Social News
So far in our social media tools, we have looked at Social Networks, Themed Social Networks and Media Sharing.
This week we will look at Social News.
Social News sites are a place where users can contribute News articles or links. The social side of it is that other people can vote on the articles and the most voted articles will usually get displayed more prominently. This is called "crowd sourcing".
You can also share what you find easily on your favourite social network such as Facebook and Twitter.
WARNING: You can really lose yourself in some of these sites and well and truly lose track of time!!!
BuzzFeed
Buzzfeed was founded in 2006 and calls itself a Social News and Entertainment website. You may have seen articles from BuzzFeed that have been shared on your Facebook feed.http://www.buzzfeed.com/
About BuzzFeed
This is from their website:BuzzFeed is a cross-platform, global network for news and entertainment that generates six billion views each month. BuzzFeed creates and distributes content for a global audience and utilizes proprietary technology to continuously test, learn and optimize.
BuzzFeed by the Numbers
- More than 7 billion monthly global content views
- More than 200M monthly unique visitors to BuzzFeed.com
- 18 offices and 1,300 employees around the world
- 75 percent of unique visitors come from social platforms
- Publish on more than 30 social platforms across the globe
- More than 70 percent of BuzzFeed traffic occurs on mobile devices
- Running 5 mobile apps - BuzzFeed, QuizChat, BuzzFeed News, BuzzFeed Video and Cute or Not
- More than 90M unique visitors come to BuzzFeed.com each month from outside the US
- Content in 6 different languages including Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, French & German
- 11 international editions including US, UK, Germany, Espanol, France, Spain, India, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia and Japan
BuzzFeed also has localised content, so in Australia, you can view things that are trending here. It covers general news as well as Entertainment and images and videos that are currently "trending" on the Internet.
Digg
Digg has been around for a number of years (founded on 2004), but was relaunched after a total rebuild. It was acquired by another company in July 2012 and is now considered a "startup" again. Time will tell whether it will get back to its former glory. This is how Digg describes itself in its About page:
http://digg.com/
If you like a story you see, you Digg it. The more Diggs that a story gets, the higher up its ranking goes.
Reddit is also a user driven news website. As with Digg, users vote on stories to raise them up or down, with the view to them making the "front page". It is made up of sub committees that focus on specific topics. To access stories, you can use the Reddit search feature or choose from the topics at the top of the screen.
https://www.reddit.com/
Huffington Post
The
Huffington Post is a politically liberal American online news
aggregator and blog that has both localised and international editions
founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, Andrew Breitbart, and
Jonah Peretti, featuring columnists. Wikipedia
Founded: May 2005
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/introducing-huffpost-australia_b_8000452.html
CLASS ACTIVITY 1
Can you find any other News Aggregators. Share your findings with the group.CLASS ACTIVITY2
Using one of the above News aggregrators or one of your choice, find an article that interests you and share with the group.
You may work together, individually or small groups, but each student must come up with an article.
Share:
- Where you got the article from (which news site)
- What the article is about
- Why you found it interesting
Niche Social News
As well as the new sites mentioned above, there are also what could be called Niche Social News sites. These are sites that are specific to a particular area of interest. There is a range of different topics including Art, Entertainment, Automotive, and Technology.http://au.eonline.com/
http://www.tmz.com/
http://www.autonews.com/
http://www.technewsworld.com/
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/
http://mashable.com/
Regular Newspapers/News organisations/Online News
Most large news organizations also have added social news sharing sections to their websites. Some implement their own sharing and voting technologies as well as having Facebook and Twitter pages. You can share news direct from the websites using the social media icons available.
Herald Sun
https://www.facebook.com/heraldsun/?fref=tshttp://www.heraldsun.com.au/
The Age
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/theageAustraliaWebsite http://www.theage.com.au
News.com.au
Website: http://www.news.com.au/Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/news.com.au?fref=ts
The following is an interesting article on how News is changing.
https://welink.com/blog/2014/11/19/social-news-discovery/
Assessed Blog/Facebook post
1. Over the next week, find some News Sites that have a Facebook page and choose at least one to subscribe to (follow/Like). Choose two posts, on different days, to share with the group using Facebook Share or share the article from their website (you can copy and paste the link).
2. Write a review of the News site in your Blog.
Wikis
Wikipedia defines a Wiki as:"A wiki is usually a web application which allows people to add, modify, or delete content in collaboration with others. Text is usually written using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor. While a wiki is a type of content management system, it differs from a blog or most other such systems in that the content is created without any defined owner or leader, and wikis have little implicit structure, allowing structure to emerge according to the needs of the users."
Wiki Sites
Wikispaces https://www.wikispaces.com/Shout Wiki http://www.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page
Wikidot http://www.wikidot.com/
WikiFoundry http://main.wikifoundry.com/
Wikia http://www.wikia.com/Wikia
Or create your own Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article
RSS Feeds
What is RSS?
RSS (Rich Site Summary/Really Simple Syndication) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.What do I need to do to read an RSS Feed?
RSS Feed Readers and News AggregatorsFeed Reader or News Aggregator software allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.
see http://www.whatisrss.com/ for more information
Many website have the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds - just look for the RSS symbol!
Readers
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-rss-reader-aggregator.htmhttp://sixrevisions.com/tools/free-rss-readers/
http://www.ghacks.net/2014/09/17/the-best-free-rss-readers-for-windows/
Feedly is one example of a RSS reader and has the advantage of being available across a number of platforms.
Forums
Wikipedia defines a forum as"An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes visible.
Forums have a specific set of jargon associated with them; e.g. a single conversation is called a "thread", or topic.
A discussion forum is hierarchical or tree-like in structure: a forum can contain a number of subforums, each of which may have several topics. Within a forum's topic, each new discussion started is called a thread, and can be replied to by as many people as so wish."
Forums are topic related - Any topic or question you would like to ask, and I am pretty sure you will be able to find a forum where other people are discussing the same subject.
Here are some examples of forums:
http://www.backyardchickens.com/
http://www.backyardpoultry.com/
http://baustralianxtrail.runboard.com/
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/
http://www.mrexcel.com/
CLASS ACTIVITY 4
Discover some forums on a topic that interests you and share with the class.Have you use a forum before to get solutions to problems or to ask a question? How was the experience - did you get the answers you needed?
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