links for 2011-01-03

I've found that most users can not articulate their current workflow for media consumption, but if you interview, observe, and probe, you can discover a few different buckets of content.

* Global – globally relevant news is relevant just because it is a big deal on a macro scale. It is relevant to the global community.
* Local – locally relevant news is relevant because it is a big deal on a micro scale in my city, neighborhood. It is relevant to my local community.
* Interests – news in my interest categories is relevant because it is interesting to me personally. It is relevant to the communities of people with the same interests as me.

This is a really interesting debate to engage in. For me, the key question becomes: what happens after people make it through the entry point? Does the technology deepen the experience, or does it diminish it? Do we control it, or does it control us? Art is not simply information, pieces of data composed and arranged in a certain way, like blogs, tweets, Facebook postings, and YouTube videos are.

The other day, Robert Scoble wrote a post wondering if Quora was the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years? I still would definitely give the edge to tools like WordPress and Blogger, and then to Twitter (which serves as both a source of information and a means to distribute content), but Quora, at least as it stands right now, is the next step in the evolution.

Daniel Romero, a PhD candidate at Cornell University in the US, has produced some fascinating research into news organisations and sources’ influence on Twitter.

These recipes may be most helpful to journalists who are trying to learn programming and already know the basics. If you’re already an experienced programmer, you might learn about a new library or tool you haven’t tried yet.

Thus this list was made – a summary of terms online journalists should be familiar with. The list has been produced by Hacks/Hackers, a network concerned with the intersection of journalism and technology. It is a crowdsourceddocument, bringing together the expertise of many people written for intelligent nontechies in (mostly) plain English.

Hyperlocal websites will grow in popularity.

There are many hyperlocal websites that have been established during 2011. Many individuals are now developing them and encouraging communities to get involved in sharing information and news through these sites.

The difficulty is that Twitter and Facebook simply carry the sort of conversations that might be going on in homes, office and pubs across the UK. But Twitter amplifies these conversations. The only way I can see a Tweet resulting in a contempt action is if it perhaps links to longer prejudicial material and is tweeted or retweeted by someone with significant numbers of followers.