guide

Start the week with a great guide to multimedia journalism

September 7, 2009 By Dan Thornton

There are increasing numbers of journalists and bloggers utilising every channel in multimedia to convey their stories and information, but whether you’re contemplating starting to embrace digital multimedia, or you’ve engaged in mixing text, audio, video etc for a while, you’re bound to pick up at least a couple of new tools and ideas from Mindy McAdam’s Reporters Guide to Multimedia Profiency.

It’s the single PDF compilation of her 15 excellent blog posts on the subject.

And worth reading if you’re publishing anything online, whether or not you’d define yourself as a journalist or editorial staff.

Former colleague (although we never met in person), Adam Westbrook has also been doing some brilliant guides to using multimedia and video.

And for interesting inspiration, I tend to look at Christian Payne, and spend some spare time trying to persuade friend and former colleague Angus Farquhar to spend more time doing crazy stuff and blogging about it.

My presentation on building online communities

July 9, 2009 By Dan Thornton

I was invited to speak about ‘Building online communities to support successful media brands’ on Tuesday by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, as part of an event covering what Scholarly Publishing can learn from other industries.

As the opening act, and with a subject so huge, I opted to go for a fairly general overview to hopefully inspire more people to give it a go without worrying about the ‘correct’ way to do things – because I’ve found that beyond some simple principles, the most important thing is tailoring what you do to your specific community.

In retrospect I probably could have included some more specific case studies – for instance Absolute Radio on Twitter and Facebook! But that’s why I subtitled it ‘a work in progess’ because anything on online communities is going to need constant revision and updating, and I intend to create v2.0, v3.0 etc and hopefully involve some more people to create a more comprehensive guide.

Building Online Communities To Support Successful Media Brands – ALPSP July 2009 from Dan Thornton

Will microblogging change SEO/writing styles?

April 13, 2009 By Dan Thornton

I’m still trying to compile all the effects Twitter has on the link economy, but now Louis Gray has added another one, in his post: ‘Are you writing your headlines for Google or Twitter.

As an online journalist and blogger, I’m well aware of the best practice for constructing a headline to maximise SEO opportunities – although as a blogger I often ignore it in favour of indulging myself by being able to write for fun.

But now Louis is noticing headlines which aren’t aiming to contain keywords and search terms, but are also restricting themselves to 140 characters (or 125 characters to allow for a short url). He quotes the example of Techcrunch making sure their articles work for microblogging.

Personally, I hope that most people write their own message if they’re kind enough to Retweet an article from here (although there’s also the automated option). I’d rather have a smaller number of heartfelt recommendations than a flurry of copy-and-pasted headline Retweets (although the traffic might be nice!)

What’s interesting is that rather than simply prescribing the ‘correct’ way to use microblogging services, people are experimenting and coming up with the things they see working for themselves, or for other people. Which is a better option, as it allows people like me to completely ignore the supposed best practice if I want! Although if it’s guides you’re after, you can start with Dan Zarrella!

Meanwhile I’ll keep mixing personal messages with recommendations, and occasionally go mad whilst chatting about an event like #motogp. And, most shocking, I’ll keep using Magpie to send out the occasional (less than one a day) advertising message as long as it helps to cover hosting costs and some new projects! I’ll just keep relying on the fact that a surprisingly large amount of people continue to see value in interacting/following me despite the fact I’m rubbish at following rules outside of 9-5.30pm.

Jumping back into the Twitter Stream with Twitter for Dummies

April 3, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Much like the constant updates of Twitter itself, picking what to write about after a break enforced by work/family is tricky as a huge amount of microblogging and Twitter coverage flows through my RSS feeds on a daily basis – so expect plenty of catching up shortly.

The admirable Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) reminded me this morning that there’s only a week left for open contributions to Twitter for Dummies.

The good thing is that you don’t need to write everything up:

‘Want to see your tip, idea or case study in Twitter for Dummies? Submit it today and get your friends to vote it up. We can’t include everything, but we’ll mention as many of the best ones as we can.

A line or two is enough, or a link to the full story. You don’t need to write it up completely here.

Vote on ideas by category and add your stuff too. Click the categories in the sidebar to go through them one at a time. Thanks!

–Advanced tips and techniques
–Business and Twitter
–Case Studies – Business
–Case Studies – Personal
–Etiquette
–Facts and Factoids
–Favorite Twitter Tools
–Government/Politics and Twitter
–How to Grow Your Network
–NOMINATE THE CHARITY
–Nonprofits and Twitter
–Personal use of Twitter
–Security
–Sharing multimedia
–SUGGEST A NEW CATEGORY
–Tips for New Users
–URL Shorteners
–Uses of Twitter
–What NOT to Do

We’ll keep taking ideas for one more week — until Wednesday, April 8, 2009. We can’t guarantee your story will make it into the final edition. We CAN guarantee that the most popular charity submitted and voted up will get 10% of the royalties from book sales.’

So as long as you interact by Wednesday, you’ll get to share some knowledge, possibly be listed in a Dummies guide, and raise some money for charity.