I hate the term ‘social media’ and I think we should kill it off once and for all.
It is meaningless, confusing and doesn’t convey the real concept.
Here are a few thoughts on the matter:
1. What we are really talking about is how we share information, not social media, whatever that meant.
2. Most of the ‘old’ media has incorporated elements of ‘sharing’ via the Internet, so splitting the media by old and social is inaccurate.
3. In fact, media has always been ‘social’. Talking, gossiping, letter writing and even watching TV can be a social experience where we share.
4. No media exists in isolation, each channel – TV, newspapers, Reddit or whatever – influences the other
5. Why lump blogs, forums, wikis, bookmarking, microblogging, geolocation and innovations like Stickybits together? They are all so different and some have more in common with ‘old’ media than we think.
6. If we kill social media we can get rid of annoying social media gurus.
As you can see, a compelling argument. I know I have used the term social media in the past too, but as of late it has started to annoy me.
Does anyone think it is ironic that the Colbert Report interview with director of Wikileaks Julian Assange is “not available in the UK”? (see image above) After all, Wikileaks main specialism is leaking content to the world…. Surely their ‘people’ can pull a few strings?
Wikileaks is a revelation in investigative journalism and open information. It’s a controversial organisation which has split opinion, as some people are unsure whether to trust it as a news source.
I quite like Wikileaks and its approach; I wanted to watch this video. I am assuming someone somewhere has uploaded the video clip to share with those outside the US. I’ve clearly not looked hard enough… Send me a link please.
It seems only yesterday since I was writing about news curation tools….
In fact it was yesterday when I wrote this post, but thanks to a helpful comment on the blog I have now found Newscred, a curation tool which allows users to build fairly bespoke news pages to read and share with the world.
My Newscred page is available here. The content selected can be tailored towards geographical areas and while the search parameters are a little strange, it would be picky to say that this isn’t a great new addition to the curation repertoire.
Newser has recently come to my attention and is a news curation tool – or in other words, a user generated or edited take on what’s happening in the world.
I have been banging on about curation to my colleagues and anyone who would care to listen for a long time and some people agree with me that curation is the future, while others doubt why it’s so important.
For me, with so much content out there on the internet, curation sites and to a lesser extent aggregators are a great way to get a different take on things.
From a PR perspective, curation offers real opportunities. For example, brands should be curating content too, to show that they are experts in a given field, or aligning themselves to a given specialism, topic, person or campaign.
As I have said before, my favourite curation tool is The Twitter Times because it pulls together content based on your Twitter feed – a real time newspaper. As it is aggregated from your Twitter feed there isn’t a feeling of the content being biased towards sources from the USA.
Alltop.com is great because the user can edit the content and have more control by creating their own page. Popurls also remains a great place to start the day and find out what is happening in the world, while the Daily Perfect brings your Facebook friends into play too, curating what they are interested in.
What is really disappointing is that there is no British curation tool. All the curation tools I have just talked about are American so have a biase in some way to US sources. Whoever launches a British aggregator, will make a lot of money.
American (broadcast) media is often cricisised in the UK for its low quality analysis, but when it comes to digital news, the Americans have a far more sophisticated choice of content. Please can some clever website developed create a British aggregator to rival these others!
So, back to Newser, my latest favourite place to find news. Yes, it is American, yes some of the content is low on quality, but every now and then the site pulls up a real gem of a story to keep you hooked.
To close this post, here are some video clips to give you more insight. The clip here is an interview with Michal Wolf, creator of Newser. For some reason the clip won’t embed in this post. Michael is a little bit OTT (Over The Top) when he talks about the end of journalism as we know it, but he does raise some interesting points.
Wikileaks today went live with a video which appears to show the US military shooting two innocent journalists from Reuters and two chidren, along with many more civilians. The whole case has, according to Wikileaks, been covered up. (in fact it, was reported in 2007, but without – until now – little evidence).
Since the video went live there has, at time of writing, been very little coverage in the mainstream media with many wondering why. (Is it a cover-up by the mainstream media? – Internet users love a good conspiracy)
Apart from the shocking content which I’m not linking too (but is very easy to find via Google), this news story is interesting because it is breaking from a none mainstream media source.
As a result, because mainstream media like to verify their sources, there is very little coverage apart from on Reddit. I particularly like this post which examines how a story of this magnitude can not be reported:
http://www.reddit.com/comments/bmq8j/why_isnt_the_msm_covering_the_video_of_the/
“Why isn’t the MSM covering the video of the civilian massacre that wikileaks released?”
there’s also a discussion going on here:
http://reddit.com/comments/bmq8j
Where as the media darling Twitter usually breaks stories, the micro blogging platform has been quiet on this topic for some reason. However, Reddit has been aflame with this story all day and Reddit’s unique forum and voting system allows for intelligent debate.
I’d love to hear from any journalists on why they think the mainstream media is not reporting this story yet?
(excuse any typos etc this was bashed off on my iPhone)
I hate social media 
