We've come a long way, baby
My former colleague Jonathan Mast posted this on Facebook and I have to say it blew me away. It's crazy how far the Internet has come in less than 20 years. No one could have imagined the impact it...
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The Social Super Bowl
In an attempt to broaden my social media horizons, tonight I joined millions around the world who were talking about the Super Bowl online. For communication folks like myself, Super Bowl Sunday has...
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Blogging: Methods Behind the Madness
Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons. In addition to getting my hands dirty with social media during the Super Bowl this week, I also did a...
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Reporting Live From Snowmaggedon Using Social Media
During the recent snow storm in Memphis, Dr. Brown-Smith challenged us to utilize social media to share photos of and information about weather conditions in our area. I am proud to say that I...
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I'm All A-Twitter: How 140 Characters Can Make a Big Impact
This leg of my social media journey is brought to you by Twitter, the microblogging site with more than 175 million users and nearly 100 million new posts added daily. In Journalism Next, Mark Briggs...
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Crowdsourcing: x (number) of Heads is Better Than One
Thanks for the above image, Cooltown Studios. This week's social media adventure centered around the concept of crowdsourcing. It's a buzzword I've heard a lot lately but didn't until this week...
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A Week of Firsts on My Social Media Journey
It's been a big week for me on the social media front. I participated in my first Twitter scavenger hunt, my first two live Twitter chats, and my beat blog got Freshly Pressed on WordPress! Twitter...
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Lights, Camera, Blog!
Thanks to Shazeen Shamad for sharing this cool photo on Flickr. As a writer, it's hard for me to swallow Mark Briggs' assertion that "journalism without photographs is like writing without verbs"...
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Smile! You're on Candid Camera
An important part of my job in corporate communications at Sedgwick CMS is quality control. My department is charged with ensuring that communication materials bearing our company name are both...
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My Friend Flickr
Thanks to Flickr user Rosana Prada for this great photo As part of our social media class' unit on digital photography, our assignment this week was to take photos related to our beat blogs and post...
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Social Media Class Blog Round-Up
This week it's my turn to compile highlights from the social media blogs of 10 of my classmates. Our topic this week was digital video. Here goes Experienced video producer Derrick Lanois recommends...
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Going Mobile: Thinking Outside the Newsroom
(Image from Technorati) The explosion in popularity of mobile devices has sparked a revolution in the way news is reported and received. As Mark Briggs points out in chapter 5 of Journalism Next,...
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Making the Most of Your Data
This example of data-driven journalism is taken from my local daily newspaper, the Commercial Appeal Chapter 9 of Mark Briggs' book Journalism Next tackles two related topics: digitizing your life and...
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Then I Joined Foursquare, Now I'm a Believer
If you had asked me a week ago what Foursquare meant to me, I would have shared with you some memories of playing the schoolyard game in elementary school. I would also have told you that the...
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Journalism as a Conversation: Let's Discuss
Speaker's Corner (Colin Smith) / CC BY-SA 2.0 This week's social media topic is participatory journalism. For me, the notion of journalism as a conversation conjures up nostalgic images of group...
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Whose Social Network? The Diversity of Demographics Among Social Media Users
Whoever said TV isn't educational clearly wasn't watching last week's episode of "The Big Bang Theory." About 55 seconds into this clip, Sheldon and Amy discuss memetics, or meme theory (but if you...
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O Reader Where Art Thou? Using Web Analytics
Thanks to The Future Buzz for this image Dorian Benkoil wrote in a recent Poynter article that it’s often said the Web is more measurable than any other medium. That’s probably true. But trying to...
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Linking: The Web Curation Sensation
Our final week of readings for Dr. Carrie Brown-Smith's graduate class on social media introduced the concept of Web curation. As Mindy McAdams pointed out on her blog, we generally associate...
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Some Stats from My Beat Blog, and Why PR Still Matters
As part of our social media class study of web analytics, Dr. Carrie Brown-Smith suggested that we review our own statistics to see what we can learn from the traffic we attract to our blogs. You may...
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Delicious: The Tasty World of Social Bookmarking
Ever seen this square design next to the Facebook "f" and the Twitter "t" icons and wondered what it was all about? I did, so for my final project for Dr. Carrie Brown-Smith's social media class, I...
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