Daily Dose of social media: Lessons learned from Binghamton, NY

What coverage of Binghamton, NY, shooting teaches about new media — Gina Chen has an excellent analysis of journalism lessons learned from the Binghamton, NY shooting. Here are the core points:

• Reader/viewer interest in the story was intense and fleeting
• Information changed and developed over time
• Regular folks took on the role of dissmenating the story
• Story was told on multiple platforms

Take note of these points (and click over to see her give examples of each one). Understanding these points will help news organizations produce better content on the Web. The last two points are especially important. We can harness users natural inclination to disseminate information, and if people are sharing information on a myriad of platforms, so should news organizations.

Tweetfind applies Google magic to Twitter search — Tweetfind combines Twitter search with a Google Page Rank-like algorithm. Search.twitter.com is great for returning the most recent tweets on a given search, but it has no way of weighting the quality of the results, ala Google.

Tweetfind is seeking to solve that and give users results based on relevancy. Here are the criteria that its algorithm considers:

• followers
• following
• of tweets
• of RT he/she receives
• of replies
• of distinct users who reply
• of distinct users who retweet
• of RT he/she makes
• of links the user shares

The site is still early, but the concept holds a lot of promise. As Twitter grows so will the need for a service like this. Now, the algorithm will probably have to be tweaked over time, but I like the concept. I’m going to give this site a try over the next week and report back. I envision this as a supplement to search.twitter.com, not as a replacement.

Five reasons URL shorteners are useful — URL shortening sites like TinyURL are a must for users of social networking sites. Can you imagine Twitter without the ability to shorten long links down? But there are other advantages to URL shorteners beyond just merely shortening the length of a link. Here are a few others the article discusses:

• They can track and compile data
• They can be transformed into social media services
• They promote sharing

Bit.ly in particular offers analytics. Content producers and companies are always trying to track ROI. Without analytics, it’s very difficult to track ROI on the Web. Bit.ly is the best way currently for organizations to track links they share on Twitter.