blogging

Microsoft launched its foray into social and search-powered news aggregation, msnNOW. According to the site’s description, “msnNOW is a new way to stay current on the trends people are talking about, searching for, and sharing the most.”

The site uses realtime data from Twitter updates, Facebook posts, YouTube activity, Breaking News and Bing searches to find patterns and tally what’s trending.  Top stories are featured in a slider, and the rest of the stories are shown in a grid-like display (think Newser, but cleaner) in reverse chronological order. They summarize those top trending stories in 100 words or less, and snow you an icon to indicate where that trending story originated. If a story originated on Twitter, you see the top tweets about the topic displayed at the top of  the article. Read more

Create a clear, strategic approach to the way you use Facebook to market your business in our new Facebook Marketing Boot Camp. The online conference and workshop starts April 24. Learn more.

GigaOM, which announced its purchase of ContentNext Media yesterday, reportedly paid less than the $6.5 million Guardian News & Media spent on its 2008 acquisition of the company. The terms of the deal are undisclosed, but GigaOM is acquiring its flagship brand, paidContent, along with its other assets: mocoNews.net, contentSutra.com, and paidContent:UK.

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So you’re a journalist who turned on the subscribe feature on your personal Facebook page and now you’ve got a good number of Subscribers.

Now what?

Previously, it was possible to divide your social media life into two realms: Personal (Facebook) and Business (Twitter). You might have used Twitter to push out links and do some reporting, while your Facebook page was more for friends and family.

Now that you have a bunch of Subscribers, who subscribe to your updates because they expect information and content relative to your job, you can’t divide the two streams like you once did.

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You may remember a few weeks ago when we talked about 3 things journalists can teach themselves over their winter vacations. One of these things is learning how to create a blog so you can showcase your writing. While you could start a blog with any number of services (WordPress, Blogger, etc.), Scriptogram has streamlined this process by allowing you to create your own blog just using a text file and a free Dropbox account. (Dropbox, in case you’re not familiar with the service, is a service which stores your files in the cloud and allows you to access them using a number of different apps across multiple operating systems and mobile platforms.)

Getting set up with scriptogr.am takes less than five minutes, and all you need to begin is a Dropbox account. Once you have that, visit the scriptogr.am website and click Dropbox connect to begin the process.

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More than a year ago, I told you about six must-have WordPress plugins for newsrooms. But as technology would have it, a lot has changed since then — new social tools, new meta tags, new versions of WordPress.  Here are a few more plugins I’d add to that original (and still relevant) list.

Storify

This week Storify launched a WordPress plugin that lets you curate and embed social media straight from the WordPress dashboard. All you have to do is drop in the URL to a Storify page and it will be embedded in your post. Before, dropping in the javascript embed code caused the code to get lost if a blogger was switching between visual and HTML editors. No longer! The one downside: It doesn’t currently support customization options like using the slideshow template or removing the header from embed. Hopefully that’s coming in a future version.

Google Standout

At the Online News Association conference in 2011, Google announced a new meta tag for publishers to use that would allow them to identify stellar enterprise content. This plugin lets you specify posts that should use that meta tag, as well as additional options for publisher meta tags like original-source and syndication-source.  Read more