Social media scorecard: How social is your site?

I created the following scorecard for small publications and organisations in order to help them assess the absence or presence of social media on their site. Here are the questions. You can dowload the scorecard to calculate the results social_media_scorecard [PDF]
1. How social is your site?
Rate your site features following social media (2 points [...]

Cater to the web2.0 user-reader (or perish)

The aptly titled “you don’t understand our audience”
Today while I was surfing through the most popular delicious links, I found this article (above). It’s about — well, I don’t actually know what it’s about because the content was locked behind a registration field.
CONTINUE READING below

Citizen Kane v. citizen editor

“I don’t know how to run a newspaper.
I just try everything I can think of.”
- Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane
I recently had an interesting conversation with a journalist friend about the question of blogging and accountability. Like many of his colleagues, my friend believes in the role of gatekeepers from an ethical standpoint of [...]

Youth making headlines in the UK

Gangs, drugs, street racing, bullying, video game addiction. These are the typical negative headlines we associate with today’s youth. It’s really no wonder why young people disengage from a media that reinforces negative stereotypes and treats them as an entity to be seen, observed, critiqued but not heard. One of the things I’ve always told [...]

PEW Study: Tagging on the rise

Depending on where you stand in relation to the technology adoption lifecycle, tagging is either old news or a recent discovery. Regardless of where you’re at, a new PEW report on tagging has confirmed that tagging is on the rise among mainstream internet users. Here’s a great overview of the trend, with explanations, from the [...]

Tag your media (or perish)

As much as I celebrate the revolution of public participatory media I am increasingly frustrated at the apparent apathy of some citizen media makers to properly contextualise their work through tagging (aka folksonomies) which is a form of cooperative catagorization. Without tags, your images, video and/or audio content are not searchable, public or properly “participatory.”
The [...]