Email as a form of social media

Duct Tape Marketing has published an interesting post on the most neglected form of social media – email. The post points out that people have sent out email with ‘tell a friend’ or ‘forward to a friend’ buttons and links for years – as a result, it may well have actually been the first form of social [...]

Curators should credit their sources

On a slightly different tangent from my recent posts concerning the need to curate news sourced online, for accuracy and verification purposes, I was horrified to learn that popular Seth Rotherham of the award-winning 2oceans blog, had not been credited as a source in a ‘breaking news’ story in a local traditional newspaper. When confronted, the [...]

The snowballing social media space

Mack Collier of The Viral Garden blogs that Social Media isn’t going away, so we should ‘either get on the bus, or get left behind’.

He adds that people who are constantly using social media for their campaigns (thinking that it supercedes all communication tools that came before it); as well as those who keep pointing out [...]

The murky waters of blog content copyright

I was horrified to learn that one of my favourite bloggers, Peas on Toast, has such an ardent ‘fan’ out there that she has been copying her original posts (sometimes verbatim, sometimes not) practically since starting out in the blogosphere.
The problem with this problem, is that blogging isn’t exactly a platform where plagiarism can be [...]

Blogger ethics and paid reviews

Chris M has brought up the increasingly relevant topic of whether bloggers should let their readers know whether a blog post/review has been paid for or not. 
As more and more PRs are seeing the value of establishing relationships with bloggers, bloggers are increasingly bombarded with press releases and requests to review products and services. 
Chris suggests that it [...]

Mind your networking manners

 It takes society longer to fully adapt to new technologies  than it takes to introduce them on a mass scale. It takes  time for norms for the use of new technologies to be  established, and until they become ‘unwritten rules’ or  etiquette, people generally apply habits formed using  older technologies to new technologies.
  This creates problems [...]

SA needs a blogopticon, too!

Gino Cosme commented on his blog last week that the blogopticon chart by Vanity Fair is ‘an awesome idea’. I agree. It’s often hard to tell whether a blog is based on news or opinion. VF’s blog chart basically divides America’s most widely-read blogs based on politics, the media and celeb gossip into four basic [...]