social media

Inanimate objects on Twitter is a new way to spread awareness.

Fence on Twitter Raises Awareness of Looming Globe & Mail Lockout

An ongoing labour dispute between Globe & Mail management and staff took a drastic turn this week when a chain-link fence was erected outside of the newspaper’s offices in Toronto.

The fence went up on the same day that a strike vote was held, and over 92% of Unifor (the union representing the Globe‘s staff) rejected the company’s contract offer.

Globe and Mail erecting fences. union strike vote today pic.twitter.com/p6XOneZNfc

— Eric Atkins (@ericatkins2) July 2, 2014

A key issue in the labour dispute stems from the fact that management will require editorial staff to produce custom content, that is content paid for by advertisers. The issue of custom content in Canadian newspapers is not new and has been covered well by Jonathan Sas over at The Tyee. As he succinctly describes the process,

A business agrees to buy pricey ads with the assurance those ads will be accompanied by stories that fit desired themes but which seem to have sprung straight from the publication’s newsroom. Indeed, custom content often runs under the bylines of staff reporters and without any disclaimer. Naturally, though, it’s understood those stories aren’t going to be muckraking extravaganzas targeting the ad buyer or their industry. “Custom” is inevitably a euphemism for “soft.”

Other issues leading to the dispute include reduced salaries to sales staff and lower job security, according to iPolitics. On Monday, many stories ran without a byline, as reporters carried out a “byline strike,” the second to hit a major Canadian daily in the last three months. Roy Greenslade writes that reporters seem prepared to launch an alternate publication, or at least take their writing to personal websites, in the case of a lockout.

As we’ve seen recently with an unfinished pedestrian bridge in Ottawa and a disgraced mayor’s luxury SUV, people are finding that one of the best ways to help spread awareness of an issue (while inserting your own opinions on the issue) is through a parody Twitter account.

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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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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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Trailblazing Goalie Shannon Szabados Draws Support Across Social Media

Published on Elle Beaver – March 11, 2014

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It’s been a busy couple weeks for Shannon Szabados.

Just over two weeks ago, the 27 year-old was laying at centre ice of the Bolshoy Ice Dome in Sochi with a gold medal around her neck and her 20 teammates standing behind heras Szabados celebrated a second straight Olympic gold medal win.

On Wednesday, Szabados accomplished another remarkable feat: suiting up with the NHL’s Edmonton Oilers for a morning practice. Just two days later, Szabados joined a short list of women who have signed contracts to play for a professional men’s league when she joined the Columbus Cottonmouths of the Southern Professional Hockey League.

Despite the impressive achievement of practicing with the Oilers, it wasn’t quite what some fans wanted. The previous night, users took to Twitter with the hashtag #SzabadosForBackup as they crossed their fingers to witness history. Earlier in the day, the Oilers traded away their backup goalie Ilya Bryzgalov and in turn brought in another goalie, Viktor Fasth, in a separate trade. The problem staring down the Oilers was a big one: with a game the same night that the trade happened, they were without a backup goalie.

Surprisingly, this conflict happens more than expected. Due to a rule in effect from 1966, the NHL requires teams to have two goalies dressed for each game. In the past website producers, beer league veterans, and local hockey coaches have all gotten frantic calls to dress as an emergency backup.

Edmonton’s situation was more unique: they had (a bit) more time to organize a backup goalie, and the city is heavily ingrained into the history of hockey and has a wealth of local talent. Szabados, a native of Edmonton and current starting goalie for the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology men’s hockey team, was a serious contender. Had she got the call, she would have been the first female to dress for a regular season NHL game.

Ultimately, the Oilers dressed Kurtis Mucha, the starting goalie for the University of Alberta’s men’s team. While the hopes of creating history were dashed, the real progress was happening online.

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