Nick Bergus Thoughts on what media do, and can do better, and other things

Yesterday, Shoq offered two reasons you shouldn’t use Twitter’s built-in or “native” retweet feature. Me, I much prefer the new-style native retweet function, and I tell you why later. But, first, I think Shoq and others are wrong for preferring the old-style retweet. First, Shoq argues that if everyone uses native retweets, we’ll all miss important things. [...]

Today, The New Yorker said on Twitter: We are now on @tumblr! Follow us: http://newyorker.tumblr.com/ But the magazine has 199 pages of Tumblr posts and its first post is dated Dec. 1, 2009. So really they meant We are now going to try to pay attention to our @tumblr! Follow us: http://newyorker.tumblr.com/ or We remembered [...]

Twitter released a small, simple app called Blackbird Pie that, when Twitter isn’t painfully slow and blogged down, should make it easy to embed a tweet in a blog post. It creates little bit of static HTML code that you can plop in a page. Like so: This is a tweet that I will later [...]

Since I bought my Droid last November, I’ve used a bunch of different Twitter clients. I have yet to find one I’m really happy with. I know development is hard, and it seems whiny to complain publicly. My hope is that the developers will read this and incorporate some of my suggestions. Or someone else will [...]

I usually cover social media generally — and Twitter specifically — as a reporting and audience-building tool the last day of my multimedia course. (Social media isn’t multimedia per se, but I worry that if I don’t cover it, it won’t come up at the j-school at all, though that’s changing.) This semester, I’ve moved it [...]

The day after Thanksgiving is usually a slow news day but never fear, dear journalist, there is a HUGE cultural event that demands coverage! Time to throw everything you got at it! Luckily you had the forethought to build a database. Now make sure you’ve got a Twitter hashtag set. Then, on Friday, get some [...]