Who will provide the credibility ratings for the journalists of the planet?

By

Citizen journalist site Allvoices.com has just moved out of beta. CNet provides a story of the site, its founder Amra Tareen, and Allvoices’ features including a map of the world showing where the latest stories are emerging. A Reuters story, Allvoices happy to pay popular posters, focuses on how the site pays contributors and its ‘crediibility’ algorithm.

Contributors are free to post almost anything and their credibility is rated by readers and an in-house algorithm which measures postings against traditional media and other sources.

But throwing the site open to the public has its pitfalls.

One recent post with a high credibility rating said the Ark of The Covenant was about to be unveiled. Other stories cite no sources at all.

Mr Sundelof said he had not looked at the Ark posting, but the in-house computer evaluation depended on feedback from many users and there had not been enough feedback on that piece.

Allvoices did not practice gatekeeping.

“We haven’t worked out how to deal with these kinds of situations,” he said. “Basically, we can only determine credibility based on the input we have.”

In a world awash with information, having credibility or reputation ratings for information sources is becoming increasingly important. While most people have focused on the media channel as the brand, this is going to shift to the individual journalist. You may trust the New York Times, but after you’ve read it for a while, you’ll place more credibility on what some journalists for the paper write than you do for others.

Allvoices is one of the early players in this space. There will be many more.

How reputation measures will evolve, particularly those for content, will be one of the important themes at Future of Influence Summit 2009.

The border between blogging and Twittering

By

Shall I tweet it? Shall I blog it?

If you’re both a blogger and Twitterer, when you get an interesting thought you want to share, you have choices.

Do you tweet it? If it’s interesting enough to let people know, then sure – very easily done.

Or do you blog it? If it’s compelling enough, competing with lots of other stuff, and it’s time-sensitive, then yes. I have a list of over 60 blog posts I’d like to write, so something has to be compelling to get in front of that queue.

This decision changes over time. I’ve blogged for seven years, and was slow to get on Twitter because I thought I had plenty on my plate with blogging. Now more and more idea sharing happens over Twitter. Of course, there’s only so much you can say in 140 characters and sometimes you have to flow beyond that. Comments and blog posts can do that – they’re part of the content creation landscape.

I will explore this issue more later. I’m working on a blog/ Twitter framework that will show how they relate to each other.

It certainly seems to be an interesting topic to explore: what is the border between blogging and Twittering?

Twitter and the ever-faster moving news landscape

By

Associated Press has just released a story titled Is Twitter the news outlet for the 21st century? which examines the role of Twitter in the news cycle.

It examines the role Twitter played in the news of Michael Jackson’s death, in the Iranian election, and in the Mumbai terrorist attacks, and goes on to quote tweeters such as Ashton Kutcher and Lance Armstrong, and commentators including TechCrunch and Andrew Keen to explore how Twitter is changing the news landscape. It also draws on my comments from an extended interview:

“Twitter absolutely changes the media landscape,” said Ross Dawson, author and communications strategy analyst. “I like to refer to Marshall McLuhan’s description of media as `an extension of our senses.’ Now, Twitter is extending our senses to tens of millions of people who are often right on the scene where things are happening.”

My views are expressed in more detail in a recent post How Twitter impacts media and journalism: Five Fundamental Factors, which reviews in particular the role of Twitter in breaking news.

I’ve had a few other thoughts on the topic recently so will post more on this later.

Twitterboard and the rise of distributed conversations

By

Twitterboard – a very interesting way of aggregating Twitter conversations on a website – launched in alpha yesterday.

I’ve installed it on this blog to give it a try. You should see a tab on the left hand side of the page. When you click it this will bring up the Twitter thread. I’ll give it a whirl and see how it goes.

Twitterboard describes itself:

Tweetboard is a fun and engaging micro-forum type application for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream in near real-time (max 1 min delay), reformatting tweets into threaded conversations with unlimited nesting. Conversations that spun off the original conversation are also threaded in-line, giving your site visitors full perspective of what’s being discussed.

The way it works is that tweets on the site are appended with posted.at/ and inreply.to/ short URLs which take people to the conversation. This means that people who see parts of the conversation on Twitter can go to the site to see a single threaded discussion.

Read more →

What’s happening in the living networks – an irregular update

By

I send out an extremely irregular email to keep people posted on what’s up in my world and the most prominent content I’m creating. I thought I might as well post it on my blog as well…

What’s happening in the living networks

June 2009

This is a quite extraordinary year for me. It’s now been 15 months since I’ve sent out a ‘newsletter’, so this email is a bit of an update on what’s going on in my world, which makes it quite a long email…. The most important of all this is the birth of my daughter Phoebe on 7 June, packed into a time of great change and development in my work, writing and businesses.

I believe that 2009 is the turning of an epoch. Linear shifts are giving way to exponential change as we call into question existing structures. The key theme for me is divergence: there is a rapidly growing gap between those thriving and those struggling. These are very, very exciting times.

In this update I provide links to some of the more interesting content we have generated over the last period. The best way to keep up with what I’m doing and finding interesting are my Trends in the Living Networks blog or my Twitter updates.

In this update:

– I morph into futurist and entrepreneur

– Launch of leading events firm The Insight Exchange

– Implementing Enterprise 2.0: New book and consulting work

– Recent keynotes in Abu Dhabi, San Francisco, Sydney, Perth etc.: videos and presentations

– Future of Influence Summit coming soon!

– Relaunch of Advanced Human Technologies

– Media coverage: New York Times, The Guardian, ABC, SBS, SkyNews etc.

– Most popular blog posts: influence framework, future of finance, Twitter and media, organizational change etc.

– Phoebe Dawson is born

[NOTE:] You have to be viewing the full article for the internal links above to work

Read more →

New iPhone app: Steampunk view of global climate – ideal for world travellers!

By

Graham Dawson of OzWeather fame has launched his latest iPhone app Climate Eye, which promises to be another big winner. It enables users to look up any city on the planet and find out official current weather and forecasts, including how much colder or hotter it is compared to expectations for that time of the year.

mycities1.png

It also shows average weather for any month or day of the year in each location, including temperatures and rainfall, even the likelihood of rainfall on any particular day.

Among other uses, the app is great for travellers who want to know what the weather is likely to be when they arrive in their destinations, or even for choosing where they want to go at a particular time of year.

The innovative interface design (which I am told is referred to as “steampunk”) reminds me of the world in The Golden Compass – antique brass instrument style to access digital data – very cool.

Forthcoming apps from Graham will provide additional insights on climate and climate change.

See screenshots of the app on Graham’s blog

FULL DISCLOSURE

Graham is my brother :-)

Media convergence in action: Journalists (try) mastering the Twitterverse

By

That’s influence for you. After The Insight Exchange’s event Twitter’s Impact on Media & Journalism last week, the biggest front page article in The Australian’s media section today, titled Journos mastering the Twitterverse, opening with:

IT’S Tuesday and I’m at a forum on the topic “Twitter’s Impact on Media and Journalism”, busily taking down the speeches in shorthand. As I do, the business-suited woman sitting on my left is tweeting about me on her laptop.

“This is interesting,” she types. “I’m at #timj talk about Twitter and media/journalism. I’m tweeting and the journalist next to me has paper/pen :-)”

Paper and pen? Got me! I do use them. However, I also use Twitter, which is how I caught up with her comment once I was back in the office.

It’s a long article, accompanied by three other articles on Twitter in media. The thrust of the article is about how journalists are using Twitter. It mentions Dave Earley’s list of Australian journalists and news media people with Twitter accounts, and Anthony Dever’s list of Australian media organizations on Twitter.

Presumably from these lists they have compiled a list of prominent Australian journalists on Twitter:

Read more →

The motivations of influencers and amplifiers: how content becomes prominent

By

Increasingly, we primarily find content through aggregated influence. In other words, influencers use Twitter, blog, Delicious, Digg, Reddit etc. to highlight the content they find most interesting. Collectively these influencers make this content highly visible, driving at times massive traffic to articles.

A couple of years ago I wrote about Uncovering the structure of influence and social opinion, which drew on research on how just a handful of influencers drive the content aggregation sites such as Digg, and a little later analyzed how influencers and amplifiers had helped one of my blog posts hit the front page Delicious.

These topics will be covered in detail at Future of Influence Summit 2009 – details coming soon.

In January the grand-daddy of the tech news aggregators, Techmeme, started accepting suggestions for stories, by people sending links on Twitter along with “tip @techmeme”. The most prominent Techmeme story suggestor has been @atul.

Atul is interviewed in Success Secrets of a Top Techmeme Tipper. The entire interview is worth reading; I have picked out some of his comments on his motivations.

Read more →

Uncovering high-value applications of organizational network analysis

By

New Scientist has published an interesting article titled Email patterns can predict impending doom, which reviews findings by researchers at Florida Institute of Technology. They, as many researchers, used the email logs from Enron, which have been made available for analysis by federal investigators.

The key finding from the research was that the number of active email cliques, in which groups exchanged emails between each other but not outside, went from 100 to 800 a month before the collapse of the company. This appeared to reflect decreasing trust across the broader organization and increasing stress. This indicates that very strong indicators of organizational health can be gleaned from network analysis.

Network analysis by Advanced Human Technologies of top executives in global corporation

Read more →

Event review: Twitter’s Impact on Media & Journalism

By

Today I was at Twitter’s Impact on Media & Journalism run by The Insight Exchange. It was as usual a fantastic event with great insights – I will be digesting and musing on the conversations and ideas for a while, and will incorporate these into future frameworks.

Below are quick on-the-fly notes from the event. Check out the Twitter stream #timj for the rich conversations from the event. For my own thoughts on the topic read my post from last week on How Twitter impact media and journalism: Five Fundamental Factors.

Here are my notes from each of the presenters – taken on the fly but hopefully a reasonable representation of what they said. Some of the presentations will be put on online in audio and hopefully transcription so will post links when they’re available.

Mark Pesce (@mpesce)

He begins by quoting Bob Woodward:

“Social media? It’s noise. Twitter? Facebook? It’s all a diversion. Good reporting is always going to be about hard work; about waking up every morning with the thought: What are the bastards hiding today?”

Read more →