A rant: adding value by leaving links in comments

I submitted the following comment to the Defence Management website on an article they had written about the MoD's new social media guidelines: "MoD wants personnel to use Twitter". (Something I covered here for the Frontline Club.)

"If you read the guidelines in full you'll see that the remit for using social networks is very narrow, (which is only hinted at in this article.) They certainly don't encourage soldiers to tweet from the field or in fact say a great deal which would be of much interest without permission. I've written a blog post which includes a discussion of the excpetions at the Frontline Club which might be of interest bit.ly/4BiIS."

When the comment was published a couple of hours later Defence Management chopped off the last sentence with the link to my post leaving just the following:

"If you read the guidelines in full you'll see that the remit for using social networks is very narrow, (which is only hinted at in this article.) They certainly don't encourage soldiers to tweet from the field or in fact say a great deal which would be of much interest without permission."

Now, if I was a bot leaving a spam link then by all means edit out my link. But I'm not a bot.

I rarely promote my own blog in this way, because it takes too long. So I'm not one of those people that constantly leaves links in all sorts of random comments sections as a promotion tool.

Of course, I was hoping to push a few readers (probably one or two) my way. But apart from the fact that it's nice for me to think that a couple more people might read my work, it doesn't make much difference to me.

I don't make any money from my Frontline blog. It's not like I need readers for my share of the advertising revenue because there aren't any ads on Frontline.

(Unlike Defence Management, I note. And I wonder how much pressure they are under from their advertisers to keep people reading what their advertisers want people to read on their site and not be directed to anyone else's point of view?)

My main reason for adding the link on my comment was because I thought it might have been of interest to the readers of Defence Management.

I thought this would be a neat way (rather than copying and pasting my whole post into the comments section) of letting people know of a different take on the issue at hand and letting them decide if they wanted to find out more.

In short, I thought I was doing Defence Management a favour by adding value to their content. How naive of me. I won't make that mistake again.

I mean, maybe I'm wrong and my blog post doesn't add any value to the discussion and they were right to edit me out. Or maybe my comment adds enough value without the link to my post and the extra information it provides. You can decide for yourself.

But whatever you decide, that's the last time I'll be commenting on the Defence Management website.

If I'm way off message with this, let me know in the comments or write your own post and stick a link in the comments! Is there an etiquette for promoting your own work in comments? Did I fall foul of it?

Links for today: BBC Newsnight, Twitter and a few others

BBC Newsnight, Twitter and journalism

I couldn't possibly comment on Newsnight's interview with Twitter CEO, Evan Williams, but here's some links for those of you who are interested...

• 'Read it and Weep': Guardian transcript of the interview
  
• Shane Richmond: 'Newsnight is not a form of journalism'
• Twitter responses to the interview: loved it, embarrassing, do Newsnight understand?

Blogging in Afghanistan

• There's a lot of news from Afghanistan at the moment. Most of it far less positive than this blog post about an online journalism and blogging workshop in Helmand. Twenty-eight attendees had to share two computers but they were determined to learn new ways to make their voices heard.
  

Money makes the media world go round?

• Rupert Murdoch to charge for news content online. The proprietor of the Sun noted that "quality of journalism is not cheap".
  
• Some have faith in the link economy.
  
• Others are not at all convinced by the marketplace of the 'free'.
  

Social networking and the 'decline' of face-to-face communication

Archbishop Vincent Nichols is worried about the impact of social networking on community. He has many concerns but at least one which I think is slightly overblown is the alleged decline of face-to-face communication.

Whether through Facebook 'Event' groups, Tweet-ups or online dating, it seems to me that a lot of people on social networks use them to help them meet people in 'real life'.

So here's one for any historians out there. When the telephone was invented or perhaps more pertinently when it became a standard household item was there also grave concern that people would stop meeting face-t0-face?

Times journalist takes 'first person' risk

I plucked this quote from an article about Manchester United's top 50 players in The Times Online late last night:

"One of the rules of writing for The Times is that you avoid referring to yourself in the first person unless you have been on the newspaper for about 20 years, but, for once, I'm going to let my hair down."

You could see why the confessional nature of (some) blogging might not fit with The Times' institutional culure can't you?

I hope the author, Kaveh Solhekol, got away with it.

(More fuel for Rod Liddle's raging fire)

We know our news sucks?

I'm reading Scott Rosenberg's new book: 'Say everything' on blogging.

On page 52, Rosenberg talks about Dave Winer, one of the Web's pioneering software entrepreneurs.

In order to 'realize his billion-websites vision' way back in 1995, Winer started writing some code, writing about it, trying it out with some other people, writing about what happens and then writing about it some more.

The idea was that the users corrected the software, fixed errors and came back to him - slowly but surely the software would improve.

Rosenberg includes this quote from Winer where he told people how this would work:

"We make shitty software. We know our software sucks. But it's shipping! Next time we'll do better, but even then it will be shitty. The only software that's perfect is one you're dreaming about. Real software crashes, loses data, is hard to learn and hard to use. But it's a process. We'll make it less shitty".

It made me think. Can we apply this to news?

We (journalists?) make shitty news. We know our news sucks. But we've published it. Next time we'll do better, but even then it will be shitty. The only news that's perfect is the news you're dreaming about. Real news takes time but demands to be known as soon as, or even before, we know what it is. Real news is often obscured by all sorts of people who want to spin the story. And real news will have factual errors, mistaken interpretations, and incomplete conclusions. But it's a process. We'll make it less shitty (because you'll make it less shitty.)

And if that does make any sort of sense what does it mean for our understanding of standards in news?

(I suppose getting the software wrong has less of an impact than getting the news wrong and like all analogies I'm sure it breaks down in other places too, but anyway food for thought...)

Horrocks: 'Responding on blogs' leads to 'improved journalism'

Peter Horrocks, the BBC's Director of the World Service, discusses the use of blogs and social networking tools by journalists in an article entitled 'The End of Fortress Journalism'.

'But new news journalists will need the flexibility to cope. They will need to network with the audience as much as they do with their colleagues. The audience is becoming a vast but still untapped news source. The most go-ahead journalists are using social networking tools to help find information and interviewees.

'Responding on blogs and using those to promote a dialogue with informed members of the audience is leading to improved journalism. It can be time-consuming but it can yield real benefits.

'So journalists will need changed culture, changed organisation and an improved understanding of the modern tools of journalism – audience insights, blogging, Twitter, multimedia production. It sounds like being pretty challenging...But I suspect that the public may well appreciate a journalism that puts serving their information needs at its heart, rather than one which is about organising the world in the way that journalists prefer.'

Horrocks' paper was one of a series that the BBC College of Journalism have published (pdf) from the Future of Journalism Conference in November 2008.

In addition to Horrocks' standpoint, there are other passages on blogging to be found in this collection including: an outline of Panorama's uptake of blogs; a discussion about which journalists within a media organisation should blog; and a few bits and pieces on the use of blogs by journalists.

Seven fours are...

I've been transcribing a couple of research interviews over the last couple of days. Here's a classic quote from a participant who shall remain nameless:

"But again they send out four emails a day at least and they build up nicely. That’s seven fours...are 36. That’s 36 a week."

Unlikely to make it into the final cut for the PhD, but by way of background it does go some way to explaining why they're doing journalism and not helping us clamber out of the financial crisis.

(Then again, maybe it was this sort of numerical 'skill'...)

In the 'stuff I've bookmarked' section:

Twitter

• Twitter use by UK newspapers. (The Guardian leads the way.)

Blogging

• Web pioneer Marc Andreessen to fund blogging investigative journalism initiative.

Tweets of the Week (so far)

• How the sophisticated news consumer curates news and information.
  

• And this one caught my eye: "Conclusion from a chat with regional station editor: there's a lot of "pressure" for journos/editors to use twitter/social media tools..."

Frontline Club

• Catch up with my latest Frontline posts on the US Army and wikis and a different look at the recent deaths of two British soldiers in Afghanistan.