aggregation - 10,000 Words

When To Link Back, Give Credit In Your Posts

Meranda Watling — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 13:30:46 +0000

I follow hundreds of people on Twitter and more than a hundred blogs in Google Reader, not to mention the myriad other ways interesting stories and information comes my way. Maybe I saw it on MetaFilter or Reddit, or maybe my fiancé or a former co-worker personally passed it on to me. After looking at hundreds of stories/web pages each day, it’s hard to keep track of what I’ve seen or, having seen it, where I saw it or who shared it first. It’s a digital age dilemma when it comes to blogging about cool new tools or breaking news. It’s especially difficult when the news seems so ubiquitous it’s hard to determine who really broke it (and often, whether that scoop is really a scoop).

This came to mind when GigaOm founder Om Malik posted this tweet praising TechCrunch for “do[ing] the right thing” and crediting them for their “scoop” regarding Google’s acquisition of BufferBox.

The comments on his tweet are particularly interesting, with comments ranging from “I didn’t know you guys had anything on it” to “How is it a GigaOm scoop when they announced it in a company blog post?” to the toungue-in-cheek “Google may acquire a startup in the next six months. You heard it here first. Please make sure to source me. Thanks.” As background, Om apparently had a post about Amazon Locker/BufferBox last month that mentioned, “I have heard rumors that Google is interested in buying the company,” and speculates on what BufferBox could add to the search giant’s line up. TechCrunch updated its post on the sale, which cites the Financial Post interview with the founder, to include a link to Om’s story as background.

But here’s the thing: Are rumors scoops? When does a scoop cease being a scoop, when the info is public and everyone else reports it? Even when it’s not a scoop, but a publicized feature/event/purchase/etc…. Who do you credit? When do you have to credit them? How do you credit them?

With that in mind, here are some best practices to help deliver credit where it’s due and, because it’s about the readers, give your visitors more background into the story and topic. What it comes down to is, it’s better to give too much credit than not enough. Hopefully these tips help navigate the sometimes murky link-back. continued…

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From SXSW: Curator’s Code, An Approach For Standardizing Attribution

Lauren Rabaino — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:27:46 +0000

Whether we label ourselves as “curators” or not, we all do it: reference each other’s blog posts, news articles, tweets, photos. We republish excerpts others’ content and mix in our own thoughts. We find inspiration in one person’s writing that prompts us to write our own manifestos. Those who are Internet-savvy and attribution-conscious know that the best practice is to link back the original sources often, but a “best practice” isn’t a standard, and there’s not a consistent way for publishers across the ‘net to attribute.

Enter: The Curator’s Code. This is one of the curation/aggregation projects out of SXSW that aims to standardize the act of attributing content across the web. The project, launched by Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova, seeks to “Keep the rabbit hole of the Internet open by honoring discovery.”

Standards exist for literary citation, image attribution, and scientific reference, but beyond hyperlinking, there’s no standardized way to denote the “attribution of discovery” in our information economy. That’s what Popova and crew want to change with the Curator’s Code.

So how does it work? There are two symbols to use when blogging, Tweeting or other online publishing:

ᔥ A sideways “S” figure, which represents an original source (think of it as the the equivalent as a retweet or “via” on Twitter)
↬ A looped arrow, which represents a “hat tip” (as in, “here’s the source who alerted me to this thing I’m linking to” or “here’s the original inspiration for this spinoff idea I had”)

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Microsoft Launches Social Media Trend-watcher, msnNOW

Lauren Rabaino — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:27:27 +0000

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. continued…

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Social Media and Online Community Posts From Around The Web

Ben LaMothe — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 13:57:26 +0000

Every Friday I post links to a few of the blog posts that I read during the week that I found interesting and insightful.

Included in this week’s round-up is a best-practice guide for determining the value of a Facebook fan; how Chevron uses LinkedIn to target influencers; a best practice guide for relationship marketing; and insights from the coming 2011 Online Branded Communities Study.

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Social Media and Online Community Posts From Around The Web

Ben LaMothe — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 12:22:22 +0000

Every Friday I post links to a few of the blog posts that I read during the week that I found interesting and insightful.

Included in this week’s round-up is a best-practice guide for getting employees on-board with the company’s social media efforts; how to calculate social commerce performance; a case study on how airlines are using social media; advice on whether to close a branded online community in favor of a Facebook page; and why business should have community managers in their org charts.

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Social Media and Online Community Posts From Around The Web

Ben LaMothe — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 15:10:34 +0000

Every Friday I post links to a few of the blog posts that I read during the week that I found interesting and insightful.

Included in this week’s round-up are posts that discuss the value of using data from users’ actions in your online community; the latest data and statistics about social sharing; and breaking own Twitter’s awareness vs usage problem.

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Storify: The Pros and Cons

Elana Zak — Mon, 09 May 2011 12:10:59 +0000

In the last couple of weeks, there’s been a lot of buzz about Storify, a new social media curation tool aimed at professional and citizen journalists that moved into the public beta testing phase on April 25. Some, such as Matthew Ingram, have even gone as far as to call it “the future of media.” We even covered Storify back in November, but is it too good to be true?

The site allows you to pick a topic and then search for related news articles, Tweets, Facebook comments, Flickr photos and drag and drop them into an embeddable multimedia story.

“We have so many real-time streams now, we’re all drowning,” Storify founder Burt Herman told the New York Times. “So the idea of Storify is to pick out the most important pieces, amplify them and give them context.”

The site’s stories have been viewed more than 13 million times since its private launch in September 2010, according to Storify’s website. Sounds great but is this new platform worth all the hype?

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3 Social Media Skills They Should Teach In Journalism School

Ben LaMothe — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 10:31:47 +0000

Photo Credit: Vaidotas2007 on Flickr

I won’t make broad statements that journalism schools are failing in some way when it comes to incorporating social media into their curriculum.

I know that many are making great strides to marry the two. Plus I’ve been out of journalism school for a few years, and around the time I left is when social media was really starting to kick off, so I don’t have first-hand knowledge of what is and is not happening.

So instead, I want to share three social media skills that I believe should be part of any journalism school’s curriculum, if it isn’t already.

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Meet ‘Producer Matthew’ Keys: Aggregation Journalist

Ethan Klapper — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 09:48:39 +0000

Uprising in Egypt. Earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Missile strikes in Libya.

Major news has broken in every corner of the world during the past few weeks. In that time, Matthew Keys has proven himself to be a must follow for the latest from these hot spots.

Keys, 24, is a new style aggregation journalist. From his home in Sacramento, Calif., Keys even altered his sleep schedule so he can be awake to bring the latest developments from Japan.

“What my audience is looking for is somebody who, in a time of crisis, or in a time of breaking news, will just get to the facts,” he said.

Better known as Producer Matthew, Keys worked until October as a Web producer at KTXL, Sacramento’s Fox affiliate and is now unemployed. He considers himself an early adopter to social media, joining Twitter in February 2007. The service arguably began getting mainstream attention during that March’s South by Southwest Interactive Conference.

Keys still considers himself a journalist. Why? Everything he tweets or retweets he ensures comes from a credible source, or it is something he could verify.

“About 90 percent of the information I put out comes from a media source that I can verify with them,” he said.

Keys relies on reporting from global wire services like Reuters and Agence France-Presse, as well as local news services. For information from Japan, Keys has aggregated information from NHK and TBS.

“This is information that I’m putting out for my audience but it’s really coming from a third party,” he said.

While Keys agrees that Twitter is an excellent way to get news, he dismisses the notion that it will become a police scanner.

“Most people can listen to a police scanner and know that about 100 percent of the information that they’re getting from the scanner is going to be accurate, because it’s coming from law enforcement sources,” he said. “If you’re following someone in law enforcement on Twitter, absolutely. But you could also be following an account — like the Steve Jobs account — and if you’re new to Twitter, you’re not gonna know that Steve Jobs doesn’t have a Twitter account.”

“I don’t think it’s ever going to be the main source of news,” he said.

Keys also maintains an active Tumblr presence.

“The use that I have for Tumblr is for photos — a lot of people on Tumblr like photos,” he said. “They’re very visual. They don’t necessarily like to read a lot. They like video. They like audio. It’s very multimedia rich.”

Keys says being a citizen journalist has helped his reputation more than working at KTXL.

“I’ve made friends at ABC, at CNN, CBS, and a lot of the stuff I put out on Twitter … they’re now wanting to use that stuff,” he said. “That never happened when I worked at Fox.”

Follow “Producer Matthew” Keys on Twitter at @ProducerMatthew and on Tumblr at http://producermatthew.com.

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Friday roundup: 10 free and legal multimedia tools, WaPo’s “Trove” project

Lauren Rabaino — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 15:47:04 +0000

Yes, another tools list. But this is a really good one.

A great post this week came from Adam Westbrook — a new media journalist, film maker, lecturer and blogger based in London — who blogged about 10 free and legal (i.e., not pirated) multimedia tools for journalists.

He calls out a few awesome tools that I’d never heard of, like MPEG Streamclip, which converts video files to fit your needs, whether that means smaller, bigger, a new file type, etc. Another cool tool is Framecounter, which detects frames per second in your video so you don’t have to do the math, and Wisestamp, an email signature generator.

Check out his full list for the whys and hows on his top 10 list.

Trove: A new experiment from WaPo

An interesting new experiment is coming out of The Washington Post called Trove. Vadim Lavrusik at Mashable reports that the project will launch in March 2011 as a news aggregation service that customizes news based on preferences of the user. These preferences are determined by a quiz-like interface that the user participates in.

Trove pulls from thousands of sources around the web beyond The Washington Post. Lavrusik, who has access to a Trove beta account, isn’t yet convinced that Trove delivers much unique value:

Trove doesn’t quite fulfill the promise of its name: a newfound treasure. It’s far too similar to other aggregation news sites out there, most notably Google News. The utility of Trove isn’t different enough from other aggregators, aside from its user interface and the ability to easily filter content.

If the site is truly about helping users find the signal in the noise, it will use the selected interests to build more focus in the channels created, rather than continuing to add a stream of content based on the user’s interests on the main page.

Read the full story at Mashable.

Trove is currently in private beta. At Trove.com, you can sign up to get an account after the site is open to the public.

Disclosure: Founder of this blog, Mark Luckie, is a senior news director for the Universal News Desk at The Washington Post.

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