This week I’m off to the Future of Journalism conference at Cardiff University, September 8-9. The conference brings together the latest research into what is happening in journalism. The keynote speakers this year are Robert W. McChesney and Emily Bell, formerly of the Guardian and now Director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism. The research to be presented at the conference ranges from studies on Twitter to Wikileaks, from foreign

The runaway popularity of social media is prompting a rethink of rules on election reporting in Canada. During the last federal vote in May, Elections Canada warned people against tweeting or sharing on Facebook the results from polls in the east of the country, before voting had ended in the west. A 70-year-old law prohibits the premature transmission of election results.  The idea was to prevent radio broadcasts of results in

One of the questions that came out of the CMRC report on social media and the news was about the reliability of social networks as a news source. Our study, Social Networks Transforming How Canadians Get the News (PDF), found that 71 per cent of Canadians who use social networks - more than 10 million people - value them as a way of keeping up with the news. But we also found that only

I’ve stumbled across this compelling presentation exploring the complexities of online social networks by Paul Adams of the Google UX team. His wide-ranging presentation explores how online social networks tend to flatten real-life social ones.   In real-life we have different groups of friends, from those from college to work to family. Most of the time, these groups are kept distinct from each other, and tend to mix at fixed

This parody of Twitter, based on the trailer for The Social Network movie has been around for a while. But since we talked about Twitter in journalism class this week, it seemed a apt time to share. Enjoy “The Twit Network&#

Image by Balakov via Flickr In an op-ed for The Globe and Mail, I explore what privacy means in an age of Facebook and Twitter. It was prompted by Monday’s Quit Facebook Day. While I understand the reasons why users are upset with Facebook’s attitude to privacy, I argue that deleting your Facebook profile is merely a symbolic act. By embracing the social web, and everything it has to offer,

A comprehensive survey of what Canadians do online challenges some assumptions the web and news. The Canadian Internet Project report, Canada Online! The Internet, Media and Emerging Technologies: Uses, Attitudes, Trends and International Comparisons (PDF), looked at Internet habits based on a 2007 survey of more than 3,100 Canadians. It found that new media is not displacing traditional media, saying that online newspapers do not seem to be replacing printed

Anti-Facebook song to the tune of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire, by Rebelvirals. (Via Richard Brennan’s Newjiffy)

Social networking sites such as Facebook offer the potential to organise around a cause. But a study presented an the Online Journalism Symposium offers some valuable insights in what people actually do on Facebook. Lessons from Facebook: The Effect of Social Network Sites on College Students’ Social Capital (PDF), by Sebastian Valenzuela, Namsu Park, and Kerk F. Kee, graduate students at UT Austin, found that social media were good for

The issue over the use of photos of Ashley Alexandra Dupre taken from social networking sites like MySpace has just taken another twist. Her court-appointed attorney, Kelley Drye’s Don D. Buchwald, has attacked the media for invading his client’s privacy. The press release (PDF) from the attorney says the alleged call girl was “thrust into the public glare at age 22 without her consent”. He goes on to accuse some