Monday, August 1st, 2011

10 things I hate about Facebook pages

Journalists need to get to grips with social media – and especially the world’s inexplicably most-popular site, Facebook. But Facebook sucks. It’s not just its hateful approach to individual privacy. It’s the fact that it’s such a complete pig to use – if you want to have some control over what you are doing and achieve […]

Friday, June 17th, 2011

Harsh sentence for semi-literate Facebook juror

A juror who has been prosecuted for contempt of the English language after using Facebook to contact a defendant in a drugs trial, has been sentenced to eight months of remedial language lessons. Joanne Fraill admitted at London’s high court using Facebook to exchange incoherent messages with Jamie Sewart, a former defendant in last year’s […]

Thursday, June 9th, 2011

Why your Facebook page keeps telling you it isn’t published

Apparently you have to “like” your own page before Facebook will publish it. Unless a page has at least one “like”, Facebook won’t let you go live with it (thanks, Squidoo). Which is so bonkers I can’t even begin to express it. And where’s that information in the Facebook help pages? Hmm?

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Facebook: why is the world’s most popular site so difficult to use?

Any reader looking to the right of this post will see a blank Facebook feed requiring a login to see a “Facebook public profile”. Or maybe a feed from my Freelance Unbound Facebook page. Or maybe they’ll see something else that I don’t see – because Facebook is nothing if not contrary. The other day […]

Friday, March 25th, 2011

How to be a social media editor

Social media editor Chris Street talks to UCA Farnham online journalism students on the power of social media in journalism and the skills you need to succeed online, compared to traditional print journalism. (Hint: there is no real difference at all).

Monday, January 31st, 2011

Freelancers: stay on Facebook all day and earn cash!

Or: “Survey predicts in boom in freelance social media jobs” Monday morning nonsense from the world of office surveys: OfficeCavalry.com says that social media is set to boom for UK businesses this year, and freelance workers will benefit: 15% of businesses will look at creating specific roles e.g. ‘social media manager’ or ‘online reputation manager’ […]

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

Facebook vs Twitter user infographic

In case anyone has missed it, here’s an interesting infographic from Tweetsmarter.com comparing the profiles of Facebook users versus Twitter users. A couple of interesting points: Twitter is a publishing platformOnly 27% of Twitter users log in every day – but 52% update their status every day. That means those updates are coming remotely from […]

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

WordPress/Facebook integration fail

I’ve been wittering on about social networks to students at Solent University recently, so I thought I ought to put my money where my mouth is and link Freelance Unbound to Facebook. Apart from being a useful technical exercise, it should be interesting to see if it encourages some of my Facebook network – a […]

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Evidence that Twitter is really for journalists

The sad news that venerable journalism industry magazine Editor & Publisher is to close apparently reached fourth place in Twitter’s trending topics list yesterday. Which seems to confirm my theory that it’s journalists who are all over Twitter like flies on a dead dog. According to the E&P web site: The name “Editor & Publisher” […]

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Facebook, obsession, murder

You have to love newspapers’ obsession with social media. Whether it’s the Twittering of Stephen Fry et al or the latest security breach involving Facebook, the news media are all over it – irrespective of whether their readers know the difference between a Tweet and a twat.  This latest example from the Metro pushes a […]