Facebook's down! Quick, post it on...everything that's not Facebook

The web is abuzz this afternoon with news about Facebook's technical problems and users' thoughts on the situation.

The site seems to be in working order again, but its problems earlier today caused quite a stir.

Mashable, the best source I've found for this type of news posted this article today. The Huffington Post reported the story here. And even the Wall Street Journal blogged about it here.

But what I found most interesting was my Twitter feed, which is still full of insights and jokes (being retweeted like crazy) about the social media site and the impact of its complications. Some gems:

@CarlosMiller: "How come when Twitter goes through its weekly crash, nobody on FB really gives a damn, but when FB crashes, Twitter goes all up in arms?"

@OPB: "BREAKING NEWS: Facebook is down. Worker productivity rises. U.S. climbs out of recession." and 20 minutes later "Top Tweet! Can it become true? @OPB BREAKING NEWS Facebook down. Worker productivity rises. US climbs out of recession. #truthiness"

@alexpriest: "Facebook fail whale: http://twitpic.com/1yqrwc cc @Boones6433"

@bcoz79: "First thought on #Facebook being down was, "I should post this on #Facebook !""

@alquaeda: "#facebook is down. Not sure if we did that, but we should claim credit anyway. Hitting the infidels where it hurts, etc."

@intuitivebridge: "Facebook is down....It just, you know...doesn't feel like it can go on anymore. It's not you, It's facebook. Really."

@mattwaite: "Irony: Hearing about Facebook being down on Twitter. Shoe. Other foot. Yeah." and "Dear internet: While Facebook is down, why don't you go on over to @politifact http://bit.ly/Onln1 and get your learn on. Just sayin'."

I'm sure there will be plenty more to come.

I think what we saw today really underscores the importance of having multiple social media sites. While some sites may become obsolete, the trend of moving on to the new "best" site and abandoning (or never even trying out) all others, saying "I don't have time for more than one" may be unwise. Particularly with the availability of tools like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, it's easy to share information across multiple platforms.

I was certainly glad to have Twitter today while Facebook was down, not just so that I could find out what was wrong with Facebook (and what people in social web thought about it), but so that I could still share information with a broad audience and find out what's going and what people are reading/watching in my social web.

Twitter as an original source

Criticism of the Oregonian's reporting on Ted Wheeler's ski injury sparked a Twitter discussion on the ethics of quoting Twitter posts.

Ian Malkasian (@ianmal) wrote "running stories w/ twitter as a primary source is risky & in my mind poor journalistic judgment." In another Tweet he posed the question"in the absence of no other corroborating info. is the twitter stream of an elected official on the record?"I re-Tweeted the question and got a few responses.

Betsy Richter (@betsywhim) replied "yes. In the Wheeler case, you have the photograph, which corroborates his story, plus the Tweets from his wife. plus he's already gone on record as stating communicating via Twitter/Facebook fosters government transparency/good comms practice."

T.A. Barnhart wrote "Ted thinks so."

Ronald Morgan (@rhyzome) answered "Um, yeah, as is an email, phone call or any other media."

Suzi Steffen (@SuziSteffen) directed me to an episode of OPB's(@opb) Think Out Loud (@thinkoutloudopb) from October, in which Ted Wheeler, who was a guest on the show, discussed his thoughts on the the benefits of using social media such as Twitter and Facebook. "When you read the Tweets, they come from me directly, warts and all.... What you see on Twitter is what you get. That is your county chair." He goes on to say that Tweets are governed by the same public records laws as e-mail and other public communications. "I just assume that everything that I put out there is public information..." he explained. He did note that the law has not been able to keep up with technology, so this may not always be the case.

I'm interested to hear more thoughts and opinions on this topic.

Oregon Live is Anything But

The Oregonian's web site, OregonLive.com, failed to report on Multnomah County Chair Ted Wheeler's broken back resulting from a ski accident, hours after Wheeler broke the story via Twitter this morning until about 3PM. Shortly after Wheeler's Twitter post appeared the story was reported by Our PDX, KGW, and Matt Davis' blog on the Portland Mercury's Blogtown. At 2:52, after Multnomah County issued a press release , Oregon Live posted their story, which contained no original information, and did not mention Twitter. Many on Twitter are wondering what their excuse is. The Portland Tribune, which beat the Oregonian by a couple of hours, at least attempted to reach Wheeler for comment, and posted a link to his web site, which they noted includes a link to his Twitter page.

WMTM Still Going Strong

A week after the We Make the Media conference in Portland, an active online discussion continues via Twitter, Google Groups, and Google Wave. Participants include many from the Portland metro area, but also a number of people like myself who aren't as centrally located, who could not stay so involved if follow-up discussion was limited to face-to-face meetings. That attendees remain so engaged suggests that the conference may have achieved what its organizers set out to do. Members of a few, if not all of the planning groups that formed at the conference, are working on ideas online and have concrete plans to meet again in person, and are also brainstorming with people from the other groups. It's too early to speculate about the success of the proposed ideas, but it seems clear that something good will come of all this!

We Make the Media

I dragged myself out of bed early Saturday morning to attend We Make the Media, my second conference at the Turnbull Center. My husband was nice enough to drop me off before he headed over to Blitz Ladd to watch the Ohio State v. Michigan game with some of our other friends from Columbus.

I tweeted from my phone (not one of those new-fangled smart ones) throughout the day, but left my laptop at home. I'm kind of sad that I missed out on reading all the Twitter discussion that went on during the conference (which I did read as soon as I got home), but am also glad that I was able to focus my attention on what was actually being said in the room. I think the tweeters made a lot of good observations, but I also thought some of the comments were rather dismissive and disrespectful of the older attendees, who were less media savvy, but very experienced and knowledgeable in other areas, and certainly every bit as passionate about working for change as the younger crowd.

After checking in, I ran out for some coffee and made it back in plenty of time to get seated and somewhat caffeinated before Joe Smith took the floor and introduced keynote speaker Steven A. Smith, a seasoned newspaper man who grew up in Portland and Eugene, and attended U of O and Ohio State (I'm always intrigued by the number of people who seem to move back and forth between these two O states). Everything he said about the industry was in line with what I've been hearing at school and at other conferences: everything's going electronic, there are serious funding problems that no one's figured out how to handle yet, shrinking newsrooms are leading to a decline in the quality and quantity of news being produced, small local papers are doing the best, etc.

Next a panel of media professionals introduced the topics of the breakout groups and then Joe Smith opened the floor up to the roomful of journalists, who had more to say (much of which they had already been tweeting) than I think he anticipated. One of the proposed breakout groups was replaced by an "Unconference" group that planned to tackle a number of the issues that attendees felt were being overlooked.

I decided to go to the OPB group, which was focused on expanding the organization and possibly forming a new non-profit. There were about 15 people who stayed for the duration of the session, and about 10 more who popped in briefly, often just long enough to share their opinions and avoid hearing those of others. It was kind of strange, I thought. I was also surprised by how much hostility developed during the session.

There was certainly a divide, which was apparent the whole day, between those who were more into new media, and more open to new methods, and the more old-school crowd, who seemed not to take Twitter and blogs very seriously, which I think fueled some productive discussion about the role of citizen journalists and how they can be included without dismissing or hurting "real" journalists (or how we can even make such distinctions), and how to be more inclusive of marginalized groups in the media; but there also seemed to be some tension that I had a hard time placing. I suppose when you put that many smart, vocal people in a room you're bound to have some clashes of personality. I certainly came away with a better understanding of the range of opinions on a number of topics, and hope others did, too.

In the end, I think our group came up with some good ideas about how to improve OPB, but there wasn't much discussion about forming a new non-profit, and after our group representative presented to the room, Joe Smith suggested that OPB move ahead with some of the proposed actions, but that we not continue to discuss it as a group.

After all the groups presented, individuals formed more specific proposals for actions, which all of the attendees voted on by way of a complex hand-rasing system. I think new technology could have saved a lot of time and frustration there. I'd certainly jump at the opportunity to use the iclicker I was required to spend upwards of $30 on for my Grammar for Journalists class last year (and have never used since).

Over the course of the afternoon, there was a noticeable decline in the size of the group. I'm not sure how many people left because of other obligations, and how many just felt that nothing productive was going to come from the conference.

Finally, after about eight hours of trying to figure out how such a large group of people with such disparate ideas could take action together to improve the outlook of journalism in Portland, we broke into smaller groups once more to make concrete plans.

I joined a group that plans to create a new non-profit multi-media entity. Ron Buel, one of the conference organizers and founding editor and publisher of Willamette Week (and another UO alum), was appointed discussion leader. I think we may collaborate with some of the other groups. We're planning to meet again in three weeks. Hope this goes somewhere!

Lots of others are blogging about this event. I'll add to this list as I find more:

Thoughts From the Spiral
Carla Axtman on Blue Oregon
360 Convos
Reporting 1 Blog
Civics 21
Still a Newspaper Man
Joe Wilson
Oregon Media Central
Ran Dum Thots

nozzlmedia
WordCount
T.A. Barnhart

Busy, Busy, Busy....

@MYMHM on Twitter was nice enough to send me a Google Wave invitation in exchange for retweeting a link to their latest episode, which I was happy to do. It took a few days for the invitation to arrive in my inbox, which gave me a chance to read about it a bit, mostly on Twitter, which did little to clarify for me exactly what it does. I finally got to try it out today, but so few people have access to it yet that it's difficult to tell how functional or cool it is yet. I am intrigued, at the very least.

At tonight's University Film Organization we did a lot of planning, and should be pretty busy for the next few weeks.

Tomorrow we are shooting more of a short written by club member Rose Guess, which we started on a couple of weeks ago.

Thursday night a couple of club members and I are driving up to Portland for the weekend to attend What is Film?, which I am very excited about. If we have time, we may go check out the Northwest Film Center's 36th NW Film and Video Festival, though I fear we have too much else to do.

We have also broken into two small groups to make music videos for folk musician Will Hobbs of Portland and metal band Straitjacket Seduction of Columbus, Ohio. We will start pre-production next week in club.

In addition to all of that, I have plenty of classwork to keep me occupied right now. My third video assignment for J331 is due next Monday. I also have exams on Monday and Tuesday and a project for my Media Aesthetics class due Tuesday.

I really can't afford to slack at all, as I am trying to bring up my GPA in order to increase my chances of getting into a graduate program next year (not that I'm sure yet that that's what I want to do). I will also have to take the GRE very soon.

I hope I can make it through the rest of the term without getting swine flu!

J Skills in the Media Convergence Era

Thanks, WoodysWorldTV, for tweeting this video, in which Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal discusses finding and building an audience and marketing your work.

These are the same points that many of the panelists made at the Oregon Society of Professional Journalists' Building a Better Journalist conference at U of O last weekend. Many professional journalists today are struggling to make digital media work for them. While tools such as blogs and social media sites can be hugely beneficial to journalists, and are becoming increasingly necessary, they present a substantial challenge.

I feel very fortunate to be starting to get a handle on digital media while I'm in school, rather than trying to learn it all on the job. As an Electronic Media major, I'm learning a lot about broadcast in my classes, but so far, discussion of how to produce media for the web has been peripheral. I spend many hours a week exploring these tools on my own, and while I use many of them regularly, I'm still learning how to use them effectively. It's sometimes difficult to determine what's worth spending time on and what's just a fad or only of real use for socializing with friends.

I first heard about Twitter about a year ago when I attended the OSPJ's 2008 conference here in Eugene. I joined immediately, mostly out of curiosity. It wasn't until recently that I began to use it regularly. When Twitter comes up in conversation, people often scoff, but I'm really impressed with how useful it's becoming for me. In addition to getting news updates from the New York Times, NPR, and various other major outlets, I get a lot of useful information from individuals working in media, which I can't imagine having found elsewhere. It's incredible the breadth of information I can get in a few minutes just by scrolling through recent tweets:links to videos, articles, and blogs; event listings; professional advice; etc.

The downside is that it has taken quite a lot of time for me to get to the point where sites like this are really becoming useful to me, and I still have a lot to learn. Learning to use something like Twitter effectively is akin to learning a new language. In addition to becoming able to communicate very concisely (tweets are limited to 140 characters) there are conventions and tags one must learn to use in order to communicate effectively. For example using "RT" to denote that something is a "retweet" and using "#" to create a "hashtag."

New social media sites crop up all the time, and it can be overwhelming trying to determine in which ones it's worth becoming literate. The newest one I've joined is Cinchcast, which is a lot like Twitter, but allows users to post photos and to record audio directly via their phones. So far users can only post mobile photos using an iPhone application, so people like myself, who don't have iPhones can only upload photos from their computers, but the site's developers are extremely responsive to user feedback, and are working on improving it so that it's more useful. There aren't many people using it yet, and a huge portion of the posts at the moment are "test" posts form new users trying to figure out how the site works. I'm excited about the site's potential, but only time will tell whether it will become as popular and useful as Twitter.