It's better for self-published authors to have a website than a blog, Ruth Ann Nordin argues on Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors. Blogs are time-consuming to keep up, and aren't seen by most readers, she writes. They can, however, help you think through a problem: "Sometimes when we write things down, it helps to sort out the jumble of ideas in our mind. I’ve tried keeping a private journal, but it wasn’t the same as blogging before a public audience."
Social media
Business Wire has updated its 2007 assessment of what it costs to produce a press release, and the price tag has jumped 50% from an eye-popping $5,000 to an even more eye-popping $7,500. The reasons, Fred Godlash writes, boil down to social media: "In today’s world the press release may be picked up by anyone that will write about your company – not just traditional media outlets, but bloggers, consumer groups, advocacy groups, social media users and more."
Could you get 36 blog posts out of a one-hour event? Denise Graveline did and she explains how on her Don't Get Caught site. The underlying message is simple — take advantage of every opportunity to generate content from whatever material you have available: "Wring every last bit of goodness out of the content you have already lying around. Most of my clients have more content than they know what to do with. No need to go out and create something newly spectacular."
What can you do if someone you don't know — or don't want to be associated with — adds you to a "Twitter list," those custom groups of accounts that users can create? Nina L. Diamond offers instructions in a Poynter post: "You can review the lists that include you, and remove yourself from any that are inappropriate or make you uncomfortable … The good news is it’s easy to find out which Twitter lists you’re on, and to make a graceful exit from them."
Simon Kuper takes the contrarian view on how social media has affected written English in this Financial Times post: "George Orwell in 1944 lamented the divide between wordy, stilted written English, and much livelier speech. 'Spoken English is full of slang,' he wrote, 'it is abbreviated wherever possible, and people of all social classes treat its grammar and syntax in a slovenly way.' His ideal was writing that sounded like speech. We’re getting there at last."
It's ugly, it's overused, and it's almost worthless as a search tool. That sums up Daniel Victor's objections to the Twitter hashtag in this Nieman Journalism Lab post. Then why do we use it? Because we're told to, Victor writes: "Shaking a Polaroid picture didn’t make it develop any faster. Blowing on Nintendo cartridges didn’t help, either. We’ve all been told at some point that hashtags connect you to more people, and it’s been widely accepted as fact."
Posterous is closing April 30, and while its bloggers can still download their content, that's not good enough, Ruud Hein writes: "They can upload it elsewhere, maybe on their own site this time, but Posterous won't setup the crucial web server status code … that tells search engines to take all their ranking information for the old URL and use it for the new URL." Hein then outlines a strategy for bloggers who want to go and stay independent.
Google can't get at a lot of Facebook's data, but the social media giant's new Graph Search can, and journalists can take advantage, Vadim Lavrusik writes. You can see a preview here. But privacy concerns are already being raised by, for example, Alex Fitzpatrick: "Like 'Toy Story 3?' If your likes are public, that like is Graph Searchable by all." More from Steven Levy at Wired.
It was the year when a Martian robot became a Twitter star, and when an Austrian daredevil made YouTube's top 10 list by plunging to earth at supersonic speed. Those were just two examples of how science fared in social media last year, Mary Ann Giordano reports in the New York Times: "To put it in 140 characters or less, social media and science found each other in 2012. In surprising numbers, people posted, viewed and searched for science-related topics last year."
Barry Starr asks on KQED's Quest blog: Why are scientists so scarce in the comments section of most science blogs? Citing the feverish reaction to a recent Quest post on a California vaccination law, Starr posits that scientists stand clear instead of wading into the debate because they are too busy and fearful of becoming targets: "A scientist needs to step up and let people know what the data shows. Unfortunately, this isn't happening right now as much as it should."