Tag: Twitter

Social-networking that cornice collapse

The student-run Huntington News is taking the social-media route to covering the collapse of a cornice on a Northeastern University-owned residence hall on Huntington Avenue.

Editor Maggie Cassidy used her Twitter account to get out the word that the News had posted a story online. And the photos were posted to the paper’s Flickr account.

Breaking news, from a paper that only comes out every other week during the summer. Good job, although the Flickr link from Twitter doesn’t work [note: now fixed]; pick it up from the story (or from here) instead.

Marty Baron is not tweeting

So what did I find in my inbox this morning? A message from someone named Marty Baron, letting me know that he was following me on Twitter. Well, I started following him and sent him a private note to make sure it was really him.

As it turns out, it’s not Boston Globe editor Marty Baron, but someone pretending to be him. “It’s not me,” Baron told me by e-mail. Such gamesmanship is far from unusual on Twitter, though it looks like the normally savvy Adam Gaffin was taken in.

Why can’t everyone be as honest as Fake Rahm Emanuel?

Social networking and the news

Social Networking and the News

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: twitter socialnetworking)

On Thursday I had a chance to take part in a panel on “Getting Started with Social Media: Lessons from the Front Lines,” sponsored by the Mass Technology Leadership Council.

It was an interesting experience, and I learned a lot from the other panelists — Perry Allison of EONS.com, Pam Johnston of Gather.com and Brian Halligan of HubSpot. The moderator was Debi Kleiman of Communispace in Watertown, whose Fenway Park-theme meeting room was where we held our presentation.

I’ve posted the slideshow that accompanied my talk. Slideshare appeared to choke on embedded links, so I’ve listed them below in case you’d like to check any of them out.

Don’t beam Alex up when it comes to Twitter

Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam mocks Twitter. I sympathize. I ignored it for as long as I could, and jumped in recently only as it became clear that it was morphing into a journalistic tool of sorts.

I have not researched the demographics of Twitter, but I think Beam might have gotten one thing wrong. He begins, “You have heard about Twitter. Maybe. It’s something other people do, mainly younger people.”

My brief experience is actually the opposite — Twitter is social-networking for old farts like me. I know very few students who use it. I recently asked Media Nation Jr. — a certified Facebooking, BlackBerrying, text-messaging fanatic — and he’d never even heard of it.

Maybe Twitter will go away. For the moment, though, it’s something journalists need to understand.

Twitter gathering at WBUR

A handful of folks who follow WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) on Twitter gathered at the station this morning for a tour and conversation about the station’s new-media initiatives. That’s “Morning Edition” anchor Bob Oakes behind the glass. (God help me, the event was dubbed a “Tweet-up.”)

For a Flickr slideshow of the event, click on the photo. More pictures may pop up later in WBUR’s Listener Photo Project. And Gene Koo of the Berkman Center, who shot video with a Flip camera, might upload something to his blog when he gets a chance.

Looks like some of Koo’s video is already available at the ConverStation, a WBUR new-media blog maintained by Ken George.