Posts Tagged ‘internet’
Social media and technology has changed the way entertainers, businesses and organisations communicate with their fans and customers. media140 writer and digital marketing executive Tony Wright highlights the downside of over exposure through social media.
You can find out more about Tony on his blog or follow him on Twitter.
What is more interesting: the world economic downturn, or its immediate effect on your neighbourhood?
We at Media140 do not presume to preempt your news consumption choices, but based on our own – perhaps base – preferences, we are betting on the latter.
After a boom in global Internet news which has lasted the best part of a decade, it seems local perspectives have gained a kind of drawing power of which newspapers can only dream.
Nevertheless, magnificent Media140 blogger Peter Bouvier had never heard of hyper-local news until we asked him to look into the rise and rise of borough- and even block-based micro-sites.
Peter discovered that while they represent geographically small districts, hyper-local sites are taking over large tracts of the online news industry.
Peter works as the social media editor for Britain’s National Health Service, has delusions of grandeur and is currently working on a trilogy of epic children’s poems called the Tales of Tikulo.
We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a newsflash.
The monoliths of global and national news organisations are crumbling! Well, okay, that is admittedly not much of a newsflash, since it has been occurring for quite some time. However, it does beg the question; what is replacing them?
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‘You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’ says famed entrepreneurial scoundrel Charlie Croker played by Michael Caine in the 1969 British gold-heist classic, The Italian Job.
The film and that infamous line – which still ranks among Britain’s most quoted – are where my thoughts turn when I think about media140’s two upcoming events at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy from April 21 to 25.
Our version may not involve gold bullion, mini-skirts or breaking into jail, but we may be just ostentatious enough to imagine it has the potential to match the movie for energy, thrills and creativity.
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For those who have not had the pleasure of seeing The Italian Job, it opens with a Lamborghini winding through the alps – just as the Media140 team shall too be heading into the beautiful Italian countryside – albeit in a marginally less glamorous minivan.
Perhaps this point of difference is a good thing, as that Lamborghini meets a spectacularly explosive fate at the hands of the mafia scarce minutes into the film.
The IJF (as it is affectionately known by those wishing to save characters) brings together an eclectic throng of journalists from Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Australia. This year’s keynote speaker is Al Gore – yes, the environmental activist who served as vice president of the United States under Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001 and is oft credited with being instrumental in the rise of the Internet.
If Mr Gore is not enough reason to book your flight now, it is well worth a click-through to this list of literally dozens of international media executives, innovators and academics who will be sharing their ideas in Perugia – which is itself a vibrant hub of culture and progress.
In addition to presenting two days’ worth of speakers and panels at the IJF, Media140’s crew of specialised ‘backpacker reporters’ will cover the festival using only hand-held devices and online publishing tools. Flips, iPhones, Nokia N96s, audioBoo and Qik will be the kind of apparatus with which we break into the festival’s vault of brilliant ideas just like Croker and his crew – minus the criminality.
Lead editorially by the much more softly-spoken Claire Wardle, the Media140 team admittedly has little in common with Croker’s band of thieves apart from the unique and honed skills each one of them brings to the – err – job. Moreover, Croker had just one ‘computer specialist’ and Wardle will have a gaggle* of them.
media140 will not be blowing the doors off of anything, but we certainly plan to blow minds with a powerful fusion of social inquiry, journalism and technological exploration.
Tickets to the festival are – astonishingly – free. All you have to do is make your way to picturesque Umbria in late April, where spring will most probably just have sprung.
When Italians hope to meet again, they say ‘arrivederci’ – and that is what we bid you!
Ande Gregson – Founder, media140
*All suggestions for a collective noun for computer specialists are welcome in the comments section below …
Image courtesy of Twitter.com
The Tall Man with Glasses, aka Stuart Witts, began his career in digital marketing back when the term social media referred to the act of writing one’s name on the side of the railway lines. This was a time before Dreamweaver, when the humble Notepad was the only HTML editor of choice.
What better perspective from which to write about Twitter’s dizzyingly speedy rise to its current status as an indispensable tool?
Stuart looks at the way news consumers and gatherers, and those who simply love a great conversation have come to rely on Twitter, and examines whether or not they would benefit if the service had competition.
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Every time the dreaded fail whale appears, doom mongers surface and spread alarmist tales. During the recent earthquake in Haiti, there were no exceptions to that rule.
After one of the aftershocks, Twitter crashed for 90 minutes and concerns over its weaknesses as a single point of contact were raised.
In a sense, the fact that concerns were raised at all bears testimony to Twitter’s meteoric rise as a communications medium. For it to be considered so important during events of this magnitude is frankly astounding, but as Uncle Ben advised the young Spiderman; ‘With great power comes great responsibility’.
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Image courtesy of the US Navy via Wikimedia Commons
It is now more than a fortnight since Haiti’s devastating earthquake. Billions of dollars in donations have poured in to relief operations, as stories of devastation and miraculous survival have gushed out of Port-Au-Prince.
Digital strategist Jonathan Waddingham and his team at online fundraising website JustGiving.com have not had much time to breathe since horror struck the Caribbean island nation on January 12. However, as the chaos gives way to rebuilding efforts, Jonathan takes a moment to reflect on how response to this disaster reflects changes in the way in which charities are now making full use of the real-time web.
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As news broke on January 12 of a massive earthquake in Haiti, some of the first details to emerge were from charities on the ground. In the past, this may have occurred via press release, a day or so after the event; this time the first information came in, via Tweets. Later, it came via blogs, phone blogs, photos and videos – all of them, online channels.
The 2005 Asian Tsunami was a milestone, in terms of the adoption of the internet by charities as a way of raising money. It was the first time that the total of online donations amounted to more than the total raised via traditional cash giving. Haiti’s terrible tragedy may prove a similar landmark in how charities use the real-time web.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Digital strategist Dean Economou takes a personal look at the origins of democracy and compares the principles and systems upon which it was originally built with the equivalent technologies available today.
Dean, with his own Greek ancestry, is well-qualified to consider the earliest origins of the democratic system. Additionally, anyone who loves an acronym will be amused by his proposals for a “National Online Democracy” – or even better, a global one.
Dean is an innovator with a keen interest in the interplay of technology and people. He has held a senior role at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, and also founded a major telecoms vendor. He currently works at National ICT Australia.
Democracy, in its most widely accepted definition, means the people having power over how they are ruled. That is fundamentally how the ancient Greeks, early Sumerian cities and forward-thinking contemporary communities in the Bihar region of India conceived democracy – apart, of course, from their exclusion of the women and the poor people.
In these small ancient cities, with relatively few citizens, it was then still feasible for nearly everyone to meet and make decisions on anything that mattered. These citizens had direct power.
As populations grew and cities expanded, direct representation became increasingly impractical. In response, a new system gradually emerged over the centuries. It was a compromise which allowed representation, but necessarily within the limitations of the existing communications, transport and information technologies of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Via physical ballot, citizens would elect a local representative who would then participate in government on their behalf. Representatives were charged with acting in the interests of their electorate, but not necessarily according to their wishes. We still use this system and we call it representative democracy.
Those compromises are no longer needed with our vastly more powerful technology which allows a significant number of people in the developed world to communicate instantly and to find out almost any information they want within seconds.
Photo Courtesy of Simon Roberts – www.we-english.co.uk
Google offers newspapers more than a search engine to demonize
Ben LaMothe is a junior associate with a London public relations agency who spends his spare time concocting new ideas for old media.
He is especially interested in how real-time web technology can help save newspapers.
In his first post for #Media140 on the topic, he proposes local rags make Google their friend by utilising its new email platform, Wave.
Real-time web offers an opportunity for newspapers to regain at least part of the ground they have lost to poor planning and bad decision-making.
That newspaper readerships are plummeting is no secret, and local dailies are among the hardest hit. Audit Bureau of Circulation figures released last October showed that 379 daily US newspapers had lost 10.62 percent of their readers on average.
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