Social Media

Crowdsourcing Science: An Innovative Project On Mount Diablo

Engaging citizens through social media is a must now for a number of causes, be it user-generated content in news media, using Facebook groups to organize and facilitate political protests, or to raise money for creative projects through sites like Kickstarter. A volunteer organization based out of the Oakland, California area is looking to expand into the realm of citizen-engaged and crowdsourced science.

In September of last year, fire blazed across the Bay Area’s Mount Diablo. Over 3,000 acres went up in flames as the wildfire spread across the mountain.

While images of the fire are alarming for observers and locals in the area are forced to await possible evacuation orders, the fires are actually a natural part of the mountain’s ecology, and many of the plants actually require fire to reproduce, according to Nerds For Nature.

Realizing the potential to study how the landscape changes and grows in the year following a large blaze such as the Morgan Fire, the group behind Nerds For Nature decided to photograph the scenery from four fixed locations over the course of a year.

But how to fund that research? The hours of labour and equipment and travel to the photo spots would no doubt cost a pretty penny.

This is where the ingenuity of this group came from – in an age of social media and camera phones, why not crowdsource it? Well, that’s just what they did.

A photo, by Twitter user @DanKalb, taken from photo spot #2 on Mount Diablo.

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Social Media and the Y.C.J.A. – Revisiting Identity and Privacy in the Digital Age

On Monday, CBC Ottawa broke the news that a 16-year-old from Barrhaven is facing 60 criminal charges related to “swatting,” which apparently involves placing 9-1-1 calls in the hopes of attaining a large emergency response.

The boy is allegedly behind thirty false alarms across the continent, including fake bomb threats at schools in Calgary and Milton. According to the CBC, he also allegedly used Twitter to take requests for future targets.

In both the print story posted to the website, and a broadcast story run on the evening news program, the boy’s suspected Twitter handle was made public. On the broadcast, images of the account’s feed and recent tweets were also displayed. Judy Trinh, the CBC correspondent who reported on the story, also tweeted a link to the story including the handle of the accused. Within a couple of hours of the story breaking, other Twitter users began to reply to past tweets from the boy, many of them discussing hi future in jail.

Here’s a screenshot of CBC reporter Judy Trinh’s tweet which links to the accused’s Twitter account. The handle was faded out by me.

Others who apparently knew – or at least followed – the accused, included his first name in tweet streams linked back to his account.

This is where things start to get dicey.

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Google Glass, Meet Citizen Journalism

Citizen journalism just got a whole lot more high-tech.

CNN is bringing iReport, their citizen journalism site that allows anyone to post content free of editing, fact-checking, and screening, to Google Glass. This will expand the opportunity for iReporters to submit video and photo coverage of breaking news as it happens.

As with all other content on iReport, CNN can choose to edit and ensure the validity and credibility of photos or videos taken with Google Glass, and broadcast them on their platforms during live, or recorded, news coverage.

Using user-generated content in order to stay on top of spot news is nothing exclusive to CNN, of course. In times of immediate breaking news, especially during times of emergency (natural disaster, security concerns, etc.) TV news outlets scramble to ask permission to use tweeted photos or call for their viewers to submit content to them.

The tragic events and subsequent investigation of last year’s Boston Marathon bombings became one of the first real explorations of the power of crowdsourced news during crises in the U.S. In Canada, a shooting in the food court at Toronto’s Eaton Centre demonstrated the same shift north of the border.

While news teams rush to gather their equipment or redirect their van to the scene of events, smartphones and tablets of those on scene were already capturing the action. The major broadcasters repurposed tweets, Instagram photos, and YouTube videos of the scene at the Marathon’s finish line. During the pursuit of the perpetrators in the following days, the news media relied on social media to get images of the police sweep. Andrew Kitzenberg had his photos of the manhunt shared across not only social media, but the television screens of major broadcasters. CNN even profiled Kitzenberg in the video below.

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Dogecoin Joins NASCAR Chase – Yes, Really

Wow.

So fast.

Much cars.

Such racing.

Wow.

It sounds like a headline from The Onion, but everyone’s favourite Shiba Inu meme-inspired digital currency will get its moment in the Talladega spotlight next weekend.

Dogecoin has sponsored the #98 car for the Aaron’s 499 at the Talladega Super Speedway next weekend.

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Exam Time: Ranking the Most Followed Universities Per Capita

It’s exam time! For those students toiling away at our post-secondary institutions, the next few weeks will be spent with noses dug into textbooks, coffee shops crowded with caffeinated co-eds, and a general sense of dread.

In honour of the season, this week’s post looks into which Canadian universities are performing the best on Twitter.

In order to quantify the which universities are getting the most bang for their buck on Twitter, we compiled the most recent enrollment numbers from the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, as well as the number of followers per primary Twitter account as of April 2, 2014.

Carleton University’s Twitterized logo. Carleton has close to 18,000 followers at writing

The school with the highest number of followers per capita? One that also ranks high on the National Survey of Student Engagement – Royal Roads University.

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Obama Opens Up Online

From The Millstone – August 30, 2012

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In the early evening of Wednesday, the United States President Barack Obama got a chance to answer questions directly from voters (Democrats, Republicans, and undecideds alike). However, this wasn’t your basic open forum at a debate, town hall, or rally. No, President Obama sat down at a laptop in a room in Charlottesville, Virginia, and answered questions from anonymous askers on the online social news site, reddit.

Shitty_Watercolour, a popular reddit user, welcomes President Obama with one of his works.

Fresh off the heels of a rally at the host city of the University of Virginia where Obama appealed to the youth vote, he further showed his dedication to the youth vote with his reddit Q&A, colloquially known as an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on the site.

For those unfamiliar with the site reddit.com, it’s difficult to explain. The site is an open-source social news site, where users have the ability to post photos, links (to newspaper articles, websites, etc.), or start discussions in one of thousands of “sub-reddits”. Other users then have the opportunity to comment on the original post. The sub-reddits each have a different focus (the list is endless, ranging in everything from US politics, to funny images, to city-specific reddits like Ottawa, to hobbies and jobs), with one dedicated specifically to these AMA’s.

The AMA’s have quickly become a kind-of hidden secret for politicians, as Obama is not the first to face the reddit hive. Previously, the likes of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, Colorado representative Jared Polis, and others have taken to the web to answer questions.

When Obama went up, the site went crazy with excitement (even leading to the site occasionally crashing.) The AMA has received over 19,000 comments at the time of writing, and that number will likely only grow as those from other parts of the world continue to log on and see.And while Obama dedicated 30 minutes out of his busy campaign trail to “be real” with the reddit community, the question of its success is hard to determine.

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