Slurp up tweets about your event (for free)

Increasingly at conferences, Twitter is a growing communication and interaction channel between speakers and attendees.  Conferences that effectively make these tweets an integral part of their proceedings better engage all participants, but doing so requires the use tools and applications that require web development know-how to set up. Fortunately, we have a free and easy tool for event organizers to use – SLURP 140!

SLURP 140 helps event organizers harness tweets about their events; it is a successor to our Twitterslurp tool that was used at both the Personal Democracy Forum and Digital Capital Week.  It provides the following services:

• Aggregation of tweets following up to five search terms
• Constantly refreshed tweet stream of all related tweets 
• Displays a leader board of your top tweeters based on their number of tweets and mentions by others
• Graphs that plot the amount of tweets by hour and day
• Opportunity for branding Slurp 140 with your event's logos and sponsors
• Access to an archive of all captured tweets (Twitter's archive currently only goes back four days)
• Additional metrics to further gauge influence and reach coming soon

SLURP 140 is a great addition to an event webpage and can be projected on screens at the event to better connect and engage tweeting participants.

Interested in using SLURP 140?  Contact us today.

Do you really digg your town?

Some people really dig their town, and Manor, TX is trying to tap into this passion through its crowdscouring site Manor Labs.  The site has many social media features from sites like Digg.  It seems fitting that its CIO Dustin Haisler, who is 23, spearheads this effort; perhaps this is what you get when you give a millennial authority.  He is doing something bold.  Check out the May 2010 Government Technology profile of his efforts titled "City 2.0."

Like Digg, Manor Labs enables people to vote up or down each idea, and the more popular an idea is, the more likely that the town will take action on it if it is reasonable and feasible to do so.  Participants are also given "Innobucks" that they earn by contributing to the site.  They can cash them in at the site’s store for privileges like the opportunity to serve as a honorary mayor for the day (complete with lunch and dinner with the mayor and city manager), a ride with the police chief in his car for an entire shift, and — my favorite — the opportunity for the town to officially name a week after the person through proclamation. It is important to give participants incentives — even if it is an ego boost like getting a week named after you, which comes at very little cost to the town.  Further, I wonder how many boys between between the ages of 3 and 10 years old who are begging their parents for a ride in a police car…  Very clever.

There’s little need to touch upon peddling and purchasing influence since the spirit of the effort is to encourage improving the town for everyone.   Another advantage to this type of crowdsourcing is that it is done in a venue that promotes transparency.

As I have noted before, there are participation inequality issues.  Not everyone has the ability (whether access or competency) nor the desire to participate in such an effort. What happens when the digitally savvy and excited over represent themselves?  That was the case when the Utah State Legislature passed a school voucher bill back in 2007; many pundits attributed some of the success to a discussion about the bill on the Politicopia wiki set up specifically discuss political issues in Utah.  After the bill’s passage, the bill was killed by a voter referendum.  Thus, even though people get excited about an idea online, it does not mean that most of the other affected people agree with the direction of the discussion.

However, it is important not to throw out the baby with the bath water.  Organizations that use social media to gather opinions and feedback from their constituents must acknowledge that their entire constituency likely does not use one channel of communication and participation.  Thus, they must take such feedback and participation in context and solicit feedback through other means to involve a more diverse group of stakeholders.  If Manor, TX does this, it likely will avoid what happened to the Utah State Legislature. 

Reclaim your Facebook Privacy

Matt Pizzimenti is concerned about how Facebook’s privacy policies and settings have evolved over the last little bit; that is why he started the ReclaimPrivacy project.  He has created an application that people can easily use after they login into their Facebook account. 

The application scans their privacy settings and provides alerts about several settings that one can use to hide various aspects of their account from anyone’s view.  One of the things that I particularly like about this application is that it provides instant links to the place where a person can adjust their settings to ensure that their information is only shared with those with whom they desire. 

Pizzimenti links to several recent articles that explain that Facebook’s recent actions have aggravated privacy advocates.  One thing that has irked them is that in some cases new settings have default values that allow the site to share account holders’ information with the public. Pizzimenti’s application will help individuals better understand all of the privacy vulnerabilities that they face.  It appears that it will flag any setting that is set to share information with Everyone (versus "Only Me" or only friends).  However, the application does not change anyone’s settings; it simply alerts them to vulnerabilities.  I think that this is an excellent idea since some people may want to have some information publicly available as this facilitates people finding them.

Regardless of how one feels about Facebook’s actions towards privacy, it is a good idea to continually examine one’s account settings on a social networking site.

Why Wikipedia has Accurate Health Information

Back in January 2009 I started the Master of Information Management program at the University of Maryland, and last semester I took a class on Consumer Health Informatics and another one on Social Computing.  With the permission of both professors, I wrote different versions of a paper for each class about how Wikipedia has maintained accurate health information, and a version of this paper is now available here. The Accuracy of Health Information on Wikipedia (click to access the report) was an interesting paper to write, and I hope that you find it just as interesting to read.

Wikipedia is different from other well known websites with health information in that it allows anyone – subject experts and laypeople – to contribute and edit information that it presents. Given that anyone with access to the site can edit it, scholarly studies have found to the surprise of Wikipedia’s critics that scientific information on the site is as nearly as accurate as that found in Encyclopedia Britannica (read the December 2005 Nature article “Internet encyclopaedias go head to head” that helped publicize this debate). This also goes against the reasoning of established measures of health information accuracy like the standards of the HONcode. Instead of having strict editorial procedures involving subject experts, Wikipedia’s culture fosters and regulates a sizable community of ardent editors who are devoted to protecting the information integrity of the site, and scholars speculate that their motivations are not altruistic. Through the diligence of active Wikipedia users and the establishment of standards, procedures, boundaries of responsibilities, and sanctions, the site has articles with accurate information. To discuss Wikipedia’s accuracy, this paper reviews the scholarly literature about Wikipedia’s accuracy in relation to health information. This discussion will focus on the the following topics: Wikipedia’s contribution to consumer health information sites on the Internet, metrics used to measure the quality of health information on the Internet, its level of accuracy, what aspects of its community culture enable it to maintain remarkably high accuracy levels, and the characteristics and aims of other collaborative websites like Wikipedia.

The CIO and Journalism

In the past we have profiled the innovative work of people like Adrian Holovaty who does some exciting things through programming that allow data to tell their own stories.  For instance, he set up the Campaign Tracker for the Washington Post, and he is now running his own site Everyblock – the database driven hyperlocal news site.  Further, in our newspaper studies we have examined how news organizations use the Internet.

While at the CIO Perspectives Forum here in Washington, DC last week, I was wondering about what kind of role CIOs should play at news organizations.  Their organizations may already use them as I am thinking (at least I hope).  However, it is important to note that in an October 2008 white paper titled “The CIO Profession: Leaders of change, drivers of innovation” IBM reports that most organizations mainly view and use CIOs as implementers and not as strategists.  Hopefully, news organizations turn to CIOs for planning and strategy and not just technical execution.  Of course, a CIO with a journalism background could help even more; Adrian Holovaty is so innovatively partly since he has a background in both programming and journalism.

If CIOs are involved in strategic planning, they can help the business and editorial staffers not only understand what is realistic, but they can also introduce them to new ideas that someone without technical expertise would know.  Further, a CIO could also identify potential problems and other issues in advance and help either avoid them or prepare other organizational stakeholders in advance. 

Here are a few examples of how a CIO can help news organizations strategically plan: 

• Broadcast journalists are now going out to the field with recording and editing equipment with fewer producers and camera people accompanying them.  Before such equipment and software is purchased, the CIO could help determine the requirements for such equipment and software and then help identify applicable products.
• A CIO with a decent understanding of database management could help find new application ideas like the ones that Adrian Holovaty has developed.
• During our newspaper studies we look at the website features that news organizations use by examining the different features (i.e. blogs, RSS feeds, video sections, etc.) they harness.  A CIO would have a valuable perspective on helping developing a strategic plan on what the organization’s website should do. Further, he or she she can help evaluate content management systems (CMS), applications, and vendors to determine how well they meet the organization’s needs and desires.
• A CIO can help an organization envision and deploy an API – like NPR’s API — which allows members of the public to use its data in interesting ways that the organizations itself did not image.  This is one way that a CIO can work with the business and editorial people at a news organization to help them find ways to profitably exploit an API.
• The CIO could help find ways to organize content for the public in many different ways.  For instance, tagging enables people to find information in ways other than the traditional divisions like News, Sports, International, etc.  In fact, The Guardian newspaper wanted a tag editor back in October 2007.  This would help make the news organization’s site more easy for the public to use.

These are just a few examples of aspects of journalism in which news organizations can turn to their CIOs for strategic planning, and considering the dire state of media companies, they can use all of the help that they can get.

How else can news organizations harness their CIOs to help strategically plan?