CNN’s poorly-advised coverage of the balloon boy hoax story, could mark a change in the way mainstream news is reported. By trying to take on services such as Twitter, by releasing ‘news’ super-fast, the reliability of stories is suffering. Here’s what I think is happening…
Once again, hundreds or maybe thousands of people, attending the SAME event at the SAME time are ‘live blogging’ the SAME content to (mostly) the SAME people. So-called ‘live blogging’ was once a useful practice, where a small number of people attending an event, would send key messages via Twitter, to their targeted followers.
However, today – when almost every attendee at these events is tweeting everything they hear, live blogging has become (at best) a nuisance for Twitter users.
When Matt Mullengweg announced that Wordpress.com was installing RSS Cloud on it’s 7.5 million blogs, something amazing happened!
All of a sudden, blogs on the Wordpress.com platform became almost real-time. In other words, posts will be broadcast almost immediately; allowing bloggers to both deliver real-time content to their RSS subscribers AND potentially share real-time comments with their readers. Here’s why I think this is such a big deal!
Blogging is experiencing (yet another) resurgence it seems. However, this time, it looks like the very sites that were accused of killing blogs, are now responsible for making them more popular than ever.
That’s right: Twitter, Facebook and co are actually making blogs more popular than ever before. Read on to find out why!
Last night on Twitter, I managed to connect with someone I have been a huge fan of for a very long time. I’m talking about the respected tech journalist, broadcaster and science advocate Maggie Philbin.
Maggie was the first person on UK television to demonstrate the word’s first truly mobile phone, car navigation system and countless other gadgets we take for granted today.
Users are investing a lot of time and effort building social networks and getting their content onto various third-party sites – never really knowing if all that hard work will be undone after an acquisition or a provider going broke.
Understandably, the question a lot of people are now asking is; “who or what can I trust?”
Here’s the answer!
So, FaceBook has acquired FriendFeed – But why? It wasn’t for the platform and with a quarter of a billion users, FaceBook didn’t need to buy the relatively small FriendFeed user-base either.
However, by acquiring FriendFeed, FaceBook have bought something, which is of massively greater value to them as a company!
How’s this for timing? Today we decided to add the TweetMeme Twitter button to our blog & then, we end up writing about TweetMeme for the first time. That’s because they have just accused a app rival (called ReTweet) of copying their idea – Oh, and some of their code too!
According to comScore, an amazing 80% of the UK’s online population visited a social networking site in May; with FaceBook proving to be the most popular. To put that statistic into perspective, that accounts for 30 million people.
As you will have heard, this week saw a Twitter employee’s Gmail account hacked, leading to the unauthorised publication of a number of “sensitive” Twitter company documents. Thankfully for Twitter, these documents were more embarrassing than damaging – but the fact they were compromised serves as an important lesson for us early adopters!
