Vark!

This looks interesting — http://vark.com/

The NY Times ran a feature on this service on Sept. 3. Basically, it uses your facebook account to identify your social network and perform a Yahoo! Answers-type of function with only your facebook friends and friends of friends. You questions get routed to only people who’ve identified themselves as willing and able to handle questions on a given subject.

You can read the NY Times feature here: http://tinyurl.com/nnk8gy

Is there a way to use this with Langley’s facebook page?

—Bob Allen

Woof!

If Twitter’s 140 characters aren’t enough for you, now there’s Woofer, which lets you ramble on for 10 times as long.

Says Woofer about itself:

We are in no way associated with Twitter.

This is simply a novelty website where we thought it would be funny to have a minimum character requirement for public posts and see what people did with it.

What can you accomplish with the extra 1260 characters?
Be eloquent.

Use adverbs.

Don’t abbreviate. Ever.

Okay!

- Mike F.

The few, the proud, the anti-social-networking

Marine Corps officials have banned using social-networking Web sites on the service’s networks due to the security risks associated with the Web 2.0 tools, according to an order published on the Marine Corps Web site.

The order issued August 3 bans accessing social networking tools that include Facebook and Twitter on the Marine Corps Enterprise Network and on the Non-secure Internet Protocol Router Network.

“These Internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries,” the order states, adding that social networking sites create an easy conduit for information leakage.

Imagine if you would…

“Imagine if a journalist writing a breaking news story online tweeted each element of the story as soon as the information were verified.”

E-Media Tidbits
Deconstructing News Stories into Tweets

I found this today on the NASA Yammer network. Thought it might interest you all.

— Bob Allen, News Media Team

Uncle Sam’s atwitter!

An Army order instructs network managers to unblock certain social media sites

An Army order directs network managers across the country to stop blocking soldiers’ access to certain Web 2.0 Web sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, according to several media reports today.

… Access should be available to Facebook: Delicious, Flickr, Twitter and Vimeo via the Unclassified but Sensitive Internet Protocol Router Network.

As reported on Wired.com, the order states: “The intent of senior Army leaders to leverage social media as a medium to allow soldiers to ‘tell the Army story’ and to facilitate the dissemination of strategic, unclassified information, the social media sites available from the Army homepage will be made accessible from all campus area network.”

More nails in the coffin

Here are the latest circulation numbers for the country’s top 25 newspapers: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003966608

(This format didn’t like my link insertion … so I’m trying it this way. Unfortunately that means you’re going to have to cut and paste!)

How the Air Force uses Social Media

The link below is a very good case study by Dana Thus @ socialmediatoday.com on how the U.S. Air Force is using social media. There are links within the article that take you to the “Air Force New Media Guide”.  While that document was creted for Air Force Public Affairs staff, it may be interesting and useful for those who want to see how other government organizations are tackling some of the new questions or concerns that using social media for communication and outreach bring.

The main article is here:

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/85261

… and the “Air Force New Media Guide” is here:

http://airforcelive.dodlive.mil/2009/04/10/air-force-new-media-guide-and-video-available-online/

New Kind of Journalism Site

Walt Mossburg of the Wall Street Journal is recommending new kind of journalist site – http://trueslant.com/

The two faces on Facebook

Why do some people create separate pages for their personal and professional lives?

Call it a self-induced, modern-day schizophrenia, but people are starting to split their personalities between separate Facebook pages in the latest movement to live online without having your entire life there.

Interesting idea, could be confusing. Read on, a ragan.com article.

What happens when newspapers die

From Bob Jacobs, Acting Associate Administrator for NASA public affairs, in a note to public affairs directors and news chiefs today on what happens when newspapers go away according to The Nation:

Interesting reading … the takeaway line I saw was “… when print and television newsrooms dry up, the internet will implode into a sinkhole of unedited opinion, hypothesis, rumor, and supposition…” Yep, that’s our new world in which we’ll need to navigate.

To read the essay referenced here go to http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090406/nichols_mcchesney. It’s titled “The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers.”