The Social Software Weblog http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com The Social Software Weblog http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/media/feedlogo.gif The Social Software Weblog http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com en-us Copyright 2008 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/IHT, OhMyNews partnerhttp://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/30/iht-ohmynews-partner/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/30/iht-ohmynews-partner/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/30/iht-ohmynews-partner/#commentsFiled under: ,

Hong Eun-taekI just watched Hong Eun-taek,  Editor-In-Chief of the of South Korea based citizen journalism project OhMyNews speak at the NetSquared conference (disclosure: I work for Net Squared).  Amongst the interesting details of  Eun-taek's talk was a statement that the organization aims to become a global news wire similar to the AP and Reuters.  One of the most recent steps towards that end is a partnership begun in recent weeks to swap headlines between the prestigious International Herald Tribune.

I think there is an important difference between the recent high-profile partnerships between the AP and Technorati and between Sphere and Time Magazine and this partnership.  Specifically, while it is meaningful for a mainstream media organization to include links indicating "what the blogosphere is saying about this topic" - I would contend that it is meaningful in a different way for prominent parties in the citizen journalism camp and in the traditional media camp to permanently display each others' headlines in a box on their sites.  It's an interesting form of mutual recognition that goes beyond the relatively casual link list to the medium in general.

The IHT/OhMyNews partnership is also clearly important because it involves two parties that are not based in the United States.  Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices Online is speaking now about the huge explosion of content producers from China, Africa, Brazil and the Middle East/North Africa that is on its way.  This partnership is liable to be remembered as a key development in the relationship between old media and new media on the global stage.
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]]>IHTOhMyNewsMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-05-30T14:45:00+00:00Technorati partners with APhttp://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/23/technorati-partners-with-ap/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/23/technorati-partners-with-ap/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/23/technorati-partners-with-ap/#commentsFiled under: ,

Technorati just announced a partnership with the AP that will look functionally a lot like its partnership with the Washington Post.  News organizations that run the AP's news module (there are reportedly 440 nationwide) will display a box highlighting the 5 most bloggged about news items of the day and inbound links will be displayed on pages for unique articles.  This is great news - only makes sense.  Further proof that the traditional/new media dichotomy isn't the best way to understand what's going on.  I think this has the potential to be very good for both the blogosphere and for the mainstream media.

This may also give a real boost to local blogs when these publications run local stories - something the WaPo deal and Sphere's new parntership with Time.com won't do.

As you can see from this example page, the linked blogs may be displayed towards the very bottom of the sidebar.  Hopefully that will change.
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]]>APMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-05-23T19:46:00+00:00On the role of publishers in a social media worldhttp://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/23/on-the-roll-of-publishers-in-a-social-media-world/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/23/on-the-roll-of-publishers-in-a-social-media-world/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/23/on-the-roll-of-publishers-in-a-social-media-world/#commentsFiled under: ,

Charlene Li has a good post about a recent panel she participated on about social media in a traditional media context.  She summarizes well, I think, with these words:
"...if you take the social computing view that as a publisher, you can't serve ALL of the needs of your customer yourself, then the best that you should do is to be the FIRST source of information for your audience. In that way, News.com ensures that although it may not be the ONLY source of technology news, it has a fighting chance of filtering and aggregating that news for its audience better than anyone else."

I think that's a great way to explain it.  Li mentions Digg.com, for example, as an example of a media publisher that does not create or control content - yet provides added value and branding and thus has built huge loyalty in this new social media context.

This is along the same idea as John Palfrey's explanation of news reading habits in a new world that I highlighted yesterday.  I think that refining the stories we can use to explain these new media to new participants will only help accelerate the truly social nature of the phenomena.   That and being able to point to examples of social media that cover more than just tech.  Commontimes.org is a digg clone of sorts about politics, for example.
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]]>Marshall Kirkpatrick2006-05-23T16:23:00+00:00MySpace teams with print mag, Nylonhttp://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/23/myspace-teams-with-print-mag-nylon/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/23/myspace-teams-with-print-mag-nylon/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/23/myspace-teams-with-print-mag-nylon/#commentsFiled under: , , ,

 MySpace has announced it will partner with the print magazine Nylon to prerelease an online version of the mag with links to the MySpace pages of bands and others profiled in Nylon stories.  Sounds like a good idea.  The publication in question appears predictably vapid, but the model here could foretell similar agreements in the future.

The move brings to mind the thesis of Nick Carr, who predicts in his forthcoming book and current Gilmor Gang appearances that on-demand media and contextual advertising will decouple high-revenue low-value content from the low-revenue high-value content it has effectively subsidized in traditional media institutions.  (Think Britney Spears coverage selling the ads that then pay for the investigative journalism found in section A or F, whichever the case may be.)  Perhaps the analogy here is that MySpace's partnerships like this one with Nylon will help raise funds to help pay for the hard-hitting critical thought of Fox News.  Hmmm.... no it's probably an example of the kind of cultural destruction that Carr sees on the horizon.  Fluff will pay for nothing but profits and more fluff while journalism that, for example, challenges those in power, will become an underfunded, far less visible niche market.

One way or the other, agreements like this, the WaPo's Technorati partnership and now Time.com's embrace of newbie Sphere all point to a real blurring of the line between traditional and new media.  That doesn't even seem a relevant question any more.  It's about being smart, not about whether new forms of media will beat old ones.

MySpace/Nylon story via Alex Bard and WebProNews.
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]]>MySpaceNylonpartnershipspublishingMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-05-23T12:57:00+00:00BBC.com to undergo major overhaul - will become like MySpacehttp://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/25/bbc-to-undergo-major-overhaul-inspired-by-myspace/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/25/bbc-to-undergo-major-overhaul-inspired-by-myspace/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/25/bbc-to-undergo-major-overhaul-inspired-by-myspace/#commentsFiled under:

The BBC's internet component is aiming to undergo a radical transformation putting user generated content and sharing at the center of its offerings. The Guardian has good coverage and calls the vision a "public service version of MySpace." They are even holding a contest for people to design the front page in a manner that best integrates Wikipedia, Technorati, YouTube, Flickr, etc.  Called Creative Future, the initiative is described by the BBC Director-General as "a big shock."

Also starting tomorrow, site visitors will for the first time be able to search the BBC's entire program catalogue as far back as 1937.
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]]>BBCMySpaceUser Generated ContentUserGeneratedContentMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-04-25T14:07:00+00:00NY Times on Search Engine Optimizing the Newshttp://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/09/ny-times-on-search-engine-optimizing-the-news/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/09/ny-times-on-search-engine-optimizing-the-news/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/09/ny-times-on-search-engine-optimizing-the-news/#commentsFiled under: ,

Interesting write up over at the NY Times today on how news media is getting into the SEO game - writing headlines with spiders and bots in  mind instead of just for humans.  The question of whether SEO will continue to influence journalistic writing further down the page is poised as a key issue. 

There appears to be little thought given here to metadata and microformats, though - which could help optimize news under the covers so that human readers don't have to suffer the consequences quite so much.  That seems especially true if human effort required could be mitigated through automation.

Found via the very nice blog of the University of Maryland Baltimore County eBuiquity Research Group.
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]]>journalismsearchSEOwritingMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-04-09T14:52:00+00:00Danah Boyd talks MySpace with Bill O'Reillyhttp://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/02/danah-boyd-talks-myspace-with-bill-oreilly/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/02/danah-boyd-talks-myspace-with-bill-oreilly/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/04/02/danah-boyd-talks-myspace-with-bill-oreilly/#commentsFiled under: ,



I think Danah did a good job. Made some important points. I was surprised how calm he was about the whole thing - until I remembered his show and MySpace are owned by the same company. Hahahah.

For more info on Danah and her work in this space see her blog.
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]]>FoxMyspaceNewscorpO'ReillyMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-04-02T14:37:00+00:00Philly journos and bloggers had a great unconferencehttp://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/28/philly-journos-and-bloggers-had-a-great-unconference/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/28/philly-journos-and-bloggers-had-a-great-unconference/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/03/28/philly-journos-and-bloggers-had-a-great-unconference/#commentsFiled under: ,

Jeff Jarvis has a long summary with many comments following about Norg, an unconference aimed at helping newspapers turn into news organizations.  Looks like it was great, and the write up is a good place to read more about the old media/new media nexus.  Thanks to Alex at Podcast on the Floor for the link.
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]]>bloggingblogsmedianewspapersunconferencesweb2.0Marshall Kirkpatrick2006-03-28T14:24:00+00:00Reuters releases a wiki for financial termshttp://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/02/17/reuters-releases-a-wiki-for-financial-terms/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/02/17/reuters-releases-a-wiki-for-financial-terms/http://add.my.socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/02/17/reuters-releases-a-wiki-for-financial-terms/#commentsFiled under: ,

The innovative folks over at the Reuters Labs have just opened to the public a wiki glossary of financial terms.  Ross Mayfield wrote a very philosophical post about it today, though it uses Mediawiki and not Mayfield's SocialText software.  He points out that the experiment is poised to avoid the key mistake of the LA Times editorial wiki because this one built a community of dedicated users behind a firewall before going public.  The question remains whether a glossary of terms is really well suited for a wiki format.

So now Reuters has a wiki, the Washington Post uses Technorati to integrate blog posts linking to their online stories, and PR Newswire has del.icio.us baked in.  Kinda makes the NYTimes paid subscriber firewall seem all the more ridiculous.  Perhaps that's why a former NYTimes ombudsman said this week that he's concerned that blogs may soon overtake the mainstream media.

Anyone else have favorite examples of mainstream media integrating with Web 2.0?
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]]>MSMReuterswikisMarshall Kirkpatrick2006-02-17T21:28:00+00:00