links - 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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‘Text is a UI’: How Journalists Can Work Usability into Online Words

Kevin Loker — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 22:26:57 +0000

Text style and placement took center stage a few weeks back while dissecting how news orgs tweet breaking news. Where should you put “Breaking”? Should it be “BREAKING”? Do you even need it at all?

A new, related mantra I’m considering for all online media endeavors, “Text is a UI.”

I found it while perusing the Alertbox of Jakob Nielsen, a web design guru whose work I’ve linked to in the past (and probably will again in the future).

“It’s a common mistake to think that only full-fledged graphical user interfaces count as interaction design and deserve usability attention,” Nielsen wrote in a post about using iterative design to move around and change words, resulting in a good, clickable, retweetable tweet.

It may sound deep and philosophical, but “Text is a UI” makes simple sense. Letters are symbols with arbitrary meaning. Words, too. And when they are paired next to and among other symbols and images online, it makes sense that we should consider not just what the words say, but also how the pairing, order, color, placement and even capitalization of our text can impact how users interact with online content. Words symbolize and signify, but they signal, too. They direct us. They’re cues for a user.

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Sharing Visually on Facebook: How Can It Get Readers to Your Site, Too?

Kevin Loker — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:52:48 +0000

I like photos. I tend to “Like” them, too. But despite my “clicks of approval” (read: we never really know what Likes mean), I don’t always click through to content when a news org shares an image.

Maybe everyone is more systematic than I am, but my Likes are pretty arbitrary. I’m calculated about a lot of things, but my commenting is pretty arbitrary, too.

Two things to healthily recognize here: “Liking” isn’t unvaluable to a news org, and neither is commenting. We can measure some value with those statistics and participate in a “Like science.” At the same time, measurement of engagement on something like Facebook may be inexact when you’re looking at all kinds of journalistic impact. (See good discussion on better measuring journalism’s impact here.)

Putting some of that conversation aside, if your journalistic meat doesn’t lay in Facebook’s garden, my gut is you want your audience to stay awhile on the content on your site. For whatever reason or combination of reasons—financial or philosophical.

If that’s you, here’s a good question worth considering: How do you share visually on Facebook and additionally draw in website traffic?

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Quick Tip: Check Whether A Link Is Fresh Before Sharing

Meranda Watling — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:00:01 +0000

Journalists pride themselves on being first. But it’s hard to scoop social media and your readers on the hot new viral video and latest must-see website.

Here’s a quick link to remember the next time you want to share a link you just stumbled on with your closest friends and followers: IsItOld.com

The “Is It Old?” site could save you from comments asking where you’ve been the past week or year, when you inadvertently share a link to the funny YouTube clip everybody else on the Internet discovered last Christmas. Paste or type in the link you want to share, and it gives you a full breakdown on how many times it’s already been shared and when it was first shared.

By the way: It says 10000words.net is “ridiculously old” — first shared more than a year ago. But know what? It’s always worth sharing, even if the site is more than hours old. So as you can see, this tool is best left to individual blog posts, videos or specific pages you want to point people to.

(H/T Mashable)

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