Employers A-Twittering?

I know class is almost over, but I came across this and couldn't pass up a post. Prof. Eisman has been urging us to try out Twitter (for the record, I tried it and am not sold). But Loren Heiny, a programmer and blogger at Incremental Blogger, published an interesting post today. We're all well aware that we are "Google-able" and that prospective employers will probably run our name through the search engine and pay careful attention to what it spits out. We're also very conscious as college students of what we put up on our FaceBook profiles. But Heiny warns that Twitter may be the next measurement for employers to keep tabs on their future employees.

He says, "Read through their tweets to see what they talk about. Is it all about drinking and partying or playing golf or some other leisure activity? Or is there talk about industry trends and news. The latter is more compelling. What’s the demeanor? Is it matter of fact? Confrontational?"

He also says that looking at the ratio of followers to who a Twitter user is following is telling, as well as how often they use Twitter: "How often does the person tweet? Once, ever? Once a day or so? Dozens of times a day? I’m not sure what the frequency of tweeting says, other than the person’s acceptance of the Twitter concept. A more important measure, might be how often other people respond to what the person says or asks."

Personally, I think that there are simply not enough young users on Twitter for this to become as standard as "Googleing" or "Facebooking" someone to find out about their life outside of their resume. I do, however, think that it is interesting to use a status message application to check up on someone; usually profiles posted on sites like MySpace or FaceBook are the standard way to look into a future employee. But think about it: how many of you would feel comfortable with your employer checking your AIM or Gchat away message regularly? Twitter is basically the same thing, only it keeps records of your previous away messages. So, if you have an "out partying" status message on Thursday night, your boss can see it on your Twitter and will know why you're so groggy on Friday morning.

If it is true that Twitter is on its way to becoming another way to check up on future employees, I think that this will further prevent younger users from jumping on the Twitter bandwagon.

Superjournalist Chef Liveblog

For all of you who could join and watch this, I hope this is entertaining and makes you hungry for tomorrow morning. I'm not going to tell you what I am cooking because it is a surprise, however you may be able to guess because I will be talking about my cooking process and what is generally going on in my kitchen.

In the interests of transparency I premade one of the batters I'll be working with and making into...something....

Enjoy, please feel free to comment on the liveblog.

Web attacks are not "free speech"

Apparently Chinese hackers believed that the best way to protest U.S Media coverage of the Chinese crackdown in Tibet was to conduct a cyber attack on the CNN.com Web site.

The attack was planned by hackers online, at a forum Web site called hackcnn.com for April 19th. However, Yahoo news reported that one of the main organizers of the attack backed down at the last minute. Still, according to the article, many other hacker went ahead anyway.

Unidentified hackers used botnet style attacks to attack the CNN Web site, Yahoo News said. A botnet attack utilizes a network of computers to run various Trojan horses, malware and spyware programs. Computer users are generally unaware that bots are running on their computers because the bots are usually well hidden.

According to the Shadowserver Foundation, a non-profit website that tracks botnet activity on the web, educational networks, corporate networks and even military networks have been used to run botnets. Botnets can be used by hackers to attack websites by overloading them with alot of data packets and requests. This simulates Web site traffic and can overload the servers running a Web site. This is called a blunt force attack and is common on the internet. One of the most notorious examples of this was last summers cyber attack on the Estonian internet.

In the case of CNN, Yahoo News reported that hackers managed to slow down CNN's Web site by two tenths of a second. According to the article CNN's network management team responded to the attack by temporarily blocking off some site traffic from Asia-Pacific region from reaching their website.

The interesting part of all this is that the Chinese hackers were doing this as a form of political protest. In the United States political protests are legally covered under the 1st amendment and the right to free speech. However, hacking and taking down a website violates several major international laws, and in and of itself is far more of an impediment to free speech than it is a political protest because it disables the internet, which is a forum for free speech.

While internet regulation laws and rules are still being written and debated worldwide a good way to view this attack is through the lens of how radio first began in the United States. At the turn of the 20th century as radio expanded, it was an unregulated bonaza of sorts. The FCC did not exist and neither did the idea of spectrum scarcity, which is the basic legal concept for why the government can regulate the airwaves. Spectrum scarcity means that there is a limited, finite, amount of airwave space over which radio transmission can occur, thus it has to be regulated so it is audible for the public.

In 1920's America when anyone could set up a radio station, there were many instances where mom and pop radio stations overlapped and caused most radios, especially in cities, to just pick up static--rendering the airwaves useless. The U.S. government stepped in and formed the FCC, which leases portions of the spectrum.

Today, the internet is growing in a similar, albeit different way. This attack on CNN represents a parrallel to the early days of radio in that if in 1920 you didn't like what someone was broadcasting you simply could boost signal power and mess with their station. Similarly hackers did this to CNN.

With any regulation of the internet and further policing by the government would come concerns for media outlets, like CNN, that operate large internet sites. It is an interesting and facsinating problem that is going to be battled out in court rooms around the world during the next few decades.


As for the Chinese hackers, trying writing some blogposts next time--that's how we do things in America, the capital of the freeworld. Last time I checked China was, and still is, a country run by an authoritarian government. Maybe you should be hacking your governments servers as a protest as opposed to those of the free world--it might be a wiser use of your time and a more effective protest.

iReport.com: making journalism degrees useless?

Most have you have probably already seen this, as I realize that four months is an eternity in the world of converged media, but earlier this year CNN launched their iReport.com site. It's the journalistic equivalent of YouTube, where users can upload their own clips and articles about anything they want to -- provided that, in theory, it's journalistically sound.

MediaWeek ran an interesting article in February about the launch of the site. The article notes that iReports have become increasingly popular, and reminds readers that coverage of recent events such as the Virginia Tech shootings and last year's wildfires in California came largely from user-generated video sent to newsrooms.

A particularly interesting feature of the site is the navigation bar including categories of iReports: latest, highest rated, most viewed, most shared, on CNN, and newsiest. Not only do users who upload news items have their work in the online community for feedback, but CNN.com actually uses some articles on their site and tags the ones that have been lifted from iReport.

iReport's "About" page starts off with an important caveat: "The views and content on this site are solely those of the iReport.com contributors. CNN makes no guarantees about the content or the coverage on iReport.com!" Notably, none of the content on the site is pre-screened. Everything is published until fellow users flag questionable content for review.

Articles under the "Highest Rated" tab generally do have genuine news content, with the top story being a photo gallery covering the Olympic torch protests. But then you also get stories like this one under the "Most Viewed" tab, about a husband's (kind of mean) April Fools joke on his wife.

User-generated content sites always have a range of uploaded content, from the interesting and germane to the downright out there. But what happens when you call all of those uploads news?

Have any of you submitted user-generated news content to this or another Web site? What do you think about this means of engaging readership, making them authors as well as users? There are obvious ramifications for what it means to be a journalist -- iReport's only standard is that users be at least 13 years old to upload content on the site. (Which makes me feel just great about that expensive diploma I'll be getting in a month.)

It seems to me that iReport may have a useful purpose for niche news -- it is a good place to see what the major networks aren't covering. Much like YouTube, where users often go to find videos that are not accessible elsewhere, iReport can be a good source for off-the-beaten-path news coverage. And this, seemingly is what CNN is capitalizing on.

Apparently blogging is the New Big Thing in the publishing world. I'm working with my literary agent in NYC on a proposal for a new book I'm writing--a relationship memoir written in a humorous style. The proposal is written and pretty much ready to go out to editors, but now my agent has told me that I'll need to create (1) a Web site for the book and (2) a blog as part of the book's promotional campaign because, well, every new author is expected to have a book Web site and a blog. I'm not altogether sure how I feel about this. I don't really mind creating the Web site or blogging. But I'm having some feelings of resentment toward the Powers That Be in the publishing world in that I think they're dumping more and more of the responsibilities for promoting/publicizing a book onto the author. They now expect the author to create a Web site for his/her book and to devote the time to blogging--before they even agree to publish the book! So there's really less and less value being placed on the quality of the writing of the book and more and more value placed on the author's willingness to pay to have a site designed and to spend the time and energy to blog. Is that fair?

Blogging about Blogs

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban seems to be right on top of industry changes as far as convergent media is concerned. In his blog, he touches on YouTube, internet video, and most appropriate for this class exercise, blogging. A recent post, "Bloggers in the Locker Room: It's the Pros vs the Joes", was sent to my Sports Journalism class by Professor Don Markus. The post talks about the NBA's recent lift on banning bloggers in the locker room. As Cuban says, "I can't wait to see the results."

Though Cuban sarcastically likens the role of online bloggers to "the internet equivalent of Talk Soup or VH1's "Best..." series," he introduces an interesting (if tongue-in-cheek) idea. Cuban had previously banned bloggers from his locker rooms, but the NBA lifted the ban. (Check out this ESPN article discussing why this was a bad move on Cuban's part.) Reacting to this, Cuban says that he doesn't care of you're a blogger that works for a major company -- of if you're in 8th grade. If you're blog is substantial, he'll send you press credentials to a Mav's game.

While sports blogging may be a different beast entirely from political and news blogging, the challenge of getting access to events has plagued bloggers. Do you think that the NBA's lift on the blogging ban will have an effect on blogger-journalists outside of sports? How difficult should it be for bloggers to get press credentials, and how should organizations decide to grant credentials to bloggers?

Navigating the networks

The BBC just posted some pretty extensive guidelines for its staff related to personal use of social networking sites.

Most of the rules are pretty straight forward (don’t leave mean comments, don’t bash BBC), but still worth checking out as most of us are going to have to wrestle with these issues.

A few things I find interesting about the new rules:

*The BBC facebook-stalked its staff and found that 8 percent of the 11,899 with an account identify themselves on their profiles as politically liberal.

*Editorial staff have to get permission before joining any political group on a social networking site. If joining a partisan group is necessary to story research, they recommend joining groups for both sides of the issue and remaining transparent about your purpose.

*When it comes to BBC-related entries on sites like Wikipedia, staffers are encouraged to be transparent. The guidelines read, “We should never remove criticism of the BBC. Instead, we should respond to legitimate criticism.”

*I think what strikes me most is the tone of the rules. There isn't a lot of "never do this or you'll lose your job" in the guidelines, but rather an invitation for openness and dialogue between editors and their staff.

If you read the guidelines, what stuck out most to you? I know we touched on this in an earlier entry, but do you think should media organizations be rigid in their rules about social networking?