We create the stories of the connected society

I love this, and my day is now a little less sucky, thanks to an invitation from Blogads founder Henry Copeland (aka @HC): SUXORZ: the worst social media campaigns of ’09.

NPR News in the US aims to double its online audience – in part by building a closer relationship with people who already love NPR. Dick Meyer, NPR Digital Media’s editorial director, calls them NPRistas. He says in the American Journalism Review: “Folks who listen to NPR think of themselves as NPR people … The [...]

One of the loveliest social media startups I’ve run across in the last few years is Scrapblog. I say lovely because it’s well designed and design itself is a core value of the service and the user experience. Users create multimedia collages with Scrapblog, then share them with embed codes, just like you share YouTube [...]

The magazine Editor & Publisher has long been the must-read trade rag for anyone in the U.S. newspaper business. Which is another way of saying: Like the industry it covers, Editor & Publisher in print has been fading for years. E&P in print switched from a weekly to monthly in 2004, while its web site [...]

Aggregation of news headlines and user ratings is so commonplace it’s hardly worth a second thought. Except, that is, if you’re interested in the business of news, or in improving the way we experience and act on news. Common as they are, headlines remain the bedrock of online news, so we see a continual flow [...]

Social networking is the fastest-growing activity on the user-centric Internet. The idea is that most anyone can join a large, loosely connected network of “friends” to share personal or professional information, establish contacts, communicate, align social activities, establish a personality or brand, and vicariously act-out life online. You pass your profile to your friends, who [...]

Last night Mary and I attended an outdoor concert at the Wolf Trap Center for Performing Arts with friends. On a perfect summer night, we claimed a patch of grass on the hillside, uncorked a couple bottles of wine with a gourmet picnic dinner, and talked about the things that friends talk about as we [...]

At this week’s Personal Democracy Forum, a sponsor distributed a low-tech, but highly effective stress toy to attendees willing to listen to their pitch: a rubber ball on an elastic string that connects to a velcro band. Strap the band to your finger and you can play catch with yourself. Which is what I came [...]

Nokia, which is obsessive about consumer research, is showing the world how to innovate from the outside-in by collecting ideas globally for free at or low cost. At Nokia Beta Labs, the Finnish handset maker lets users test the latest smartphone software. Instead of people recording silly Web cam videos for YouTube or inventing frivolous [...]

For the past week I’ve been playing with the private “alpha” of a new social bookmarking tool called socialmedian. You can also give it a try. To register as a tester, use this code on the signup page: wemedia. (This code is available for 100 testers).

Here are the slides (PDF) from Dale’s presentation today at the NewsPaper Association of America conference in Washington, DC. (Current membership and login required for download. To join or renew, click here.)

Social media is all the rage. But why? Why is the connected society becoming so relentlessly social? Are we smitten with the technical cleverness of Facebook and MySpace? Do we revel in the empowerment of distribution and sharing offered by YouTube, Digg and Twitter? Are we simply fools for anything new – or for the [...]

The social web depends on content, tagging and utility created or improved by the good will of the people formerly known as the audience. Where does good will end and greed take over? That depends on whether you’re a giver or taker. Dan Gillmor at the Center for Citizen Media is bothered by the free [...]

One of the roles of media is to help people understand the world so we can make informed decisions – and then take action. The daily flood of news and information from all the big media institutions we love and love to hate is one approach to learning, sifting, filtering and evaluating all this information. [...]

A couple of recent sketches and "what ifs" by designers offer a counterpoint – or should I say, complement – to our Search Working Group conversation about better search: what about better web sites? Imagine if Amazon depended on customers searching generic search engines to find books and merchandise they wanted to purchase. People do [...]