I’ve talked about social media here and in many different presentations at the Missouri School of Journalism, conferences and training seminars. I feel like all of my ramblings are a little more legitimate as more and more journalists debate on whether these trends are good or bad. Obviously I plant myself into the camp that this is good.

Feel free to view my PowerPoint slideshow.

Twitter isnt the end-all be-all for journalism, but I do see it as a growing news tool. The trick, you need to be in there to understand how it works. For the first time, I recommended to all of my students that they should join a few social networks and learn how they work. I started out in Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Motionbox, Vimeo (I could go on) for my personal needs online and I’ve transitioned that use into ways I can use them professionally. You cannot jump in and think you know how it works. That’s how you end up finding reports like this one. It is so easy to fall into a culture of fear. Journalists shouldn’t allow themselves to do that. I think we should act like journalists, investigate these tools and see how they can be helpful. People are using them. Let’s see how we can use them to our advantage to deliver better news to our markets.

Now I’ll try to stop ranting.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about Twitter lately… Heck, a lot of my posts have been about Twitter since I started this nerd blog. But I have to say, Twitter came into its own this week due to the tragedy in Mumbai. It’s been a major focus since the attacks started Wednesday and many media outlets have noticed.

CNN: “Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai”
Forbes: “Mumbai: Twitter’s Moment”
Reuters: “Blogs feed information frenzy on Mumbai attacks”
ABC News: “Social Media a Lifeline, Also a Threat?”
CBS News: “Web a Reliable Resource in Mumbai Madness”
France 24: “Citizen journalism offers intimate view of Mumbai attacks”
The Guardian: “Twitter comes of age with fast reports from the ground in Mumbai”
The Times of India: “Twittering & blogging about terror”
New York Times: “Citizen Journalists Provided Glimpses of Mumbai Attacks”

It’s fascinating to see how people flocked to share information onto Twitter and then watch how some of the more mainstream media tried to explain it. Amy Gahran (who is a consultant and works at Poynter) was kind to speak to a number of these media outlets to explain how information needs to be filtered. She tried to explain how social media is a news source and not an evil threat. Unfortunately, some outlets hear that call, others continue to play to the culture of fear. (Note the title of the ABC news article) She wrote a great piece for Poynter on how to be a responsible tweeter.

In reading the many articles online and watching the conversations on Twitter, I’ve come to a couple conclusions on why Twitter can be a wonderful news source for all of us to use during developing news. First, you can’t understand or rely on information from Twitter without becoming a part of the Twitter community. It’s very hard to trust or understand the information found on there unless you’ve been there long enough to build a community and a reliable chunk of people you follow. I knew about Sarah Palin’s nomination hours before it went puplic. My husband thought I was crazy to bring it up. I knew about the earthquake in China and the kind of damage it was causing before there were full accounts on the international media outlets. I knew about developments of smaller stories across the country because I follow people I trust and I’ve spent enough time following them that I knew what they are experts in. If a mom blogger suddenly started tweeting with financial tips, I would question that information unless she happens to be a day trader and a mom blogger (it can happen).

Second, I consider Twitter like how I work with scanners in a newsroom. When there is scanner squawk during breaking news (such as the #Mumbai hashtag) often it’s correct information… but you have to consider the source and confirm it. Twitter can be more reliable considering if you’ve been there a while you already know your sources, background and reliability. When there’s breaking news, you can follow it through a hashtag but confirm and do follow up with the people you follow.

I am visiting my in-laws for the holidays when I happened to hop onto Twitter this afternoon. That’s when I discovered the horrible news about an attack at the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai, India. But as I continued to watch the chatter on Twitter, the situation got worse. More attacks at the Taj Hotel and word attackers were taking people with passports from the US and the UK. Talk of grenade attacks and suddenly a list of people who were in Mumbai emerged. It was amazing to suddenly find people who were in the city give their perspective. I was almost immediately hooked to the Twitter search page where people were using the #mumbai tag with updates on the situation. At some points thousands of new posts would appear in a matter of seconds.

The most fascinating information emerging came from a Twitter user named Vinu. CNN reports his full name is Vinukumar Ranganathan. He had seen the damage first-hand. Many of the explosions happened a couple of blocks from his home. Along with his tweets, he started to upload dozens of photos he took while he was outside. While I read his writing and looked at his pictures, I noticed him comment that CNN had seen his tweets and wanted to talk to him on the air. His phone interview and his photos emerged on that network. His photos can be found online interspersed with AP and Getty Images on CNN.com. CNN started actively recruiting first-hand information through social networks and I suddenly realized the social network of news is going mainstream. It’s fascinating.

While I was having this awesome social media moment, a family member talked to me skeptically about how it was possible I could know so much about what was happening without following a “real” news source. I feel I was getting better and more accurate information following Twitter than anywhere else. Many of the facts I learned emerged 10 minutes, even an hour later through CNN or other outlets. Along with the Twitter feed, a help blog emerged and a wiki that was keeping up with the developments very closely. You can even follow Twitter real-time and within a 15 mile radius of Mumbai. It’s incredible how the world can combine to deliver awesome information.

UPDATE: A nice list of social networks used during this developing story can be found on Poynter’s website and here.

Of all the things I do online, I’ve found this blog is the one that gets the least amount of attention. It’s too bad since it’s the one place where I can really think about my career and the many projects I work on. This summer was not boring. I helped a group of students blog from Beijing while they worked for the public relations arm of the Olympics. They blogged about their experiences for two months in China. From time to time they also shared news reports that I used on the air. It’s so cool to be able to share video from across the globe so easily.

I’ve thought a lot about why I don’t seem to blog enough in this space and I realized why — I spend a lot more time on Twitter and Facebook. It’s a way I share and communicate my thoughts and ideas. But I’ve pondered over whether that is productive or not. To me, Facebook is more personal and not as professional (although I try to keep things relatively professional on my page). Twitter is a great space to share and communicate with professionals AND people with similar interests outside of work. I am able to learn about so many things and share many thoughts in a quick manner. That simplicity allows me to stay in touch and see what is important to so many people compared to the time it would take to read each person’s blog posts. But that got me thinking about this blog. Twitter seems so fleeting. The information shared is brief and often not a full thought. Blogs allow those ideas to flesh out and breathe.

I asked around Twitter to see how many other people have noticed a decrease in their blogging - and many consistent Twitter members agreed their blogging has taken a hit. It makes me think that I should try harder to break free of the 140 character discussions and share my thoughts here. I’m sure someone else would shudder when I say this, but I think blogging is more permanent. It’s a distinct record of thoughts from a moment in time. I should try to commit to spending more time here!

I have some big changes as a new semester starts at the Missouri School of Journalism. For this school year, I have a chance to focus on some pet projects and less time in the newsroom. I’m not leaving it completely, but I will be able to spend more time on Smart Decision 2008. I have some big ideas and I hope to be able to share those big ideas here soon.

Aggregation. It’s a big focus of my life these days. I’m looking for easy ways to collect information and share it with the general public. At the same time, I’m trying to find ways to collect the websites and social networks I visit and aggregate it into one place. That’s why I’m curious to see how Google’s Friend Connect, Facebook Connect and MySpace’s dataportability may help play in this goal to link everything into one location on the Internet.

I look at this on two levels: How can it work for me and how can it work for my news website.

For me, I love social networking. I love chatting, learning and sharing. It’s kind of obvious from my previous posts. But I think it’s so cool to be able to share and see different perspectives from people I trust. It’s the same idea as having a get together with your friends - but I know I’m not alone when I say many of my friends live across the country. We move around a lot! Not to mention, my job has given me the chance to meet really cool and smart people in all kinds of locations. Social networking lets me stay in touch in ways that writing a letter and sending it in the mail can’t do. And in a slightly self-centered way, it gives me a chance to know what my friends are doing after years of them reading my family blogs and never leaving comments! They know all about me but I don’t know a thing about their most recent updates.

On the professional side of things, I want my news product used by my market! So that’s why I tried an aggregated website sharing the news from KOMU.com, the local NPR newsroom and a local newspaper as a test. We’re aggregating all of our election-themed news and sharing it into the SmartDecision08.com website. This is a way to create a one-stop information hub on the election season in Missouri, specifically mid-Missouri. I don’t have enough funding to make it function as well as I would like it to function, but it is deep. There is so much information and it’s delivered in a way that can really let a news and political information consumer learn a lot. I want to find ways to help collect information and give people the change to socially learn and share on this kind of level. Take news and make it personal. That’s been my goal for years. It’s so cool to see how today’s technology is reaching the concepts I thought about a long time ago.

I am trying out a new site called blippr.com - it gives you a way to socially share the things that entertain you: books, movies, music and games. It’s a level of social networking I haven’t really participated in before. Facebook has all kinds of options that include those items, but blippr seems to have a very clean, concise and non-gimmicky way to accomplish sharing entertainment reviews. It connects to facebook and twitter and friend feed so the idea is to use it as an aggregator of sorts to collect and share your likes and dislikes within the products you already use. I think that’s where everything is headed. I just wish I could wrap my head around how we can use these kinds of tools and still help inform online consumers the news they want and possibly need to know to participate in the non-computer based world where they live. I would have something really cool if I had money and programmers who would put up with my constant brain dumps!

I’m deep inside many different social networking tools. I use them personally in order to see how useful they are for my job. If it’s useful for my day to day life, then there may be a great reason for my newsroom to share its information using those tools. A year ago I got into Twitter, but no one else in my circle got into it so I left. I jumped back in last fall and it’s really picked up steam. Now I’m trying to think of ways these short messages can be helpful for my job and I’ve enjoyed what I can talk about in my life. Fun products like Tweetstats can show off what I talk about the most (like kids, work, meetings, newsroom). I spend a lot of time playing with these tools and thinking big — on a personal and professional level. I blog on Wordpress and Blogger, I tweet on Twitter, I post pictures on Flickr, I create “scrapbooks” on Scrapblog, I co-moderate a Yahoo group, I connect with people on LinkedIn and Facebook. I oversee a news website and an election website. I text, I surf the web from my phone. It’s a hell of a juggle and someday someone is going to find a way to merge all of these products and concepts that offer a connection into one cellphone based tool. I hope I’ll be able to join in and help with the creation of those tools. It wasn’t that long ago when my boss and I were talking about how he would love to see a small handheld video player — Oh you know, like a video iPod? I’m visioning the world’s most interactive iPhone where you can type, talk or post without any effort. That will be super cool. Who knows. Maybe’s Google’s Friend Connect will do that… When it goes live (and it’s rumored to launch today). This could have major implications on how to help a standard website (like komu.com) connect with its audience in a more social way. (The Washington Post explains)

I’m obsessed with social networks. From the moment I started playing with Facebook YEARS ago I saw an amazing opportunity. It’s an amazing way to stay in touch with people and share connections. THEN Facebook added applications… And that’s when I saw the amazing opportunities for newsrooms and educators. Students could add applications and share the information that matters to them. I jumped into the applications game and challenged my students to build one for KOMU. In the meantime, everyone from NPR to the BBC have applications that share news and information. Heck, even Google has a news feed reader. But now Google has finally shared why Microsoft bought into a piece of Facebook… That’s because Google has its own social network it plans to launch. The idea is to socially network all of the information you’re already gathering on Google. It’s a way to socially link all of the applications we all use on Google: iGoogle, Blogger, Picassa, Orkut, Maps. All of the tech blogs have the details. I kind of feel like Google is late… But the company tends to surprise me.Honestly, as a news nerd, I’m excited to see the newest opportunities to share information… Whoever is offering it, I want to try to delivery information with the help of that tool. Now wouldn’t it be great if I could beta what they’re calling Makamaka?

A year ago I had a moment of genius. I thought how cool it would be to match voters up with candidates by using a social network tool called introNetworks. It’s a flash-based social network site that would be SUPER COOL to use and give people the insight about candidates that match closer to their viewers… but not so close that they won’t want to learn more about their candidate. Well, my idea came true. I got an email from introNetworks saying a group called Neighborhood America is using my idea. I couldn’t afford it so I’m thrilled to see someone else put the money into this technology. I’m also very, very jealous that I didn’t have the funding to do it myself. I highly recommend checking out the how-to video on how this works. It’s exactly how I had envisioned it.

So I was grocery shopping and thinking about this blog.  I’ve blogged for years, but mostly about my family life.  I have two adorable kids who are pretty darn interesting.  But as I get deeper and deeper into my career, I realize I really should write down my professional thoughts.  It all exploded this summer when I had to share my moments of genius on Facebook.  I had this moment of excitement when Facebook applications started showing RSS feeds of news content.  To me this is a big shift in how journalists, businesses, bands, universities… ANYONE can share information on personal social network pages.  The BBC was the first to offer a topical RSS feed for Facebook.  I had spent the previous month or two begging someone to find a way to make that happen for my site’s RSS feeds.  Then it happened.  Once a major news outlet started doing it, more and more news outlets started coming up with amazing Facebook apps and other widgets through Google, Yahoo and any other application someone might use a lot.  I was excited.  I’m still excited about this stuff.

And that’s why I have to blog about my ideas.  It’s too exciting to hold it in my mind!