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Posts tagged ‘Social network’

23
Nov

Beebs College of Journalism to go live in December

Nearly five years ago the BBC launched a new virtual training service for its journalists called the BBC College of Journalism – or CoJo.

CoJo has evolved considerably since it first started but is basically a mixture of digital courses, face to face courses and information/best practice provided in the form of a blog and articles.

Their are focused exercises looking at things like writing that includes digital courses, videos, guides and advice from people within and outside the BBC.

There is also a very impressive, and fun, virtual newsroom application that throws story updates and tasks at you in quick order.

Well this incredible resource for BBC staff will be opened up to the wider British public on 14 December. It will be free for British users and under a subscription for people accessing it internationally.

The team behind the service have been busy “writing, editing, blogging” to get the content ready to launch the site to the wider public.

As well as the learning resources and blogs the team are also making use of feeds like twitter and delicious to pull in information from around the rest of the web.

According to Kevin Marsh of the team, there are currently around 2,500 pages within the site, a couple of hundred videos and dozens of virtual newsroom scenarios.

Once it has gone live I think this will quickly become an invaluable resource for journalists, bloggers, academics, students and even people sharing stories with their friends.

And hopefully it will be picked up and used by people contributing to message boards, comment systems and phone-ins as the libel courses would help make those platforms run more smoothly.

One to read

Story Curve: Emerging into the light

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26
Aug

Covering a music festival – socially

A weekend for me is usually a fairly predictable affair; I wake up on a Saturday and spend the day looking after my (nearly) six year old son while my wife goes shopping with our eight year old daughter and toddler.

Then on Sunday we spend the day together as a family – go the park, sometimes to the zoo and usually have a Sunday roast at around 2pm – like I said, all pretty predictable.

But one weekend a year, the first weekend in September to be exact, I spend nearly a full 23 hours interviewing, listen to, photographing or filming bands.

The first weekend of September is when the Jersey Live music festival happens at the RJA&HS Showground in Trinity, Jersey.

This is the sixth year of the event and the sixth year I’ve covered it for the BBC in Jersey.

For the first four years I spent the weekend gathering content and then pulled it all together for the BBC Jersey website, BBC Radio Jersey and a bit for BBC Channel Island News (then BBC Spotlight Channel Islands) on the following Monday.

Then last year I tried an experiment – instead of holding all the content and publishing it on Monday – I’d publish as I went along – socially.

2816227820_468f2e56da_bActually the original idea was to publish it all to the BBC Jersey website – updating a series of features and galleries as the weekend went on.

But it didn’t really work out that way due to an error with 1) logging into the BBC FTP server and 2) intermittent WiFi in the press tent.

So our coverage sort of went social by accident and by that I mean photos on Flickr and updates on Twitter – with slightly longer reviews posted to our MySpace blog.

This year we have a whole new look BBC Jersey site, a new publishing system and no way to update the site remotely on a non-BBC laptop.

So I’m planning to go social from the start and will be tying the whole thing into the various social media pages for my show – BBC Jersey Introducing.

As with last year I’ll be posting photos to Flickr as I come out from the front of the stage, or as I get back from wandering the festival site taking photos of people.

Then I’ll write 140 character reviews of the bands on the various stages I visit (as will the other two people covering the festival with me) on Twitter as well as using our Twitter stream @jsyintroducing to write any interesting festival facts or stories.

I’ve also set up an Audioboo account for BBC Jersey Introducing where I’ll have the phone next to me when I interview bands – so you’ll be able to hear (albeit slightly lower quality) interviews as I do them.

I’ll then be pulling the mass of content together using Tumblr so it can be found in one place and having that re-post the mass of content to the BBC Jersey Introducing fan page on Facebook.

I’ll then be able to use all of the above to help me write the various reviews, articles and create the galleries that will make up the bbc.co.uk/jersey coverage of the festival.

It will also help me piece together my first ‘post festival’ show on the following Saturday as the highlights will be on Twitter and Facebook.

And obviously I’ll be trying my best to respond to any comments or feedback on any of the various social sites while running around the Showground in Trinity.

So if you’re not going to Jersey Live but want regular updates on what’s happening just follow @jsyintroducing on twitter, become a fan on Facebook at jerseyintroducing, follow my boos or keep track of the whole thing on Tumblr.

Or you can still do all of the above from a half decent mobile if you’re AT the festival – you might even hear about a cool band just starting you might not have gone to otherwise.

Then again you could just enjoy the event and catch up with our coverage on the BBC Jersey site on Monday – they’ll even be video.

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23
Apr

Bands: Don’t go with Facebook

There is a blog post on Mashable written by Stan Schroeder which basically explores and asks whether you would be prepared to pay Facebook for your own persistant URL – so mine would be facebook.com/upyourego.

In my case the simple answer is no. I’d much rather set up upyourego.com/facebook and give that out to people with a redirect to my Facebook profile.

I’m not a big fan of facebook, I’ve got a profile and have to use it as people seem to insist on getting in touch with me through it – but I personally wouldn’t pay for a vanity URL as I DON’T WANT people to find me on there – unlike Twitter, Flickr, MySpace et al where I actively hunt for friends (god that makes me sound sad!).

But, I do present a new music show for the BBC, a show that involves playing music by unsigned bands with no label promoting them and usually no website – so after playing a track I give the bands myspace address.

We Are Scientists

This is great because it means people can find out a lot more about the band easily, can listen to more of the bands music and find out when they’re playing next.

It also acts as a great way of cutting some of the waffle about the band ‘to find out more go to myspace.com/greatband’. In fact for the rest of this article I’m going to use an actual MySpace profile for a group in Jersey I’m into right now.

Brobots: myspace.com/brobotsyeah

However an increasing number of bands are turning to facebook as their platform of choice – basing this on the fact that as ‘they’re are a lot of people on facebook’ they’ll be found easier.

Unfortunately this creates a problem for giving out that domain name, for selling the band on air and for the band selling themselves at gigs.

DSC_0139

If the band have Facebook as their prefered social site of choice it means to promote the bands home online I have to say something along the lines of ‘to find out more or hear other tracks from ‘insert band name’ go to Facebook and do a search for ‘band name’ and it is probably the fourth one down

Instead of the much friendlier – go to myspace.com/brobotsyeah.

So from that point of view only – I’d say it would be in the interest of a band, comedian etc to pay for a premium URL – just to make marketing easier. But personally, if I was advising a band I would tell them to YES get a Facebook fan page and fill it with links to all the other social sites online that work with bands much better.

Or just stick with MySpace – after all the people listening to the music and will be really into it, the people playing the music on the radio and finding new bands to play at their club night – still use MySpace.

In face almost all my band communication and a large chunck of production for my show is done through MySpace.

And when a band only have a Facebook profile I’ve started setting up tiny URLs for the bands that only use Facebook and giving that out on air instead.

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