Daily Dose of social media: put Twitter’s #followfriday to good use

Sqworl: A Simple Way to Share Groups of Bookmarks — There are a lot of social bookmarking sites out there, but Sqworl has to be the easiest to use and understand. The concept of Sqworl is a little different than most social bookmarking sites, as it is built around the concept of grouping links together. Let’s say there was a flood in town, a group of users could get together and create a group called “Town flood” and put links into this group of news accounts, Twitter status messages, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, etc.

It seems to be a great way to put links together about a specific event or topic. Once you have links in your group, you can then easily share it with anyone. I also really like how clean and simple the interface is. It’s not cluttered like a lot of social bookmarking sites. It’s also visual, and shows screenshots of your links.

Very nice.

Sqworl Screencast from Caleb Brown on Vimeo.

TopFollowFriday — Now we can finally put that #followfriday hashtag on Twitter to good use. You know the hashtag I’m talking about: the one where people recommend users for others to follow every Friday. Here is a good description of TopFollowFriday:

[It's] a website that can be used to filter and choose to trust or not trust something, based on the reputation of the person who created the content.  Based on #followfriday, a growing Twitter ad-hoc event that occurs each Friday, Scott’s new site tracks #followfriday, and then records the endorsements, allowing users to chart the changes.

Essentially, you can see how many endorsements somebody has. As #followfriday continues to grow, this site will become more relevant. Also, you can track if a person is getting more and less recommendations as time goes on. (Tip submitted by Daniel Bachhuber)

At SXSWi, Twitter is the new Twitter is the new Twitter — Just when you think Twitter has reached a saturation point and is no longer useful or relevant, it proves its worth again.

We saw this at ONA08 as well. Twitter has become a central part of many conferences. Can you imagine not being able to share your thoughts, experiences, what you learn, etc while at a conferences like SXSW or ONA? Twitter makes for a better experience and really has changed conference going forever.

Maybe the panel you are attending sucks. You can hop on Twitter, check the #SXSW hashtag and see the panel that everyone is raving about. Twitter has also become an indispensable communication tool for organizing impromptu get togethers at conferences.

Beat blogging lessons from ONA 08

There were not any beat blogging-specific sessions at ONA, but there were several valuable lessons I learned that are applicable for beat bloggers.

Comment moderation

• This idea that if you do any comment moderation you are liable for anything that is written within your comments section is false. Very false.
• Write this down: You can moderate your comments for profanity, spam, banality, etc and still have libel protections for anything you miss or don’t realize is libelous.
• The idea that moderating comments makes us libel is based off of old case law that has since been superseded. I strongly encourage you to read what the Electronic Frontier Foundation has to say about Section 230, which provides protections against libel on the Internet.
• “Courts have held that Section 230 prevents you from being held liable even if you exercise the usual prerogative of publishers to edit the material you publish. You may also delete entire posts. However, you may still be held responsible for information you provide in commentary or through editing.”
• A news organization or independent blogger is only liable for comments that become libelous because of editorial decisions. For instance, if someone wrote a comment that said, “Joe Smith is not an alcoholic,” and I edited out the “not,” I would have just made that comment libelous.

Supply and demand

• This is an issue facing journalism on the Web and not just beat bloggers. Right now, there is simply more supply of written content than there is of demand for it from advertisers. This means low CPMs for written content. It also means that text-only beat bloggers need to get a lot of page views to make a decent amount of revenue.
• On the other hand, there isn’t enough supply of video content on the Web to meet advertisers demands. Advertisers love video ads and pre-roll. They want to stick it on your content, but are having trouble finding enough content.
• I’m not suggesting that everyone jump to doing video, but diversifying content can help boost revenue. This could be a once-a-week podcast or vodcast with a few ads in it. It could mean shooting some video for your beat blog. But realize that video content can get a much higher ad rate than printed content can.

Did you learn any other valuable beat blogging tips fron ONA 08? Please share.