a sidewalk café and started knocking around the problems of printed newspapers and journalism on the internet. It took a somewhat provocative post on my part to kick off the discussion, but then, that’s what we do every day in newspaper editorials and in our letters columns to get some buzz going. We got past any animosity, pulled our tables and chairs closer together, and while in the end we “agreed to disagree,” we ascended to some deep thinking about the nature of media and the utility of social networking to news enterprises. Given some of the players involved, it’s even possible that some of the ideas thrown out could have some actual effects in the marketplace.
Only of few of us have ever previously met in person or by phone or email, but there were were, having what Chris Brogan, writing about social media, has called a café-shaped conversation:
Five years of Facebook: How it redefined what we consider “news”
Facebook celebrates its fifth birthday today, having led a revolution in social media and shaken up journalism in the process. As a student at Harvard when Facebook launched here in February 2004, I claimed the 185th profile on the site, known then around campus as thefacebook.com — one word, as in, “You won’t believe who poked me on thefacebook.com!” I’m hoping that someday my low profile number will carry the cachet of an old “member since” date on an Amex card. But until then, I’ll just share a quick story about the early days of Facebook that bears on the intersection of journalism and social media.
Mark Zuckerberg has added a wealth of features to Facebook in five years, but he has also taken a few away. There was an ill-fated foray into file-sharing and a course catalog that didn’t survive the site’s expansion. In the first few months, Facebook profiles also listed every mention of a user’s name in the archives of Harvard’s student newspaper The Crimson. It was a useful widget for keeping track of news in your friends’ lives, but Zuckerberg killed it not long after bringing Facebook to a few other universities.
There was no explanation for dropping the feature, and it could have been a problem with scalability, but this is what I think happened: Zuckerberg, who had initially played down the scope of his site, realized that Facebook wasn’t a tool for keeping track of news made somewhere else. It was a tool for making news right there, on Facebook.
Morning Links: February 2, 2009
— Amanda Hirsch has a great interview with the documentary filmmaker Louis Abelman on, of all things, Twitter. Will this be the piece that finally makes journos a little less skeptical of Twitter and Twitter-like things?
Since the only kind of documentary work I’ve been involved in has been vérité style, in which the camera must stay with the subject for a long time, potentially years, in slow and deliberate accumulation of material that will be distilled down, I can see similarities between that process and Twitter.
— Terry Heaton writes smartly about social-networking policies for newspapers.
— Frédéric Filloux writes on news apps for mobile phones, particularly for the iPhone. Personally, I spend an enormous amount of time reading news on my iPhone — but almost never in the dedicated apps of the Times, CNN, Bloomberg, or other news organizations. Am I the only one, and are the rest of you using the native apps?
