[From Hummingbird604.com » Blog Archive » Third Tuesday Liveblog - Tris Hussey on the Paradox of Communications in the 21st Century]

It’s a good thing that Raul takes such great live blogging notes, because I don’t speak from notes anymore. My slides, for what it’s worth, are more talking points for me. I recommend following the slides with Raul’s live blog, they might make more sense that way.

Regardless,here are my slides…enjoy!

Update: Forgot to include links to the article on how people read online and the Globe & Mail article on Ray Lam.

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It’s great when you see that one of your professional passions starts gaining ground in the mainstream. It is so much easier to explain what you do when most folks have heard of it.

Yes, I know that people say when a technology gets popular, it’s ruined, but let’s hope this isn’t going to be the case. Social Media is really starting to come into its own now as a marketing tool. Yes, I know business blogging has been around for a while (like 2005 qualifies as “a while”), but I think Social Media is the teenaged version (can’t say grown up or mature) of business blogging.

Tonight you have one of those great opportunities to learn about how to use Social Media for marketing and not come off as an idiot or spammer. In fact you get to learn from a panel of comprised of three of my friends: Shane Gibson, Raul Pacheco, and JP Holecka:

HOW TO PROFIT FROM SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Practical advice on expanding your network and increasing sales through social media marketing

[From HOW TO PROFIT FROM SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING - Eventbrite]

What’s my role in all this? Well I did say I was blogging the panel. I will be live blogging and doing it here on the M2O blog.

You might wonder about this. The panel tonight isn’t free, so why should you pay for it? We talked about this very thing on Thursday planning the panel. I was asked to live blog by Marc and worried that I was giving something away for free that maybe shouldn’t be. The consensus was that there is more value to being at the panel than you can read in my live blog. Which is very true. I’m going to miss things (even though I do type pretty fast, faster when well caffeinated) and you will miss the give and take between the panelists and the audience. There is value in networking with people and value in the things that people get for being there (handouts, extra info, door prizes).

Okay, then why live blog at all? For those who can’t make it, you can ask questions and I’ll relay them to the panel. If you’re at the session and want to re-read something, it will al be there for you. Finally, I’m the “fourth panelist”, I’m not going to be on stage (lord I hope not), I’m going to write about what is going on, but I’m also going to put my two cents in as well. I’ll throw in my commentary and thoughts as I go. So really, if you want the complete experience you need to go to the session (there is still time and room!) and read my live blog afterward.

I know this is going to be an entertaining night. It’s a given you’re going to learn something, I’m just going to make sure that everyone have fun doing it. So if that means I have to heckle the guys via Twitter, so be it.

See you there!

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In the past few weeks I’ve been introduced to Twine, Microplaza, the new PostRank beta, MyAlltop, and Glue all of which want me to gather, tailor, categorize, and then share.

I enjoyed Twine for a while, but I’ve begun to feel that I wasn’t following the right people or subscribed to the right groups/twines because it’s proving less useful for me. Granted, it is easy to bookmark something to Twine and then tweet it out. I don’t go back to Twine and check those things I’ve marked.

Microplaza is even less useful because the shear number of links shared by the shear number of people I follow, which forces me to again build up a “tribe” to glean the wheat from the chaff.

MyAlltop I’ve found far more useful right out of the gate and the only one I’ll visit a couple of times a day to check for new information. However I think that is because I picked the news sources I wanted but wasn’t asked to share or follow others to make the site “work”.

Glue I haven’t played with much and only installed this morning. Glue’s premise is like Medi.um in that I’m supposed to be able to see which of my friends and colleagues have been to a certain site/page and what they thought of it (no chance of embarrassment there, no not at all).

So we note, bookmark, select pieces of information to share with friends so our friends can benefit from what we’ve found. Likewise we benefit from what our friends have, collectively, found so that we can find more cool sites, useful information, or just plain old news. Okay, great.

Which gets me back, finally, to my premise. We follow groups of people. People we know and trust. Often those people do the same/similar things we do. Collectively we have a lot of similar interests, so it makes perfect sense that we’d share a lot of the same stuff.

I think we’re not leveraging the “cloud” in the right ways to find more, better, new information and ideas.

(Yes, yes blinding flash of the obvious. Hush.)

We assume that if “our cloud” (that is our network of friends and people we follow) is large enough we’ll find a lot of the information we need/seek. I’ve found that premise has worked pretty well for specific bits of information. Asking a direct query on Twitter generally nets me the info I was looking for. Again that’s a specific question, what about just general stuff? For general stuff I think “our cloud” fails us, but would “the cloud” be better?

I think if we rely too heavily on our close-knit cadres of people for new info, we’re just going to hear a lot of the same stuff. The more services we build based on the friend-follow model (especially ones that use existing networks for your friend-follow list) we cement ourselves more deeply into our own echo chambers. Echo chambers we know are terrible at challenging the status quo or providing real critique of ideas.

Solutions?

Would algorithms to find people more based on your preferences alone help?

Would throwing a dash of “random person to follow” work?

Personally, I’m looking at the broader list of people I follow, adding more RSS feeds, and even getting back into the habit of doing topic searches. I noticed that since trying Nambu I’m getting pickier about setting up focused following groups. My “News” group is cake, it’s the “Friends/Favourites group that I’ve found interesting.

I’m also playing with Yahoo’s new Sideline app for searching all of Twitter more easily maybe searching for topics within the larger Twitterverse will bring interesting tidbits my way.

Before you start labeling me as an anti-sharing person, I do like to share links and I do like to get links from people. What I think we need is a way to expand our nets to gather more info, while still filtering to some degree to keep out the dreck.

Okay, tag, your turn. Are you finding the new crop of info finding tools helping or just “meh”?

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While it is vital to read the five as a whole, I take the fifth (”That no effort shall be spared to expand, develop and adapt the news and other services and products of Thomson Reuters so as to maintain its leading position in the international news and information business”) as an imperative for continual innovation and experimentation.

I have no idea what journalism will look like in five years except that it will be different than it is now. That’s a great thing, I believe.

I have little patience for those who cling to sentimental (and frankly inaccurate) memories of the good old halcyon days of journalism that were somehow purer and better than a world where tweets and blogs compete with news wires and newspapers.

Bring it on, I say!

Journalism is one of the great self-declared professions and crafts. I am a journalist because I said I was one more than two decades ago and have spent the years since working on my abilities. I am not one because I am somehow anointed with a certificate or an exam result.

link: Full Disclosure » Blog Archive » Twittering away standards or tweeting the future of journalism? | Blogs |

This post came out at the same time as Gillian Shaw of the Vancouver Sun has published a list of all the Twitter IDs of people at the paper. What do these have in common? These are news outlets–saying “newspapers” is far too limiting–that get it.

They’ve seen the handwriting on the wall, and they see that it’s adapt or become fish wrappers. The Vancouver Sun and Reuters aren’t the only news folks on Twitter of course. Almost all of our local news outlets are on Twitter and interacting with the community at large. What do we get? Headlines pushed to us. What do they get? News sources. Lots of news sources.

Gillian put out a request this week about the new media fund in the new budget. She needed social media/new media folks to interview. I don’t know how many she got in the end, but she got her story and some dandy quotes (If I may say so myself).

Now, what about news organizations and outlets that a baulking at Twitter and blogs tainting journalism? I think they should look back in history a bit and see where their roots really come from. Bunch of rabble-rousing folks who felt that there was a story to be told and would print it out for anyone who would care to read. Yeah I’m sure Ben Franklin’s paper was decried at first. Heck I think all newspapers were decried by the establishment at first.

Times have changed. Information is exchanged electronically and faster than the events themselves (which does lead to inaccurate information at times), journalism and journalists have to change as well.

Or be left behind.

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Hey, was there anything interesting going on in the States this week?

I’m kidding of course because the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the US was not only huge news in the States, but around the world as well.

Social media played a pivotal role in Obama’s election, so it isn’t surprising that social media, and online video especially, would also figure prominently in his inauguration as well.

The CBC gave Bradley a ring this week for his take on this sea change in how we create and consume news and events. Here is what Bradley said in the CBC article:

User interactivity is becoming a key component in how people consume media online, said Bradley Shende, CEO of Media2o Productions, a Canadian company specializing in broadcast and online video production.

Video streaming “has been growing huge in the consumer space,” Shende told CBC News. “The more [people] consume, the more they become participants.” User-generated sites like YouTube.com have resulted in the “democratization of media,” he said.

Video is becoming the prevalent web format, said Shende, adding that while other features may attract people to a site, it is video that keeps them there.

[From Obama inauguration puts online video consumption into focus]

The more I’m working with online video, whether it’s the polished shows like ConnectedLife or the rough cut stuff that I do with a hand-held camera, the more I’m learning that we are truly changing the face of media.

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Okay in a few words, what are we talking about here? Think of it as “Lord of the Dashboards” (one dashboard to rule them all), since we have all these dashboards already, what if we could have an interface that connects them all? What if instead of having to flip from Facebook to Flickr to FriendFeed to Twitter to Google Reader to get all the info and updates you need, you had one place to do it?

It’s a little how I imagine my Infostreaming concept to work, though DiSO is focused more on connecting the social media islands that you have already instead of helping to find and sort new information. I don’t see these as mutually exclusive though. A good infostreaming board like Netvibes could pull this info in. Coupled with the idea of pulling in the bookmarks and such from friends and connections, well there you go.

What’s needed now? Brains and coders. We’re pretty close to being able to pull a proof of concept out of the hat (at least how I see it). The one thing I would ask is that it either be a service with a great AIR app or leverage Google Gears. I want to be able to have offline access to the info. If DiSO were to become an info hub, I’m going to want to be able to jot things down whenever I want.

Got legs? Yeah. I agree with Marshall, this has got serious potential and legs.

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