On the Twitters

  • In their “The science of the hashtag” post, Twitter charts the lifecycle of a hashtag and spells out just what and who propelled it to popularity. In short – celebrities > media, as if you didn’t already know.
  • An alleged Twitter expert says research shows that to increase your chances of being retweeted, you should Tweet your links in afternoons, evenings and on weekends.
  • I don’t know if Jay Rosen is a Twitter expert, but he’s been known to craft a good 140 characters. He explains his process and what makes a tweet “beautiful”.
  • Nieman Storyboard makes the case that Twitter is a great community for building and telling a narrative story, using TBD’s Storify as an example.

Tips & Tricks

Random industry news

  • The Huffington Post may have created what many of us have dreamed of for years – a news recommendation engine based on collected data. Tie in advertising and we might as well all go home and let them take over the world.
  • Not everyone’s a fan of it, though, and with good reason.
  • Former TBD GM (and my former boss) Jim Brady chats with Jason Policastro about his work with Philly.com’s new collaborative journalism initiative, online advertising, funding hyperlocal sites and more.
  • Ken Doctor outlines the metrics and numbers journalism outlets should be keeping an eye on in 2011. This goes way beyond web traffic and Twitter analytics. Great read.
  • The NY Times reports Steven Brill’s Journalism Online experiment, which developed a system to charge newspaper sites’ most frequent online visitors for content access, has good news. They analyzed preliminary data from the project’ initial sites and found that “advertising revenue and overall traffic did not decline significantly despite predictions otherwise”. The Times, of course, really really wants this to succeed.

Shameless plugs