Each week, Social Circles brings you the biggest news from behind the social networks. Keep up to date with the latest trends, breaking news, and expert analysis from across the web.
This week’s wrap-up includes Facebook’s new anonymous capabilities, a Tinder for partying, and Instagram’s community guidelines under scrutiny.
Each week, Social Circles brings you the biggest news from behind the social networks. Keep up to date with the latest trends, breaking news, and expert analysis from across the web.
This week’s wrap-up includes the web’s newest platform which promises to pay users, updated privacy measures for Canadian military personnel, and Facebook’s new app which takes mobile users back to the days of chat rooms.
As part of a new segment, I’ve compiled the must-read social media stories from around the web in one simple list.
This week features another enormous photo hack, Twitter further mimicking Facebook, and asks whether Ello is already a thing of the past. Without further ado, here’s the top 5:
With a fresh school year kicking off across the country this week for close to 2 million students in Canada, the promise of Frosh Week lingers in the air.
The annual tradition that celebrates the first week of university life for freshmen, and the return to school for older students, is often one of the best parties of the year at campuses from coast to coast.
Contentious and controversial, Frosh never fails to garner significant media coverage. Despite recent calls for Frosh Week traditions to “grow up” or for schools to crack down, the tradition will surely live on in dorm rooms, student houses, pubs, and clubs.
With that in mind, York Regional Police have come up with a brilliant and creative campaign to warn students about the potential costs they could face if they party too hard.
Courtesy of @YRP here is your complimentary frosh week expense list. #makewisedecisions and #partywithcaution pic.twitter.com/vPbfATOPtK
— York Regional Police (@YRP) September 3, 2014
The police force tweeted out the expense list earlier today, which covers the obvious like streaking, under-age drinking, and open container violations (cleverly referred to as “Popping bottles in the back of your friend’s Corolla), to the not so obvious, like putting cement mix in the laundry machine, illegal gambling, and, I quote, “forcing a pet to smoke marijuana.”
Educating students on the potential repercussions from not “Partying With Caution”, as the release says, is important. But too often it gets bogged down in an authoritative tone that’s easily glossed over.
Instead, the YRP have done an incredible job delivering this message to students in a more accessible voice. They’ve managed to introduce some humour to the situation (“Dropping excessive bass at 4 a.m.” and “Downing Jager-bombs in public”) while still reminding students to remain safe and responsible.
Last Thursday’s Major League Baseball trade deadline kept baseball fans on high alert. Big deals were struck, fan favourites shipped out of town, and some writers even declared it the best deadline day in the history of the league.
One of those writers was Ken Rosenthal.
Best. Deadline. Ever. Thoughts on a day that shook the industry…. http://t.co/FM0JIqHvTb
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) August 1, 2014
Rosenthal, a reporter with FOX Sports, is one of the league’s best analysts. As FOX’s on-field reporter for each of the last five World Series, he’s become a well-known and likable authority on the game and a go-to source for rumours, news, and insight.
Online, he’s racked up over 500,000 Twitter followers, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that a number of fans were receiving their deadline updates from him. The day was a busy one for him, frantically tweeting and re-tweeting any reliable information.
A new trend was also emerging throughout the day, though. While Rosenthal worked his own sources and would try to confirm rumoured deals, he would also tweet recognition of whoever was responsible for first breaking the story, usually local affiliates with the team, but also national analysts with competing networks, like CBS.
Confirmed: #Yankees get Prado from #DBacks. First reported: @JackCurryYES
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) July 31, 2014
Miller to #Orioles, source confirms. First reported: @jcrasnick.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) July 31, 2014
Confirmed: Lackey to #STLCards. First reported: @JonHeymanCBS.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) July 31, 2014
It’s not a new development that Twitter has created an all-new race to be the first person to break a story. In fact, in almost all cases of breaking news, reporters turn to Twitter to try to scoop all other competitors. As Brendan Nyhan wrote for CJR in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings and manhunt, “Fast and wrong beats slow and right.”
Rosenthal’s approach, though, was starkly different. He was giving credit to the reports/analysts who first broke the story. It flew totally in the face of what we’ve grown used to, where all outlets report the same story as their own.
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.
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.
Kyle Brown 