The letters page of a daily newspaper is the most mixed of mixed bags. Various papers I've worked for had different approaches to it; some banned 'round robin' type endorsement letters ostensibly written by celebs ('hello, I'm Gloria Hunniford and I'd like everyone from Southampton to get behind National Gut Week), others stuck them on... Continue Reading →
Web 2.0 and brands
Gary Vaynerchuk, of Wine Library, gave a talk on Building Personal Brand Within the Social Media Landscape at the recent Web 2.0 Expo NY. He's a bit shrill at times but it's worth presevering I think.Here are some of his points: Becoming a brand"The place where we play is very real and it is a... Continue Reading →
New Dipity – me likee
While I was in New York my invite to preview the upcoming incarnation of Dipity dropped in the inbox. Which sorta killed me, as I wanted to start playing with it immediately - but I had Manhattan's shops all around me. In the end Manhattan (and my marriage) won but now I'm back home I've... Continue Reading →
Learning from liveblogging
I'd love to know how many of the UK's regional newspapers have run liveblogs this year; it seems as though real-time coverage and participation in almost everything (public spectacles, event TV, sports, political rallies to name a few) is on the increase when it was hardly in evidence 12 months ago.I've been pondering this as... Continue Reading →
Networking and the tools of the job…
It started, as so many things do nowadays, with a tweet. Mark Commerford suggested to me there was a blog post in social networks and the different ways a journalist might use them - and keep track of them.So I sat down and started thinking about what network tools I use most often, and what... Continue Reading →
Why the deadline isn’t ‘Now’
I suspect most of us find it comforting to work to a deadline; it's satisfying to cross a mental finishing line and feel a job is completed. But a deadline is a also a mindset... and that's not the most useful thing for a journalist to possess right now.Dictionary.net has this to say about the... Continue Reading →
Tweet Cloud
The nice thing about my Tweet Cloud - as far as I'm concerned - is that my friends are in the biggest type, which makes them my most frequent and important tweets. That's how it should be...
A Dipity TimeTube of La Princess
And another great excuse to use Dipity... this time it's the TimeTube application that I'm trying out. This has taken all the YouTube videos with the keywords I selected (La Princess, La Machine) and worked it into an embeddable display of videos.This is a really nice way of displaying the giant spider videos in one... Continue Reading →
Giant spider in liverpool
La Princess left the Echo Arena on Friday night and moved through the crowds to the Pier Head - walking straight past me. It was an amazing experience...... but what made it even more brilliant was that reporting the event on the hoof was so simple. Along with VJs for the Post&Echo at the event,... Continue Reading →
The Lifecycle of a News Story
I rediscovered a link on my Delicious recently, called the Lifecycle of a Blog, from Wired, which traces how a post goes from the author's keyboard through the system into a subscriber's RSS reader. It's here if you're interested.Anyway, that sent me off on a bit of a tangent; I started wondering about the lifecycle... Continue Reading →
Alison Gow | Building the New 