Posts tagged twitter

Part of the reason why many people (particularly geeks) dislike talking on the phone is that it forces both sides to be present at the same time, instead of allowing a user to consume or respond to the information at their own pace — or multi-task while they are doing so.

That’s Mathew Ingram in his piece on digital etiquette, which is a reaction to Nick Bilton’s piece on digital etiquette in yesterday’s NY Times.

Ingram is talking about synchronous vs. asynchronous communication (ie: phone vs. e-mail or text) and how the proliferation of different kinds of communication technology has allowed people to develop different affinities for communication etiquette (depending on age/industry/how connected you are). 

Both are interesting reads. The bottom line is that people have different preferences and we need to keep that in mind when we communicate with each other. Bilton, for example, writes of his distaste for communication that wastes your time (ie: leaving a voicemail when you can just send a text). Ingram, in a similar-but-different example, writes of the patience we need to develop for those who might not be at the same technological level we are (ie: don’t expect your parents to text you if they are just getting used to e-mail). 

Sort of Related: Our recent post on How to Tweet Like a Buddha. It’s essentially a list of tips on how to be mindful on Twitter. How to remember that behind the screen is human being with a particular set of values, habits, preferences, and a particular level of knowledge, tech literacy and access to communication. So, in the same way we are mindful of how the person in front of us is receiving the information we convey, it’s worth being mindful of the person behind the screen. It’s an important mindfulness, I believe, that is sorely lacking in our attempts to navigate the technological literacy divides of our time.—Jihii

latimes: Twitter is not the world: Or America, for that matter. In a new study from Pew Research, reactions to events on Twitter often are detached from society’s reactions as a whole. While Pew found that Twitter consensus moves back and forth from liberal to conservative, what really sticks out is just how much more negative Twitter discussions can be. For both [presidential] candidates, negative comments exceeded positive comments by a wide margin throughout the fall campaign season. But from September through November, Romney was consistently the target of more negative reactions than was Obama. And as always, it’s important to understand the limitations of Twitter’s reach. The overall reach of Twitter is modest. In the Pew Research Center’s 2012 biennial news consumption survey, just 13% of adults said they ever use Twitter or read Twitter messages; only 3% said they regularly or sometimes tweet or retweet news or news headlines on Twitter. Read Pew’s full study here (or follow them on Tumblr, which will hopefully be proven to be more positive than Twitter). Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP

latimes:

Twitter is not the world: Or America, for that matter. In a new study from Pew Research, reactions to events on Twitter often are detached from society’s reactions as a whole. While Pew found that Twitter consensus moves back and forth from liberal to conservative, what really sticks out is just how much more negative Twitter discussions can be.

For both [presidential] candidates, negative comments exceeded positive comments by a wide margin throughout the fall campaign season. But from September through November, Romney was consistently the target of more negative reactions than was Obama.

And as always, it’s important to understand the limitations of Twitter’s reach.

The overall reach of Twitter is modest. In the Pew Research Center’s 2012 biennial news consumption survey, just 13% of adults said they ever use Twitter or read Twitter messages; only 3% said they regularly or sometimes tweet or retweet news or news headlines on Twitter.

Read Pew’s full study here (or follow them on Tumblr, which will hopefully be proven to be more positive than Twitter).

Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP

How to Tweet Like a Buddha

Came across this in my archived bookmarks this morning. Laurie Deschene on how to tweet mindfully.

Background via Tricycle:

For the last two years, I have provided a daily wisdom quote through a Twitter account called Tiny Buddha. Since the follower count has grown by leaps and bounds, people have suggested I tweet more often throughout the day. I’ve realized, however, that the greatest lesson we can all learn is that less is enough. In a time when connections can seem like commodities and online interactions can become casually inauthentic, mindfulness is not just a matter of fostering increased awareness. It’s about relating meaningfully to other people and ourselves. With this goal in mind, I’ve compiled a list of 10 tips for using social media mindfully.

Read the list.

FJP: Twitter (in my mind, and for most journalists) is supposed to be this noisy place where news breaks and people make funnies and debate. Mindful tweeting then, is fact-checking, verifying, and creating meaningful conversations. But she takes it further. It’s different, sweet, and interesting to think about. —Jihii

How Do You Explain the Word “Reporter”

Sesame Street wants to know.

Meantime, and this boggles my mind, they’re five million views away from a billion on YouTube. — Michael

Images: Selected Tweets. Select to embiggen.

Super Bowl Twitter Numbers Twitter released some of their numbers from the Super Bowl. They include 24.1 million total posts along with: 231,500 Tweets Per Minute during the power outage. 183,000 Tweets Per Minute when the Ravens finally won. 268,000 Tweets Per Minute at the conclusion of Beyonce’s halftime show. It also took a mere four minutes into the power outage before the first advertiser took out a promoted tweet against it. Other, non-Twitter, odds and ends: The street value of the silver used in the Vince Lombardi trophy is $3,500. The Paul Harvey “So God Made a Farmer” speech used in the Dodge Ram commercial was made in 1978. CBS used 62 cameras to broadcast the game. A 30-second ad cost $3.8 million. It’s estimated that Americans bet $10 billion by halftime on various aspects of the game.

Super Bowl Twitter Numbers

Twitter released some of their numbers from the Super Bowl. They include 24.1 million total posts along with:

  • 231,500 Tweets Per Minute during the power outage.
  • 183,000 Tweets Per Minute when the Ravens finally won.
  • 268,000 Tweets Per Minute at the conclusion of Beyonce’s halftime show.

It also took a mere four minutes into the power outage before the first advertiser took out a promoted tweet against it.

Other, non-Twitter, odds and ends:

  • The street value of the silver used in the Vince Lombardi trophy is $3,500.
  • The Paul Harvey “So God Made a Farmer” speech used in the Dodge Ram commercial was made in 1978.
  • CBS used 62 cameras to broadcast the game.
  • A 30-second ad cost $3.8 million.
  • It’s estimated that Americans bet $10 billion by halftime on various aspects of the game.
Watch the World Tweet in Real Time Tweet Ping is a kind of ticker for Twitter activity by continent, showing the last used hashtag, mention and word-, character- and tweet counts. As you can imagine, everything moves very fast. Feels like you’re in a high tech spy movie.

Watch the World Tweet in Real Time

Tweet Ping is a kind of ticker for Twitter activity by continent, showing the last used hashtag, mention and word-, character- and tweet counts. As you can imagine, everything moves very fast. Feels like you’re in a high tech spy movie.

In the report, Twitter said that, worldwide, it received 1,858 requests from governments for information about users in 2012, as well as 6,646 reports of copyright violations, and 48 demands from governments that content they deem illegal be removed.
Twitter gives user data to U.S. 7 times out of 10 | Internet & Media - CNET News (via infoneer-pulse)

How to Use Storify as Your One-Stop Social Media Search Engine

Regardless of whether you actually want to create a storify. David Higgerson describes 12 tips with examples so read through his post.

Short version:

  1. Create a Storify, just for the sake of recording what you find.
  2. When searching, use the words people on social networks use.
  3. Make a beeline for Facebook, where you’ll find a lot of people to start with when looking for sources.
  4. Filter out retweets.
  5. Use Twitter images.
  6. Use the location filter carefully.
  7. Embed picture Tweets.
  8. Get your search criteria right on YouTube.
  9. Check photo dates on Flickr.
  10. Just because Instagram pictures are often filtered, doesn’t mean you can’t get valuable information from them.
  11. Storify lets you search Google too.
  12. Beware of hoaxes.

An addendum to #12: this post by Steve Buttry on how to verify information on Twitter.

Related: This piece on Andy Carvin, the “one man Twitter news bureau” and his social media news process.

For people who’ve followed me on Twitter, they’ve gotten to know many of the people I tweet about as characters in a broader Arab Spring narrative. You see their ups and downs, the hopes fulfilled and their dreams dashed. But because it’s happening over twitter, you’re not experiencing these stories in the past tense. You’re experiencing them in the present – as present as you can get. And my characters are real people, whether they use their real names or are forced to use pseudonyms for their own safety.

Andy Carvin, interviewed by Jesse Hicks. The Verge. Tweeting the news: Andy Carvin test pilots Twitter journalism.

For those who don’t know much about NPR’s Andy Carvin, this is a good primer. For those who know who he is, you probably know that he has a book coming out too — about his time reporting the Arab Spring on Twitter.

A Minute-by-Minute Look at Twitter Volume for Obama’s First & Second Inaugurations WSJ: President Barack Obama’s second inauguration was scaled back from his first in terms of cost and scale. But it outshined his 2009 inauguration in one major way: how it played out on social media. There were 1.1 million inauguration-related tweets sent during the ceremony, up from about 82,000 in 2009, according to Twitter’s Government and Politics Team. The most viral moment of President Obama’s speech was when he said, “We cannot mistake absolutism for principle…name calling as a substitute for debate,” which elicited 27,795 tweets per minute. Another high point was when he began his inaugural address after taking the ceremonial oath of office. That inspired 24,760 tweets per minute, compared to 3,210 back in 2009. Twitter had a much smaller number of users in 2009. Image: via WSJ

A Minute-by-Minute Look at Twitter Volume for Obama’s First & Second Inaugurations

WSJ:

President Barack Obama’s second inauguration was scaled back from his first in terms of cost and scale. But it outshined his 2009 inauguration in one major way: how it played out on social media. There were 1.1 million inauguration-related tweets sent during the ceremony, up from about 82,000 in 2009, according to Twitter’s Government and Politics Team.

The most viral moment of President Obama’s speech was when he said, “We cannot mistake absolutism for principle…name calling as a substitute for debate,” which elicited 27,795 tweets per minute. Another high point was when he began his inaugural address after taking the ceremonial oath of office. That inspired 24,760 tweets per minute, compared to 3,210 back in 2009. Twitter had a much smaller number of users in 2009.

Image: via WSJ

How to Staff for Social Media

Mark Golin, Editorial Director of Digital for Time Inc.’s Style & Entertainment and Lifestyle Groups, discusses the social phenomenon of people relying on networks such as Twitter and Facebook as their primary news source.

In order to harness these platforms successfully, Golin explains how magazines must carefully staff social media positions with people who have a particular skill set that is not unlike what we look for in editors. In order to engage users successfully, Golin believes that a unique voice is needed on each platform, and the style and sensibility required of social media editors is something that can — in most cases — be learned and practiced.

Visit the theFJP.org to see more videos with Mark.

Agence France-Presse and The Washington Post infringed on the copyrights of photographer Daniel Morel in using pictures he took in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake in January 2010, District Judge Alison Nathan in Manhattan ruled.

From Reuters earlier today.

Background:

The photographer put the Haiti images on Twitter, and they were then disseminated widely after an AFP editor discovered them through another Twitter user’s account, according to the ruling.

AFP distributed several of the pictures to Getty Images, the ruling said. The Washington Post, a Getty client, published four of the images on its website, according to the ruling.

So Morel approached AFP, which then sued Morel on grounds that it legally used his photos. Morel sued back, and sued the Washington Post and Getty as well, though at the time of this writing Getty is not in the same boat as the publishers.

The judge ruled against the AFP and WaPo based largely upon what she found in Twitter’s terms of use.

From Mashable:

While the AFP argued Morel’s work was free to use once posted to Twitter, Nathan instead found that Twitter’s Terms of Service required that news outlets first get permission before running tweeted photos.

Nathan, however, did rule that the retweeting of such photos is allowed.

Twitter has long held that photographers own their tweeted content. The company’s Terms of Service section on copyright maintains that “Twitter respects the intellectual property rights of others and expects users of the Services to do the same.”

FJP: Should be interesting to see how this plays out.

fjp-latinamerica: Spanish: now the second most popular language on Twitter Spanish is now the second-most-used language on Twitter, only after English, according to Spain’s Cervantes Institute. Despite this “spectacular” evolution, the potential growth of  Spanish-speaking users continues to be outstanding given that more than 60 percent of Latin Americans do not have access the Web. Spanish is the third most-used language on the Internet and ranks second in the ‘offline’ world, with 500 million speakers, only behind Chinese. Image: Twitter en Español Follow FJP Latin America on Tumblr and Twitter.

fjp-latinamerica:

Spanish: now the second most popular language on Twitter

Spanish is now the second-most-used language on Twitter, only after English, according to Spain’s Cervantes Institute.

Despite this “spectacular” evolution, the potential growth of  Spanish-speaking users continues to be outstanding given that more than 60 percent of Latin Americans do not have access the Web.

Spanish is the third most-used language on the Internet and ranks second in the ‘offline’ world, with 500 million speakers, only behind Chinese.

Image: Twitter en Español

Follow FJP Latin America on Tumblr and Twitter.

While Twitter’s Turks will help bring much-needed context to the platform, they’re not journalists who verify whether something is true. As we’ve seen with the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut and Superstorm Sandy, Twitter rumors ran rampant. Some rumors turned out to be true, but many were inaccurate or even malicious. Some were important, others were trivial. At Breaking News, we rely on experienced journalists (that’s one of them, Stephanie Clary, above) to verify real-time reports and prioritize their importance. We also add context, associating reports with ongoing stories, topics and locations. But accuracy and importance — along with speed — are the essence of breaking news for any news organization.

The Breaking News team to Twitter: Your Mechanical Turk team can’t compete with our actual journalists. (via shortformblog)

FJP: Some Background — The Twitter Engineering blog posted yesterday about how it uses real people alongside its search algorithms to determine the “meaning” of trending terms. It does this with both in-house evaluators and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourced marketplace for accomplishing (relatively) small tasks. 

The goals is to contextualize and understand, for example, that something like #BindersFullOfWomen is related to politics.

Here’s what Twitter has to say about what happens when topics begin to trend:

As soon as we discover a new popular search query, we send it to our human evaluators, who are asked a variety of questions about the query… For example: as soon as we notice “Big Bird” spiking, we may ask judges on Mechanical Turk to categorize the query, or provide other information (e.g., whether there are likely to be interesting pictures of the query, or whether the query is about a person or an event) that helps us serve relevant Tweets and ads.

breakingblog