Daily PUMA Column - Commentary by Alessandro Machi

Showing posts with label News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label News. Show all posts

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Haiti Earthquake Facebook Updates and Discussions on Facebook.

I was trying to find some kind of news crawl about the Haiti Earthquake but could not find one. This facebook discussion link might prove useful as it is being updated by facebook members. Once on the discussion page you will see six facebook page links located directly under the Facebook Haiti header.

(Edit update) I just checked google and to my shock, they are now using a scroll technique in which the Haiti links scroll down the screen in steps. When I did my Haiti research just an hour earlier they did not have the scroll feature in place.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Google News Search Option, just who is "newsworthy" to be listed, and who is the decider?

I am trying to figure out how Google knows the difference between a news article, and a newscraping article. In general, many blogs are of the newscraping variety.

Newscraping means the blog writer reads an already existing news story, or watches a program on television, and then writes about it. This would be considered "newscraping". The blogger didn't create the news story, instead they re-interpreted an existing story from their own viewpoint.

But wait a minute. What if you or I actually do come up with a news story? What if we are the first to report something of note? Will Google News know to include the blog on their Google News search service? I suggest fellow PUMA bloggers do some google research. Write a story about something that you personally witnessed, and then use search words from your article and search Google "news" to see if your story appears.

Daily PUMA wrote an article about the KFI Tax Protest and the content was based on what was being said on a radio program. In many respects this is no different than a press conference in which a reporter never gets to ask a question but uses the responses from other reporters questions to write their own story.

Even though Daily PUMA reported key facts from the radio show that were NOT reported by anybody else anywhere on the internet, the Daily PUMA article DID NOT appear on Google News Search.

Example. KNBC reported that hundreds showed up to the KFI Tax Protest Rally in Fullerton, California. Based on estimates from police officer estimates, it is believed that as many as 15,000 people actually showed up. Daily PUMA was reporting on how inaccurate the television news station was in reporting the attendance, this IS a news story worthy of being on Google News.

Most subscribers to google's key word service are actually subscribing to google news, which appears to mean that our blogs may never be worthy of inclusion to the millions of internet users who use google key word search.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Good News, Bad News about DailyPUMA.

Well, it's mostly good news actually. Daily PUMA has EXPANDED the two right columns of this blog to give better highlighting to the PUMA blogs. The Wider columns should also increase how long each PUMA article remains near the top of the column. (It's a mathematical, longitudinal distance thing).

The bad news is the center column had to be shrunk and now has to have all the individual video clips readjusted. At the moment the time to do that cannot be found.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

The Philosophy of Not Moderating Blog Comments...

I can only go by me experience, but I think I have only deleted one comment out the hundred or two that have been posted to my various blog articles. Unless you are being spammed by really awful stuff, consider letting your readers comments go unmoderated and reviewing them as needed.

I think not moderating comments and letting anyone reply fosters more interaction. As proof, I accidentally left my blog setting to DailyPUMA.com on the do not show until moderator approves setting. I got six responses (half were my answers), and then the comments dried up. I then realized the comments default was automatically set to moderator approval and registered users only. After I changed the moderator setting to let anybody reply, even Barack Obama, I noticed a new surge in comments to the same topic.

I think people like to read back what they just wrote after they post it, moderating comments eliminates that small joy on some blogging platforms. Now if the person doesn't know that their response is being held, until after they hit the reply button, odds are they never responded in the first place if prior comments haven't been already moderated. People tend to reply when they see that others have already replied. If you have your reasons for moderating comments before they appear, please share them here so the entire PUMA community can learn.

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