News alerts: keeping audiences coming back for more

Newspapers maybe missing out if they don’t make full use of alerts and tools, especially when it comes to exclusive materials, argues Dorian Benkoil of Poynter Online.

He uses the example of the Times’ story of tennis player Andre Agassi’s autobiography - in which he admitted to the use of the drug crystal meth - of which they would then be publishing exclusive excerpts.

Because the Times did not have an alert system (using, say, Twitter or Facebook), which would have encouraged Benkoil to go back to the excerpts when they went live, he eventually started checking Google news and the Guardian, and didn’t return to the original source for some weeks.

This, he argues, is a missed opportunity that could lose newspapers valuable page views, advertising and other opportunities, stating that this is backed up by masses of Web analytics data.

Every little impediment, says Benkoil, is an opportunity for a visitor to leave, go somewhere else, forget they can get what they want from you.

Over time, he adds, that means the loss of real money and all the other metrics people like to use, such as "stickiness" and "engagement."

He continues by saying that if The Times had offered the chance to be alerted when the excerpts were published, not only would they have had his subsequent page views (and ad impressions), they would have had his contact info and valuable information about his interests.

Benkoil suggests that every site should have sharing apps, like the AddThis module at the bottom of the Agassi story that links to dozens of social networking and bookmarking options, amongst many other apps.

But, he concludes, publishers also need to tailor their links and offerings as much as possible.

Sometimes, he says, that will mean human intervention, such as a smart editor saying, "Hey, we've got the Agassi excerpts, they'll be big, so let's make it easy for everyone to find them and get alerted to them."

This will also increase the ability of new Semantic Web applications to place relevant alerts and adverts alongside them and it should be as easy as possible for someone to find what they are looking for on the publication’s site.

Attracting Users With Social Media

How news sites attract audiences via social media is the subject of a presentation from net consultant Martin Belam.

Belam, who is information architect for the Guardian’s web development team, presented his findings at last month’s International Social Media Summit.

Among the social media tools and sites discussed were social bookmarking and recommendation sites, blogs and Twitter.

Belam has made his presentation available on Slideshare (see below) and as a six-part series of posts on his currybetdotnet blog.

How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic

View more documents from Martin Belam.

Best Ways To Share Blog Posts

Social media, texting and Instant Messaging all make Mashable’s list of the Top 20 Ways to Share a Great Blog Post.

Writer Ben Parr points out that there’s a whole host of ways to share blog posts with friends and strangers on the Web, so he's put together a list of Mashable’s 20 favourites.


On the social media side, this includes microblogging site Twitter, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, and social news sites like Digg and Reddit.

Suggestions also include spreading the word about a good blog post by blogging about it yourself, sharing the link with friends via Google’s RSS reader or sending the link to blogging platforms such as tumblr and posterous.


TwitThat, it installs a bookmarklet into a browser to enable one-click posting to Twitter feed, also merits a mention and so does ping.fm, which sends links to multiple social media accounts at once.

And not forgotten is sharing via texts – using the text share option under articles – or posting the link to friends via Instant Messaging.

Check out the full 20 on Mashable.

BBC Shows Bookmarked Content

Articles which have been shared most by users on social media sites are now displayed on the BBC news page.

Previously, the Most Popular Stories Now box showed the Most Emailed, Most Read and Most Watched/Listened.

But in recognition of the growing popularity of social bookmarking and recommendation websites, the BBC has changed Most Emailed to Most Shared.

This then takes into account not just articles which users have emailed to one another but also stories they have shared via sites such as Digg and Facebook.



Writing about the change on The BBC Editors blog, news website editor Steve Herrmann said the change was introduced in order “to get a broader range of input to these recommendations”.

Herrmann also used the blog to announce that the Most Read section will continue to include ten headlines after it proved a success with users.

The Editors blog welcomes any feedback about these changes in the comments section of Herrmann’s blog post.

New Roles For Multimedia Newsrooms

The changing nature of information means that the role of the journalist must also change, according to academic and blogger Paul Bradshaw.

So he has come up with a set of six new roles which journalists could fulfill as part of his vision for A Model for the 21st Century Newsroom.

His six suggested roles are:

1 – THE AGGREGATOR SUB

“To collect feeds together (aggregating), identify the useful and relevant stuff (filtering), publish it (bookmark-blogging), identify legal issues and verify where necessary.”

2 – THE MOBILE JOURNALIST

3 – THE DATA MINER

“The investigative journalist of the 21st century is someone who can work with databases and spreadsheets, picking out interesting patterns, pushing the powerful for data, and having an understanding of the vagaries of statistics.”

4 – MULTIMEDIA PRODUCER

“An understanding of how a story or issue can be explored on a range of media makes a significant difference in how you come up with story ideas and gather information.”

“They may not do all the work themselves ... but they can see the possibilities.”

5 – NETWORKED SPECIALIST

“Now it’s not just about knowing their subject area, and the big names, but also being visibly networked in that environment, blogging, vlogging, bookmarking and commenting across their specialist parts of the blogosphere.”

6 – COMMUNITY EDITOR

“Building communities, helping start or fuel conversations, preventing them turning nasty, supporting users, inviting guidance and help, and assisting them in certain projects.”



Check out the Online Journalism Blog for the full post.

Social Media – UK Landscape

Blogger Martin Belam has been looking into UK newspapers and how they’re using social bookmarking options.

Part One of his research focuses on ten regional news websites and the range of share options they provide and Part Two looks at an additional ten and features a cool results table.



He also compares the contextual help provided by newspapers in relation to the social media share buttons which appear at the end of articles and reveals some interesting findings.

The study forms part of a series investigating the online offerings of regional newspapers in the UK, with previous posts comparing RSS feed services and video content.

If you want to know more about UK news sites and social bookmarking, take a look at this post and slideshow which were featured on the JP Digital Digest blog earlier this month.

UK Newspapers & Social Bookmarking

I’ve been doing some research into UK newspapers and social media share options recently and thought I’d share the results here.

Below is a round-up of the main findings followed by a slideshow of the results with graphs and pie charts.

(Further details on the phenomenon of social bookmarking can be found in previous posts – follow the links on the right.)

Main Findings:

Share options on national and regional news sites in the UK are dominated by five social bookmarking sites - Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Facebook and StumbleUpon.

These five account for 80.6% of the total number of share buttons made available by articles on regional news websites and 63.5% on national newspaper websites.

Data collected from 34 websites shows that 94.1% of them include Digg and Delicious among their bookmarking icons, 85.3% feature Reddit, 82.4% have Facebook and 70.6% include StumbleUpon.

Also featuring in the top ten most common share options are NewsVine (44.1%), Fark (29.4%), Yahoo! My Web (29.4%), Google Bookmarks (23.5%), and Technorati (20.6%).

National – Regional Differences

There are some pronounced differences between the share options displayed by national news sites and their regional counterparts.

Three national sites have the Add This widget (standard one offers links to 39 bookmarking sites) while no regional sites yet include it.

The inclusion of the Add This widget means nationals have a higher average of share buttons per site – 12.5 – in comparison to the average for the regionals of 5.4.

However, regionals have a higher mode with 5 share buttons per site in comparison to the nationals which have a mode of 4.

The type of bookmarks used also distinguishes the two groups, with links to sites such as Fark, NewsVine, MySpace and NowPublic proving much more popular among nationals than regionals.

While regional websites have a greater percentage of websites using the StumbleUpon (up 18.9% against nationals) and Facebook buttons (up 16.2% against the nationals).

UK Newspapers & Social Bookmarking

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: newspapers journalism)

US Election Picks

Now that the dust has settled on the US election, here’s a guide to some of the online coverage that caught the eye of commentators, bloggers and journalists.

The Look

If you want to see how the digital media reported the votes as they came in, student Gary Ritzenthaler spent the night taking screen grabs of websites from around the world.

Blogger and academic Mindy McAdams writes that the PhD student from the University of Florida has made these images public on Iterasi, an online bookmarking service for pages as well as links.

And guardian.co.uk has a collection of images showing how the global online media reported Barack Obama’s victory.

Blogs

An overview of some of the most popular US election blogs was provided earlier this month by TimesOnline.

Although the article is about websites rather than purely about blogs, most of its 25 picks either are blogs or have their blogging sections recommended.

The effectiveness of the pro-McCain and pro-Obama bloggers is discussed in this article by Judith Townend on Journalism.co.uk.

Meanwhile, the BBC adopted a three-pronged blogging strategy with Gavin Hewitt providing updates from the Obama camp in Chicago and Matt Price blogging from the McCain campaign headquarters in Arizona.

North America editor Justin Webb completed the triumvirate by offering an overview of the results via his regular blog.

Multimedia

The effectiveness and accuracy of some of the media’s fancy maps have been discussed on The Information Aesthetics blog, and the Australian resource also has lots of links to some of the most innovative ones.

And alternatives to the usual raft of red/blue maps dotting the online media landscape have been offered up by Mark Newman at the University of Michigan (HT - Martin Stabe.)

While the Washington Post combined mapping with its Twitter, blog and video reports through the multimedia fest called TimeSpace: Election.

Users could view news from chosen locations and use the timeline to filter reports by date.



On the video and slideshows front, plenty of journalists in the US hit the campaign trail and polling booths to produce some great little packages.

In her round-up for Poynter Online, Regina McCombs points to an audio-visual piece from the Nashua Telegraph where voters were asked to sum up why they voted in one word.

McCombs also flags up a multimedia feature from the Star Tribune asking local politicians and activists what the Obama victory means to them.

While the New York Times contributed with its documentary – Choosing the President – which combines audio, video and some very flashy graphics to produce an effective overview of the election from party nominations through to November 5th.

And in the UK, election news videos produced by satirical outfit The Onion News Network were featured on Telegraph.co.uk after the newspaper struck a deal with myvideorights.com.

Social Media

How Obama harnessed the power of social networking websites like Facebook is discussed in this New York Times article (HT – Nigel Barlow).

And among the news outlets taking advantage of image-sharing websites was Sky News, which posted photos of its election coverage activities to its Flickr stream (HT Journalism.co.uk).

User-Generated Content

On a grand scale there was the YouTube-PBS partnership project – Video Your Vote, which encouraged the public to record their voting experiences.

While among the small but innovative UGC projects was the Word Train feature from the New York Times which asked users to submit one word to describe their current state of mind on election day.

The most common words were then displayed across the webpage and visitors could also choose to view words from a particular time period or from Obama or McCain supporters only.

Further Reading


There are lots of other round-up posts around the blogosphere, such as one on the Online Journalism Blog from Paul Bradshaw and this from Laura Oliver on Journalism.co.uk.

[Pictures from top - Jonathon Colman on Flickr and Shasti O'Leary on Flickr.]

SPOTLIGHT – Social Bookmarking II

Following on from last week’s introduction to the world of social bookmarking, this SPOTLIGHT post will be examining how it relates to journalism.

What advantages does it present to journalists? And what possible dangers could be lurking?

These are the issues we’ll be looking at in this post, and we’ll discuss the ways that some mainstream sites are dipping their toes in the waters of social bookmarking.

We’ll also have a list of the ten most popular social bookmarking sites linked to by the UK’s mainstream media.

And at the end will be a list of useful places to visit if you want to find out more about this dynamic and fast-changing online activity.



Bookmarking The News

The early years of social bookmarking have already been marked by innovation and invention as new service providers pop up to the surface like bubbles in a glass of champagne.

And among these are the sites dedicated to the collecting and sharing of online news content links – such as Digg, Reddit and NewsVine.

So do these websites – and their counterparts such as Delicious and StumbleUpon – present journalists with an opportunity or a problem?

Freelance journalist, blogger and social bookmarking superfan David Cohn is firmly in support of the former.

“I think ignoring it is like shooting ourselves in the foot,” is his take on whether journalists should be getting involved in social news sites.

While academic and blogger Paul Bradshaw stated that social bookmarking holds “enormous potential” for reporters.

So here’s an introduction to just a few of the ways that social bookmarking could aid journalists and media groups with the gathering, production and distribution of news.

The Benefits Of Bookmarking

NEWS-GATHERING

Generate Story Leads

According to Cohn, social news websites are a good source of stories if journalists are prepared to dig (excuse pun) for them.

“Often there are great ideas that stay at the bottom because they were presented poorly. Journalists have the time to take those ideas and polish them up.”

While Bradshaw notes that the use of tagging on social bookmarking site Delicious can help reporters to “spot leads or information you would otherwise have missed”.

For example, any member of Delicious can look up a particular theme or topic and see all the page links saved by other users.

Grow Contact Book

Most social bookmarking sites enable you to find people who are prolific collectors of the same content as you.

For example, the Conversation Tracker on NewsVine allows members to follow comment threads of their peers while users can “make friends” on Reddit, create a network of like-minded people on Delicious and receive notice of Diggers Like You on Digg.

As Beat Blogging editor Patrick Thornton puts it: “Social bookmarking is a way to find experts in specific fields.”

Thornton also notes that these contacts don’t always have to come from outside the news world – they could be fellow journalists.

He points to new networking/bookmarking hybrid site Publish2 as a platform that could help local reporters covering a particular beat share sources and information with a journalist from a different location.

Create Extra Content

It’s becoming an increasingly common practice for bloggers to automatically publish their Delicious links on their own pages.



Blogger Martin Belam writes: “Publishing daily lists of links in this way gives a blogger an opportunity to ‘micro-blog’ about items they’ve read but haven’t wanted to or had the time to write a full-length post about, and to add another regular stream of content to their blog.”



NEWS PRODUCTION

Crowdsourcing Research

Social bookmarking websites can also be used during the writing process as they can help point the way towards relevant articles for information.

For example, in writing this blog post about social bookmarking I searched through the most popular articles on Delicious tagged under “social” and “bookmarking” to find useful examples and background material.

NEWS DISTRIBUTION

Draw More Traffic

Just taking Digg as an example, the site passed the milestone for one million registered users back in 2007 and could have almost tripled that figure this year according to one estimate.

So any website which gets its articles on the hallowed pixels of the Digg front page can usually expect a pretty significant increase in traffic.

One newspaper putting this to the test has been the Chicago Tribune, which has created the character of Colonel Tribune to be its representative on social media sites including Digg, Twitter and Facebook.

According to one of its media coordinators, it was the social bookmarking sites that proved to be the most successful of the social media platforms for drawing traffic to the Tribune online.

These kinds of strategies could soon be emulated by news groups in the UK after it was reported that Digg, which tends to lean towards North American news, has plans to launch localised versions early next year.

Attract New Eyeballs

If there’s one demographic grouping that you could say has embraced social bookmarking it’d be the young (see this Hitwise study from 2006 on Delicious).

So social bookmarking websites offer regional news providers an effective way to put their content in front of people who may not visit their neighbourhood news website or read their local newspaper.

POST-PRODUCTION

Show Your Sources

Social bookmarking is also a way to open up the news production process to the audience by sharing links to source material.

For example, Bradshaw’s model for the modern newsroom includes social bookmarking in its list of “Five Ws and a H that should come after every news story”.

Feedback

Most social bookmarking sites allow their users to submit comments on stories and therefore provide journalists with another platform for interacting with the audience and ascertaining their opinions.

Putting This Into Practice

If you want to know how to start putting some of these ideas into practice, this excellent slideshow produced for Journalism.co.uk has some practical tips for journalists using Delicious and Furl.

Journalists and the Social Web 2

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: journalists delicious)

The Downsides Of Bookmarking

Finding What You Want

Social bookmarking websites are folksonomies so there are no hard and fast rules for tagging content and giving names and terms to things.

This means that journalists using sites for research may miss out on articles with unexpected tags or ones with spelling mistakes and so on.

Spammers can also make it hard for users to find what they’re looking for as they could deliberately mislabel content to appear in popular searches.

Cliques Rule

This is an allegation levelled particularly at Digg, where bloggers in the past suggested that a relatively small group of contributors were responsible for submitting a significant share of the front page stories (this Mashable story has details).

It means that in some instances it can be difficult for newcomers and those without an extensive social bookmarking network to get their stories where they can be noticed.

How Wise Are Crowds?

The voting systems on social bookmarking rely at least partially on the actions of its users to help good content float to the top and let poor content sink to the bottom.

However, some say the crowds cannot always be trusted to make the wisest choices and this Read Write Web story has an example of misinformation and herd behaviour in action.

Overloaded and Out-ranked

This occurs when a website’s article appears on the main page of one of the big bookmarking sites and the subsequent traffic influx results in some kind of technical failure.

Whether it’s the Slashdot Effect, the Digg Effect or you’ve been Farked or Drudged – the end result is the same.

Here’s one blogger’s account of their day of mixed fortunes after one of their pieces made the Digg front page.

Meanwhile another blogger tells of his Digg front page experience and points out another potential downside is the fact that the Digg link page then out-ranked his own blog post in a Google search for a certain period.

More...

If you want to know more about what some see as the potential pitfalls of social bookmarking check out this 2007 blog post entitled “Top Ten Reasons Bloggers Should Avoid Social Bookmarking”.


Mainstream Media & Social Bookmarking: Who's Linking Who?

The majority of mainstream news websites in the UK now feature some sort of bookmarking options, encouraging users to share content in the wider world of the Web.



But which bookmarking sites enjoy seeing their little logos adorning the most Share This boxes?

To get some insight into the most popular bookmarking tools I did a quick data collection exercise looking at the share buttons available on 20 UK news websites.

Of course, this is by no means a definite picture of the current situation in the UK but it provides an interesting peek into some possible trends.

With the regional news websites, publishers seem to have installed a generic selection for all their sites so I looked at examples from nine of the 20 biggest groups and also gathered information on 11 national online newspapers.

Ranked according to the percentage of the 20 sites including it among their share icons, here’s the Top Ten Most Popular Social Bookmarking websites:

Digg - 100%
Delicious - 95%
Reddit - 85%
Facebook - 75%
StumbleUpon - 65%
NewsVine - 50%
Fark - 35%
Yahoo! My Web - 30%
Google Bookmarks - 25%
MySpace - 20%

(The Nationals: Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Record, Daily Star, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Mirror, The Sun, The Telegraph, and The Times.)

(The Regional Groups: Archant, CN Group, Guardian Media Group, Iliffe News & Media, Johnston Press, Midland News Association, Newsquest, Northcliffe, and Trinity Mirror.)

Interestingly, from the ones I looked at only two websites – Express.co.uk and Mirror.co.uk - have the Add This widget function which posts content to over 30 bookmarking sites simultaneously.

(I'm working on a fuller version of this research with results on 15 national news websites and the 20 biggest regional publishers' sites and will make it available soon.)

If you want to compare these results with trends in the US, this Poynter Online article from Ellyn Angelotti has some interesting data on the social bookmarking situation stateside.

While the effectiveness of these social media options has been put to the test recently by Belam.

Belam monitored social bookmarking sites to see how many articles from online newspapers and broadcasters were being featured on them.

And his results for the Metro, local London news sites and ThisisPlymouth.co.uk (looking at Fark only) can be viewed on his blog.

Plus, Belam looked into the help and advice which mainstream media sites offer to users with regards to the often bewildering array of colourful logos.

Internal Social Bookmarking

To finish up, we’re going to take a quick look at a fairly rare phenomenon but one which may become more widespread in the future – that of in-house social bookmarking systems.


For example, The Guardian has a clippings file option which lets registered users not only collect and store articles, but also share them with other members.

According to The Guardian: “Your clippings are publically available at a web page personalised with your username so that you can access them without signing in.

“Anyone can see your clippings so you can send the link to your friends and let them know what you’re reading.”

Each clippings file also has a webfeed so users can receive their own saved stories via RSS or sign up to get a feed of someone else’s, including a Guardian journalist.

While earlier this year the New York Times launched its TimesPeople service, which acts as a social bookmarking meets social networking service for its registered users.



According to the NYT: “TimesPeople is a great way to discover things on NYTimes.com that you might not otherwise have found and to share your discoveries with people you know and trust.”


Resources

If this hasn’t satiated your appetite for knowledge about social bookmarking, there are plenty of resources on the Web.

Dosh Dosh has a good introduction to over 40 social bookmarking sites with a screen grab of each.

Meanwhile, eBizMBA has an up-to-date chart of the 30 most popular ones measured by criteria such as inbound links, Google page rankings and traffic data.

And Wikipedia has a list of various social software sites with links to their home pages.

In terms of practical tips for utilising social bookmarking services, Poynter has a good guide to Delicious for beginners.

And this slideshow from web developer Stuart Marsh is an introductory guide to building traffic by using social bookmarking tools.

Pro Blogger has a post from 2006 with ten tips which have stood the test of time for encouraging a “Digg culture” for your site.

While Cohn’s Columbia Journalism Review article has some good advice for becoming an effective Digger.

Finally, if you want to share your thoughts about social bookmarking and its value for journalists, Cohn has created a social network group for just those kinds of discussions.


So that’s it for this week’s SPOTLIGHT post. As usual, do get in touch if you have any examples of innovation you’d like to share or any topics you would like to see covered in future posts.


[Pictures from top: eConsultant; Martin Belam.]

SPOTLIGHT – SOCIAL BOOKMARKING I

Welcome to the latest SPOTLIGHT post where we’ll be looking at the world of social bookmarking.

First up will be some definitions of this positively infant topic and then we’ll provide an overview of the current crop of social bookmarking sites and cast a glance at their history and development.

In Part II, we’ll see what all this means for journalists and how they can incorporate social bookmarking applications into their ever-expanding digital toolkits.

We’ll also examine how some mainstream media sites have started to utilise social bookmarking and check out some examples of innovation.

And we’ll finish up with a list of resources for anyone who wants to investigate this area further.


What Is Social Bookmarking?

According to Poynter’s interactivity editor Ellyn Angelotti, social bookmarking websites can be seen as the “virtual refrigerators” of the Web.

“Clipping articles from the newspaper and posting them on the refrigerator just doesn’t cut it anymore. Now social bookmarking sites serve as virtual refrigerators, giving users an unlimited number of magnets and much more surface area.”

This popular analogy captures the essence of social bookmarking – these are links that users can share with friends, groups or even the rest of the world.

So they work like browser bookmarks (such as Internet Explorer’s Favourites) in terms of enabling people to store and collect webpages and content of interest to them, but go a stage further by allowing these collections to be made public.

As usual, Common Craft has come up with an excellent video to show the basics:




Social Bookmarking – A Brief History

The term social bookmarking was coined by probably the best known bookmarking site, Delicious.

Launched in 2003, Delicious allows users to install browser buttons (known as bookmarklets) which make storing and sharing pages easy.

Initially it was used by people to save the URLs of static webpages they frequently visited or of articles of particular interest.

Fast forward a year or so and along came Digg, heralding two major changes for social bookmarking – a voting/rating system and an emphasis on articles with a temporal dimension.

Digg wasn’t alone for long and this trickle of social news sites soon resembled a flood, with each new site proclaiming its own killer features.

Hundreds of social news bookmarking sites now exist, each offering users a place to store, share and rate content and giving news providers a new place to find readers.

Described as “an outgrowth of social bookmarking” by freelance digital journalist David Cohn, the social news media has become a crucial sub-genre of bookmarking.

Most mainstream media sites have recognised this fact and are now getting in on the act, providing buttons at the end of articles encouraging readers to recommend it to one or all of the various bookmarking service providers.



So who are these providers? And what exactly do they provide?

Some You May Know

There are so many social bookmarking websites that it’s impossible to provide an overview of them all here so we’ve picked out some of the most common to mainstream users in the UK.

We’ve also thrown in a few lesser known ones at the end for good measure.


Delicious

Self proclaimed as the “biggest collection of bookmarks in the universe”, Delicious is probably the best known social bookmarking site and also included as a share option on the vast majority of UK online newspapers.

Delicious allows Web users to share and save content and use their own tags to organise links, which can be shared via networks or kept private.

Visitors can also search all links by tags to find relevant material – for example you can search Delicious for all items to which users assigned social bookmarking tags.

Incidentally, it features as the only social bookmarking application in this year’s list of essential online tools for online journalists from lecturer and blogger Alfred Hermida.


Digg

Along with Delicious, this is the most popular bookmarking site among the UK digital media’s article share icons.

Members submit stories for digging and can help rank content by the digg or bury options.

Submissions which hit the front page reward the user with community ranking points, and reward the source with an influx of Digg traffic.

Cohn wrote this article for the Columbia Journalism Review explaining the appeal of Digg from the point of view of a community user and a news organisation.

And this JP Digital Digest post from earlier this year shows how Digg has now entered the news creation process too.


StumbleUpon

Another permanent fixture on many newspaper’s share buttons, StumbleUpon is a recommendation engine enabling users to endorse content they like and find communities of interest.

This Venture Beat article has some useful information on how it works for anyone interested in the algorithms and human filtering processes used by bookmarking sites.


Reddit

Another mainstay on share options, the social news site Reddit awards so-called karma points to trusted posters and also recommends articles of interest.


Facebook

Yes, it may be a social networking site but as long ago as 2006 Facebook entered the social bookmarking arena.

Its “share on Facebook” icon appears on hundreds of mainstream news websites and allows Facebook members to post text, photos and video to their profile pages.


NewsVine

More common in the US, NewsVine is owned by MSNBC and is a citizen journalism website as well as a bookmarking service.

Users can vote for articles and can also create same interest groups which can be public or private.

[Appears as a share option on regional sites owned by Trinity Mirror, Guardian Media Group and on national websites including DailyMail.co.uk, Guardian.co.uk, Telegraph.co.uk and Mirror.co.uk.]

And Some You May Not Know…


Furl

Standing for File Uniform Resource Locators, Furl is more of a general social bookmarking site with the usual rating and sharing options.

It also provides users with their own file space to save pages and clippings which they may have annotated themselves.

[Appears as a share icon on regional sites owned by Newsquest and on Mirror.co.uk.]

Fark

Described as the snarky side of social bookmarking, Fark takes a tongue-in-cheek look at the news with tags such as Dumbass, Strange, Stupid, and Asinine.

It’s often the destination for the weird and the photoshopped and features as a share button on TimesOnline, DailyMail.co.uk, Mirror.co.uk and Telegraph.co.uk.

Tip’d

One of the new faces on the bookmarking scene, Tip’d.com concentrates on financial news and investment tips.

Like Digg, members rate articles by tipping it and the most popular make it to the homepage.

NewsTrust

The founding principle of NewsTrust is to promote articles which display “quality journalism”, so members are asked to rate articles against criteria such as sourcing and accuracy.

Add This

Websites can include the Add This widget on their site to enable users to click just one button and send content to a multitude of social bookmarking sites.



It’s not yet featured on many UK sites but one of the few that does have the widget is Mirror.co.uk.

Want To Know More?

Squidoo has this list featuring over 100 social bookmarking and networking websites for you to explore at your leisure.

While journalists may find Cohn’s guide to bookmarking sites a useful resource as he explains their nature through suggesting what print publication it would be (e.g. NewsTrust would be the New York Times etc).

And this Dosh Dosh article provides a useful introduction to social news sites and has some handy tips on how to find the relevant one for your needs and how to become an effective participant.


End Of Part One

So that’s it for Part I of this SPOTLIGHT post. Next week’s sequel will look at how journalists in mainstream media are engaging (or not) with social bookmarking tools, the pros and cons of doing so and some examples of innovation in this field.

In the meantime, please get in touch if you know of any innovative ways that media sites are using social bookmarking sites or if you have any other comments.

Until next time…

‘6 Ways For Newspaper Sites To Attract Traffic’

How to make a smooth transition from print to online is the focus of a recent blog post from Mark Potts.

The new media consultant says part of the problem is quite simply the poor standard of many newspaper websites

“What should newspaper websites be doing to break out of the box they’re in and get traffic and revenue moving in the right direction again?”

In answer to this question, Potts has put together some quick and easy suggestions on how newspapers can improve their digital services.

Here are some of the highlights from his post:

1 – Keep It Simple

“Knock half the links off your home page. Then go back and knock off half of what’s left.”

He adds: “And don’t forget to put some of that simplified home page navigation on every page - unlike printed newspapers, few readers enter websites through the front door.”

2 – Nail The Niche Market

“Build strong niche products - possibly as separate sites with their own brands - to go after targeted audiences and advertisers.”

3 – Don’t Stop Moving

“Web-savvy companies like Google or Apple or Facebook or Yelp think nothing of jumping into smart new technologies and ways of producing and displaying information.”

4 – Build Links

“Use your site to create the best possible guide to what’s going on in your market, regardless of sources.”

Potts adds: “Make it essential that your readers come to your site first to find out what’s going on around them.”

5 – Spread The Word

“Do content-sharing deals anywhere you can - with competitors, social networks, blogs, aggregators, whatever.

“Put your content in front of as many eyeballs as possible and use it to drive business back to your site and your advertisers.”

6 – Find The Audience

“Deliver your Web content any way you can: e-newsletters, RSS, Facebook apps, Twitter, whatever. Get it out there (and be sure to include ads!).”

To read Patching The Leaking Lifeboat in full, visit Potts’s Recovering Journalist blog.

Must-Have Digital Tools For Journalists

Personalised news applications prove a popular addition to Alfred Hermida’s list of “31 Essential Online Tools for Journalists” for 2008.

The blogger and academic includes no less than six RSS software and online feed readers, including FeedDemon for Windows, NewsFire for Mac operating systems, and Google Reader on the web.

Hermida’s guide also comprises four personalised news page services (such as Netvibes and MyYahoo) and news alerts offerings from Google and Yahoo.

And under the heading of Web 2.0, the former BBC journalist reckons a digital journalism toolkit would not be complete without a social bookmarking website like delicious and online storage services like Wuala and Box.

Hermida, who is programme leader at the University of British Columbia, said of his list of essential tools for 2008: “What is striking is how much these tools have developed in the past year.

“Some fall by the wayside and new ones spring up, such as sites that mine social network sites for personal information.”

The full list is available on Hermida’s reportr.net blog and he welcomes any additions to his 31 essential tools.

Picture: Results Through Training

Social Media Task Force Reaps Rewards

A newspaper has revealed that a team dedicated to boosting its social media presence has helped its website score an 8% increase in page views.

The four-person task force at the Chicago Tribune has distributed content through a variety of new channels to draw in traffic, according to the Huffington Post.

One of their first actions was the creation of the character of Colonel Tribune to become the face of the newspaper on sites including Twitter, Digg and Facebook.



And as well as bringing traffic to the main site, the Tribune said the strategy is producing good story leads and helping journalists keep in touch with their readers.

“Essentially, social media gives us a year-round, real-time focus group to monitor conversations and keep us in tune with what consumers are thinking,” noted Bill Adee, head of the task force and associate managing editor for innovation.

Representatives from the Tribune were at the recent newspaper industry convention in Chicago, where they discussed their social media initiatives in detail.

Professor Jane Singer was at the session at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication convention and here’s her summary of the main points:

“Daniel B. Honigman, social media coordinator for the Tribune and the Colonel’s creator, sees the character as a ‘Web ambassador’ and a way for people to interact and engage with the paper.

For instance, the Colonel recently hosted a meet-up, which around 50 people attended. The character also serves as a point person for news tips (which Honigman forwards to the appropriate journalist).

However, the Colonel is hard to find on the main website. Honigman said the marketing department does not know what to do with him.

He emphasised the need for detailed metrics to enable the sales staff to sell social media, notably to optimise the potential to bring different audiences to advertisers.

Other social media bits from the Tribune:

* Honigman said bookmarking (for instance, through digg.com) has been the most successful social media strategy for driving traffic. Popular ‘diggs’ are highlighted on the home page.

*The Tribune also has several hundred fans on Facebook, and one reporter is particularly active on Twitter. Honigman says Second Life is no longer worth the effort for a newspaper company.

* Bill Adee pointed out that social media functions such as bookmarking are handled by newsroom staff at the Tribune, in contrast to The New York Times, where those functions are the province of the marketing department.

* Along with ‘most popular’ and ‘most e-mailed’ stories, the home page includes a ‘Hot Topics’ button, which offers links to Chicago Tribune stories related to the most popular items on Google News and Google Web. Adee says this tactic helps boost the site’s SEO.”

Boston.com Launches Community Channel

The portal site for the Boston Globe has introduced a new database enabling users to find community projects in the local area.

Entitled the Do Good channel, the new site allows people to search for information about nonprofit initiatives in the city and outlying areas.

Visitors can look for relevant projects using subject categories such as health or animals, or they can search by location or by level of participation.

They can also share their results with others via sharing sites like Facebook and the bookmarking service del.icio.us.

Charitable and nonprofit organisations can add their profiles for free to the Do Good database and almost 700 have signed up so far.

In a press statement, vice president of product Bob Kempf said: “Introducing the Do Good channel will make the connection between Boston.com and our visitors even stronger.

“The section adds a new dimension of high personal value to the Boston.com user experience.”

The channel is powered by the national network good2gether.

Share What You Read At NYT

The New York Times has launched what it terms a “social network for Times readers”.

Users who sign up to the new TimesPeople service can recommend articles, blogs and reviews to other members as well as create their own networks of fellow NYT surfers.

Readers will be given their own profile page where they can view their recent activities and browse their readers’ network.

In addition, the plug-in enables users to share their activities on the NYT site with others and to see what different people are looking at.

Activity pages can also be displayed and accessed as mini-feeds on Facebook profiles and as RSS feeds.

According to the NYT, the new feature “is not a social network like Facebook or MySpace - you won’t have Times friends, and it won’t get you Times dates.

“Instead, you’ll assemble a network of Times readers.”

The NYT continues: “TimesPeople is a great way to discover things on NYTimes.com that you might not otherwise have found and to share your discoveries with people you know and trust.

“It’s also a way to connect with other Times readers whose recommendations interest you.”

Further details on TimesPeople can be found at Journalism.co.uk and on its FAQs page.

Daily Mail Beta - 7 Pluses

A beta version of the Daily Mail website is now online and open for feedback from users.

The Mail is using the test site to try out some new ideas so net consultant and blogger Martin Belam has provided a list of the seven things he likes about it.

1 - Picture Panel

A prominent part of the new design is a photo panel in the centre of the top of the homepage which rotates several images throughout the day and enables users to link directly through to the stories.

2 - Soft Focus

Belam says the new site places stronger emphasis on lighter stories branded as Femail with the right-hand column devoted to stories on style and showbiz news, although he says it could run the risk of becoming a downmarket version of its print counterpart.

3 - Headlines Archive

This new addition chronologically lists every story published each day, categorised by section.

Belam writes that it’s “a useful variation on the section-based browse mechanism used across the rest of the site”.

4 - Polls

The site has a page dedicated to user opinion polls.

“Casting a vote is a satisfying user experience, with a great big custom tick appearing across the check-boxes on the form.”

5 - Quirky Stuff

The homepage has a photo strip called “Fancy That”, featuring picture-led stories of the weird and wonderful from around the world.

“It is a very visual way of showcasing quirky content that is likely to generate click-throughs.”

6 - Clippings

Users can create their own page of personalised content page by making clippings of up to 50 their favourite articles.

7 - Beta Better

“I love the fact that it is a Beta. Not many mainstream media organisations have been brave enough to engage with widespread testing of new designs on their audience in this way.”