I promised this post in early summer, but I’ve been waiting until I had a clear sense of what life on FourSquare is like before I wrote it. I feel like I’ve been on FourSquare long enough now to give a sense of what kind of things people should stay clear of. So, here are my suggestions for the three rules of etiquette of FourSquare.

Feel free to post a comment with your own FourSquare pet peeves or to disagree with one of mine.

1. Think before you sync: If you forget every other rule, remember this one. Technology allows us to do many cool things — including syncing, but that doesn’t mean we have to do them. What is syncing? It’s when you set up one social medium to automatically update another social medium. Good idea, right? Well, sometimes.

I had synced my Twitter to my Facebook page at one point, so every tweet turned up as a Facebook status update. The problem was: My followers on Twitter are very different from my Facebook friends, so I was sending messages to the wrong audience. That gets annoying quick, as a real-life friend cautioned me.

Same thing can happen with FourSquare. The application allows you to update Twitter or Facebook every time you check in, get a mayorship, lose a mayorship, earn a badge. You may be tempted to do this. Resist. Resist. Resist. None of your Twitter followers want to know how many times a day you go to Starbucks.

My rule: I set up my FourSquare so that the only time it updates my Twitter account is when I earn — or lose — a mayorship. My thinking is this is a rare enough occurrence that it won’t annoy. (Hope that’s true.) Also, syncing this aspect enables me to connect with my FourSquare friends on Twitter.

For example, when I lost the mayorship of the Tim Horton’s coffee shop near campus, the woman who won it announced her new mayorship online. I @replied her, joking that she had ruined my day for stealing Tim Horton’s. She consoled me. Granted, this is hardly a high-level form of relationship, but we made a connection. Now she is someone I know on Twitter, not just a follower.

For another look at the sync or not debate, read this post by Steve Buttry.

2. Search before you add a venue: At one point, a Mobil Mart near my house was on FourSquare three ways. One with a street address. One without a street address. One as Mobile Mary (not Mart). I know how this happens. You go to check in, and the location you’re at (such as this Mobile station) doesn’t immediately pop up in the FourSquare queue. So you decide to add it. But you’re on your cell phone, so you make a typo because you’re typing quickly or your can’t remember the street name. Then two more people do the same thing.

The result is: Multiple check-in locations for the same spot.

Why is this a problem? Well, in the whole scheme of problems such as childhood cancer and world poverty, it’s not. But in the microcosm of the social media world, it’s annoying because when other people go to check in, they aren’t sure which is the real location. The result is multiple mayorships of the same spot. Again, not cataclysmic, but it does make FourSquare a bit messy and less fun.

There’s little cache to winning the mayorship if you know anyone can do the same by just creating a duplicate location.

And if a company wants to offer coupons or specials to people who earn mayorships or even just check in, you darn tootin’ want to make sure you’re checking in at the bonafide location.

So, search before you add a venue. Sometimes, venues don’t just pop up. It could be that your GPS is off slightly and reading you in a different location. It could be you just need to hit “refresh.”

FourSquare will often warn you if you try to add a location that already exists, but if you misspell it or don’t add the address, often this warning won’t happen. Doing a quick search for the venue doesn’t seem like too much work, now does it?

3. Don’t lie. I may get some heat for this one because I know some people consider the fun of FourSquare is to check into Starbucks while standing in their office a quarter-mile from Starbucks. But nobody likes a cheater.

Yes, compared to robbing a bank or cheating on your income tax, lying on FourSquare pales. But remember what you learned in kindergarten: It doesn’t matter who wins or loses. It’s how you play the game.

So to check into a location you must actually be at the location. That means you didn’t just drive by or you didn’t just think about the place. And if you forget to check in and try to do it later to make up? Well, that’s probably OK in my book, but I’d worry if that becomes a habit. Really.

One exception to this rule: fake locations.

I have no problem with someone checking into “hell” or “heaven” while obviously still alive. I kind of like the metaphysical locations. But for brick-and-mortal places, please, actually walk in the door before you check in.

What do you think?

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 I’d say the Syracuse BizBuzz Social Media Conference this week was a great success.

The buzz was about 325 people showed up. The whole experience was pretty exciting — to be around so many people who want to get more connected and engaged online.

A few hiccups, of course: WiFi was really spotty in the main conference area, especially if you use Verizon, as I do. I wanted to live-tweet keynoter Dave Evans,  author of “Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day,” but to do that I had to borrow a friend’s Mac to do so. (The conference offered a login to get free Wi-Fi from the Oncenter, but it didn’t work that well for phones.)

That aside, I met some great people. Shared ideas. Learned some technical tips, especially during the Linked-In seminar. But for me the best takeaway is that we’re part of a something new and exciting. The tips on how to tweet or blog or connect on Linked-In matter less than the energy that spurs us to do it.

If you couldn’t make it to Biz Buzz, here is the power point from my speech on blogging for business. It was aimed to business professionals, but the tips are really relevants for anyone who wants to use their blog to engage. Enjoy.

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Twitter turns 4 in the new year, so I think it’s old enough to learn some manners. Here are my suggestions for Twitter etiquette and style as we head into 2010.  I’m sure I’ve missed some ideas, so feel free to add in the comments.

To tweet or to twitter: I think it has been well-established by now on Twitter that the verb is to tweet. I tweet today; I tweeted yesterday; I have tweeted many times. Twitter is not the verb. To twitter is something a bird does, by emitting chirping sounds. People don’t twitter. And certainly, please, dear journalists, let’s not switch back and forth between tweet and twitter as a verb. You wouldn’t do that with any other verb.

Twitterati: I think there is more ambiguity about the noun to describe people who use Twitter. Are they tweets or twits or twitterati? I, personally, prefer tweets over twits. But I like tweeps even more. Tweets feels a bit like saying, “Hey, these are my peeps.” But I’m not opposed to Twitterati, as long as it is used as a plural for both men and women on Twitter. Then, following the rule for Latin endings, one man on Twitter would be a Twitteratus; one woman, a Twitterata; a group of women, Twitteratae. Perhaps that gets too formal. Twitter user is also fine.

Twitterverse vs. Twittersphere: My preference for describing the whole world of Twitter is Twitterverse, mainly because I think Twitterverse sounds better than Twittersphere. (However, I much prefer blogosphere to blogoverse.) Yet, I think both are correct.

Thank you: I think a culture has developed on Twitter where it makes sense to thank people for retweeting your blog post or adding you to their Twitter lists. I think it’s fine, but not necessary, to thank people for following you. But, please, let’s outlaw this too-pervasive practice of thanking people through automatic direct messages, especially those that tout an e-book or blog. Why? Because that’s just spam in the clothing of faux friendship. I like to compare Twitter to a party. If you walked in and introduced yourself by saying, “Hi, read my book,” I probably wouldn’t talk to you much. You can tout your book — just wait to we have some semblance of a relationship.

Retweets: In the old days (like a year ago), people typed the word retweet before they retweeted (repeated) another person’s tweet. Today, that has been shortened to RT. But always be sure to credit the original person who tweeted. (Via @username works well.)  My rules on retweeting that others may or may not embrace is this: If you retweet, you can shorten the original tweet to fit the 140-character limit. But do not change the gist or meaning. That seems like misquoting, to me.

@Replies: Twitter is a conversational medium. People say things; other people respond. But when a one-on-one conversation goes beyond two or more tweets, it’s time to take the conversation outside — to direct messaging. A group discussion is fine to have on Twitter, I think. But when two people just talk exclusively through @replies, it feels a bit like listening to a stranger’s yelled cell phone conversation. Lower your voice, please. But if the topic is general and might be of interest to others — feel free to chat away without heading to the DMs.

1/2; 2/2: Twitter’s 140-character limit can seem restricting, but it doesn’t have to be. If you have more to say than can fit in 140 characters, use this approach. 1/2 at the start of  a tweet or @replies means: first part of two parts. The second part is 2/2. Now, I’d advice using this sparingly because often — but not always — the best route is to edit yourself. Also, the 1/2, 2/2 trick theoretically could be used for tweet, but in practice it is usually reserved for @replies and direct messages.

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Edited: 10:37 a.m. Dec. 29. Here’s what’s great about Twitter. I wrote this post, tweeted it, and within minutes got some smart comments froma fellow Twitter user, Frank D’Agostino, of Syracuse. I added his suggestions in italics, so it’s clear they came later than the rest of the post.

Edited: 11:25 a.m. Dec. 31. It’s official. Based on comments on this blog and suggestions on Twitter, I’m  updating my post to reflect my new belief that tweeps is the preferred term for people on Twitter.

Today’s post is second in my new occasional series, “What the heck do you do on Twitter.” Today’s post comes from one of my news writing students, Danielle Alvarez, a 21-year-old magazine and modern foreign language major at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. (Don’t worry — she’s getting extra credit for doing this.) (Read the whole series.)

If you’d like to be featured (don’t be shy), send me an e-mail at savethemedia@yahoo.com or direct message me on Twitter.

Here is how Alvarez uses Twitter:

How long have you been on Twitter? I have been using Twitter actively since the 18th of October, 2009. I signed up, however, sometime over the summer.

Why did you get started? I got started because I was in charge of a lot of the tweets for one of my summer internships, Modelinia, and wanted to follow them from the other side. In addition to keep in touch, now I’m using it as a way to increase blog traffic and share my thoughts with the world.

Was being on Twitter different than you expected? It was not much different than I expected, although I’m impressed with the number of “legitimate” people on Twitter that there are. It is not just led by insignificant tweets from people who I could care less about. Harsh, but true.

How much time do you spent on Twitter daily? How many days a week do you log on? I probably spend about one hour on Twitter daily, but I also have TweetDeck open for most of the day. I log on everyday during the week and less on weekends.

What is the primary reason you use Twitter? My primary reason to use Twitter is because, even though I may not agree with the concept of the social media device, it has become extremely popular among real people. I didn’t want to miss out on the fun, as well as the latest news, simply because I’m being stubborn.

Do you mainly follow people you know in the face-to-face world, strangers, or a little bit of both? Anything else you like to add about your Twitter use? I follow a mix of people: (Gina Chen); friends that I’ve made through blogging, interning and traveling, and particular news channels, magazines and organizations, which I fondly support.

Is there anything  you’d like to add? I think it’s worthwhile to add that being involved with Twitter has made me more connected and in the loop because sometimes I’m just not interested in the latest party pictures that someone has posted on Facebook.  Many of my real-life friends have become such because of certain commonalities among us, but now  I can virtually socialize with others that share particularly recent interests, such as culture, travel, language and food.   In this way, I feel like it adds another dimension to my blog, as well as putting me in direct contact with readers and fellow bloggers alike.

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I’m starting a new feature here at Save the Media, called “What the heck do you do on Twitter.” It’s an occasional feature, which in journalism-speak means I’ll do it when I have a chance. The idea is to showcase a variety of people who are using Twitter in creative ways. My emphasis, of course, is on how people use Twitter for journalism, but I want to highlight all types of applications. Hopefully, it will be a place we can all learn. (Read the whole series.)

If you’d like to be featured (don’t be shy), send me an e-mail at savethemedia@yahoo.com or direct message me on Twitter.

Now,Susan Kline explains how she uses Twitter. She is an archivist and historian of 20th century American History who lives in Upstate New York.  She enjoys photography, thrift stores and vegetarian cuisines. Here are her answers to my questions:

How long have you been on Twitter? I started using it off and on in November of 2008.

Why did you get started? Well, I’d always been someone who was pretty active online with everything from IRC to online journals and blogs to chat rooms, IM, Facebook, etc. But Twitter was one thing I was having a hard time getting my head around. I had heard of it for awhile and have to admit I made fun of it with a coworker. We’d trade online articles about people who were obsessed with it. I was biased towards Facebook and the status update concept there. I guess I didn’t think anything of value could come from so few words and profiles that don’t really have all that much information. I started taking the “Nebraska Learns 2.0″ online course through the Nebraska Library Commission, and Twitter was one of the things “23 Things” on the list. We were urged to try and it and see how librarians were using it.

Did it end up being different than you expected? Yes. I didn’t expect to really like it, and I ended up liking it quite a bit. I use it daily now. I wasn’t ready for how people act with such a herd mentality through it. I mean Michael Jackson’s death was pretty much reported first through Twitter rather than any “official” source. People were absolutely sure he was dead when no other source was saying so yet. What if they’d all been wrong?

And I didn’t expect all the spam followers, but really it’s not surprising since Twitter’s become more popular. But I could see the potential for networking purposes.

How much time do you spent on Twitter daily? How many days a week do you log on? I log in pretty much seven days a week. I use it more on weekdays though, seems like that’s when people are updating more so there tends to be more to read on those days. I tweet maybe five times a day, retweet a time or two a day and send replies to other people’s tweets maybe two to three times a day.

What is the primary reason you use Twitter? I use it primarily to network and interact with people in my field. It’s a way to keep up with that other archivists are doing professionally and find links to relevant news stories and blog posts or other tools that are helpful professionally. I can also throw question or problem out there and get a response within a few hours (at most) from someone who is willing to tell me how they did it or provide a link to help me understand something. When I lived in Nebraska, I could literally count on my hands how many archivists there were there. I wasn’t working as an archivist at the time, and it was hard to find ways to stay active professionally.  In other words, my geographic location made it hard to interact with others in my field.

Twitter really opened that up, and I was able to find others throughout the country. They’re really aren’t a ton of archivists out there, you know. How often do you run into one at a party? It’s not like being an accountant or a teacher where your profession’s knowledge base is more widespread.

What do you feel you get out of your Twitter use? See above. Also the phenomena of using Twitter at conferences appeals to me. If you can’t travel a lot to professional meetings because of time or money constraints, it’s a helpful way to get people’s opinions and know what’s going on.

I admit some days though it’s mostly a distraction for me.

Do you mainly follow people you know in the face-to-face world, strangers, or a little bit of both? Most of my list is people I don’t know “in real life.” I have a few people I’d consider “pre-Twitter face-to-face” friends on there, but they don’t use it much. I mainly keep up with face-to-face friends and family through Facebook, and use Twitter for people I don’t know. I

t’s fun to meet your Twitter followers and people you follow though. I ran into one on the bus one morning on my way into work, and someone approached me at a conference several months ago and said that she “knew me” and turns out she’s someone I had been connecting with on Twitter for awhile. It was a nice icebreaker, and we ended up talking quite a bit at the conference. I’m happy to say we were able to keep connecting after the conference through the medium.

Anything else you like to add about your Twitter use? Building Twitter relationships is not for those who aren’t patient. I always tell people you have to get to know others on Twitter by following them for awhile. There’s no extensive profiles like on other sites for you to read or photos for you to look at and get a sense of the person.

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A friend, Glenn Coin, has asked me to guest lecture about the ethics of social media for his Utica College journalism class, so I figured I’d blog my lesson plan to save time — and spread the message.

I thought the ethics of social media is a timely topic, given the debate over social media rules that has been waging now for months. It began in the spring when first the Dow Jones Co. and then The New York Times issued social media rules. Then it resurfaced recently when The Washington Post released its rules, and a WaPo editor admitted he quit Twitter, rather than violate the rules.

In the meantime, several ethical moments in social media have taken place, and I’ll got through them each later in this post.

First, what are ethics?

Merriam-Webster defines ethics as:

A set of moral principles : a theory or system of moral values.

What about for journalists?

For journalists, the definition of ethics gets a lot longer. The Society of Professional Journalists offers a long list of what constitutes journalistic ethics, including:  making every effort to be accurate, avoid stereotyping and offering a diversity of viewpoints. It also calls for journalists not to plagiarize and to distinguish between advocacy and news reporting.

So are things any different online?

Online Journalism Review argues no. Journalistic ethics are pretty much the same online as in print or broadcast:  Don’t plagiarize; tell readers how you got your information; don’t accept gifts or money for coverage; tell the truth; be honest.

I agree with OJR. Journalists online must be accurate and honest and strive to tell the truth, and they can’t copy others’ work. (I’d argue that linking isn’t copying, although not everybody agrees with that.)

So are ethics any different on the Web or in social media than in the rest of journalism?

I say no. I think ethics are ethics. You can’t have one set of rules for online and another for print. But I do think the medium impacts how we live out these philosophies, and I’ll get to that more later. When it comes to social media, one of the key questions becomes: If a journalist offers an opinion on Twitter, is that unethical? Does that violate some type of rule? Think about that — and we’ll discuss more later.

Personally, I follow a basic code of ethics that works for me in the face-to-face world, the professional world and online. It’s quite simple:

• First do no harm. I try in every part of my life to avoid doing anything that would hurt another person. (To me, this doesn’t mean writing only good or happy news. But it does mean getting as many sides of the story as possible before writing about something that could put anybody in a bad light. It also means giving a source an adequate chance to repond, not just calling once.)

• Don’t put anything on the Internet (Twitter, Facebook, what have you) that you’d be embarrassed to see on the front page of The New York Times. That means no drunk pictures, nothing “inappropriate,” nothing that accuses another person of something without verified support.

3. Be transparent. That means be honest about what’s going on. If you make a mistake, admit it. If you misunderstood something, acknowledge it. If you inadvertently wrong someone, say you’re sorry and try to fix it. To me, this doesn’t mean you pretend you don’t have opinions. You’re just honest with yourself about how what you’re thinking shapes your worldview.

The bottom line with ethics is it comes from inside you. I can’t tell you how to live any more than you can tell me how to live. Ethics aren’t black and white; they are gray, very gray. If a clerk gave you more change then you should have received, and you noticed in the store, would you return it? (I would.) What if you’d driven home already before you noticed? For me, it would depend on how much more. If it was change or a few dollars, I’d chalk it up to good karma on my part. If it was significant money ($20), I’d mail a check to the store with a note. But you might not, and that’s OK. My code doesn’t have to be yours.

What every journalist, what every person must do is really think about what ethics means and come up with a personal code that reflects that. And then stick by it. Certainly, if you work for a news organization, you’ll be bound by whatever code that organization adopts. But you still need to have your own personal code, and you may need to argue your point — in a nice way.

Don’t fall into the trap of … My boss told me to do it. My editor said it was OK. You know in your gut what’s right. Follow that. Would you be embarrassed if someone knew you did something? Then don’t do it. That queasy feeling we get in our stomach is there for a reason — to stop us from doing something stupid. Feeling guilty in many cases is often a normal response to doing something wrong.

Next, I’m going to go through some recent ethical dilemmas in the sphere of journalistic social media. I’ll tell you whether I think each case was ethical or not, but you need to figure out what you think for yourself. Argue your case. Stand for something. The goal of this exercise isn’t to teach you rules, as I might if I were teaching algebra (solve within the parentheses first, then the exponents, then multiplication and division from left to right, then addition and subtraction from left to right). Ethics is messy or mungy.

Ethics is often case by case because you may encounter a situation you never expected or thought of or that doesn’t mirror anything else that has happened before. Being ethical in practice is easy; living it is harder. (Think of it this way: You find $1,000 in an un-marked envelope in the mall. My ethics say I must return it, even if I have no way of knowing if it will reach its true owner. But it’s a lot harder to do that if your rent is due, and you have no idea how you’ll pay. Believing something is easy. Acting on it can be difficult.)

Some examples:

• The “jackass tweet.” President Barack Obama called hip-hop artist Kanye West a jackass for grabbing the microphone from teen country singer Taylor Swift during the MTV music video. Obama made the comment off the record during an interview with CNBC.  “Nightline” co-anchor Terry Moran tweeted to his more than 1 million followers that the president had called West a jackass.

Right or wrong? I say wrong. The comment was off the record, and that means the journalist should not disseminate it. Period. OK, let’s mix it up a bit ethically. What if a guy from a local deli was in the room at the time, delivering sandwiches. He overheard the president and tweeted it. Right or wrong? To me, that’s more fair game. He made no promise of being off the record. Word to the president: Don’t call people jackasses even off the record.

• The erroneous tweet: About a year ago, Mathew Ingram, communities editors for the Toronto Globe and Mail, tweeted after seeing a report on CNN’s iReport “citizen journalism” portal about Steve Jobs having a heart attack. He noted there were reports of a heart attack, but they were unverified.  A minute or two later, he noted where the tip came from, that someone on Digg saw the report on the news, and that the report could be from a troll. He caught fire from some who argued as a journalist Ingram should have made sure the report was true before he passed it on. In the end, it turned out that Jobs had not had a heart attack.

Right or wrong? Well, first, in the interest of transparency, let me disclose that Ingram and I both blog for Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab. While I’ve never meet him personally, we’ve corresponded a bit through Twitter. He also wrote a blog post a while back defending a controversial post I wrote about journalistic rules you can break on your blog. I tell you this because I believe in transparency. I don’t think all this clouds my judgment of Ingram, but you might. So here is: all on the table.

With that said, I don’t think he was wrong to tweet what would clearly be a very newsworthy tweet. I’m not saying that newsworthiness outweighs accuracy. Not at all. But Ingram, I believe, wouldn’t have tweeted something he knew to be false. He was just passing on news that many people would interest many and pointing out that it might not be true. If I had read his tweet, it would have spurred me to find out more, not lulled me into believing something based only on a tweet.

Some argued he should have verified the tweet before passing it on. Perhaps. Verification is always good. But one of the beauties of social media is its fluidity. It would be impossible for all of the millions of people on Twitter to verify every tweet before passing it on. Twitter isn’t a news medium. I think there’s an expectation that Twitter is the start of a conversation to prompt people to find out more, not the be all and end all.

With all that said, Ingram acknowledged on his blog that he’s likely do things differently. Perhaps. But Twitter only works an an information conduit if people aren’t afraid of tweeting. We’ll all make mistakes. Just last week, I tweeted something that look legit and turned out to be spam. Mea Culpa. That’s not unethical. That’s human.

• This is your brain on Facebook: A doctor in training posted a picture of a patient’s brain on Facebook, prompting a probe by Upstate Medical University, which wasn’t happy with the posting. The brain wasn’t labeled, so no one could really tell whose brain it was, except, of course the doc in training.  But some of the doc in training’s friends posted comments beside the picture that, perhaps, the owner of the brain might find, eh, unseemly:  “Do you feel like Hannibal Lector sometimes?” “Love a good BRAIN in the early morning!!” “Should that be served with a white or red wine????”

Right or wrong? My take is this was wrong, very wrong. Why? Doctors get to see us in our most vulnerable states (few things are more vulnerable than having your brain exposed), so they have even a greater obligation to protect that vulnerability. If it were me, I wouldn’t like my brain being discussed this way. And I wouldn’t want my doctor discussing any part of my body on his or her Facebook page.

But, you couldn’t tell whose brain it was, so why does it matter? To me it does. Some might say, “Lighten up; it’s funny.” I acknowledge that doctors probably need to use some gallows humor to get through the day, similarly to how cops and police reporters handle the job with humor. That’s fine. But don’t go public. Joking with a colleague is one thing. Doing it on a Facebook, very public space, the town square of our era so to speak, is different. (Yes, I know that only the doc’s Facebook friends could see the picture. But the thing is with the Web is you can’t trust that. If people can hack my credit card number off the Web, I’m guessing someone (not me) has the know-how to hack into Facebook.)

• The pulled blog post:  The Globe and Mail’s book editor attended a search-engine optimization seminar at the newspaper and then blogged critically on the newspaper’s Web site about the worshop. According to Ingram’s explanation, the books editor felt the workshop stressed too much that online headlines should be understandable to search engines, rather than people. Some senior editors at the Globe took umbrage at the post, and it was pulled. Ingram urged that he explain to readers why the post was taken down, especially considering some people had already seen the post, and at least one blog had linked to it.

Right or wrong? Well, to me, I think it was vital that the newspaper explain why it took down the post, even if no one had seen the post. The days of the detached news staff that knows better than the readers are over. So I’m glad, the newspaper explained it’s reasoning, which was the rant wasn’t particularly suitable for a books blog. I think journalists have an ethical obligation in today’s world to be transparent. To explain what they do and why they do it. Actually, I think this has always been the case, but the Web forces more transparency. (In the old days, if the books editors ranted in a print column, editors would spike it before anyone outside the newsroom would know.)

Transparency becomes an ethical issue because being transparent engenders trust in the same way that concealing things engenders suspicion. Ingram writes that he “argued that the trust of our readers was also a key part of our brand, and that we had to do everything we could to maintain it. That, I think, is the fundamental purpose of being open and honest in the first place. Trust, as Craig Newmark has said, is ‘the new black.’ ” I agree.

What do you think? Where do you draw the ethical line.

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More than a year ago, Brian Stelter had a story in The New York Times about how the social media generation takes it upon themselves to pass on the news they feel is worthwhile. The story contained a seminal quote from an unidentified college student that has become iconic of the new journalism evolving before our eyes. He said: “If the news is that important, it will find me.”

The line meant many things to many people. BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis and the Globe and Mail’s Mathew Ingram, a colleague here at Nieman, both wrote about it at the time.

That single line seemed to capture what is changing in journalism. The old model of sender (news organization) to receiver (audience) was eroding. With the interactive Web, people could be senders and receivers. News organizations could also be both. The lines were blurry and crossed. And if you wanted to capture those illusive young readers you needed to get that.

So why am I bringing all this up now, more than 18 months after the pivotal story — a lifetime in the Web world?

Read the rest of the post at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

News organizations, take note:  More women than men are using social media, a new study says.

The study, from Information is Beautiful, uses Google Ad Planner numbers to come up with its conclusion that more women than men use many popular social networks. Digg stands out because 64 percent of users are men. Linked-In and YouTube are tied, genderwise.

You can view that data yourself, but here are some findings I found interesting:

• Twitter: 57 percent women users.

• Facebook: 57 percent women users.

• Flickr: 55 percent women users.

Read the rest of the post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Seems like it’s a good time for some short takes from my jaunts around the blogosphere. Here are some posts that I found interesting. Hope you will, too.

Is news like bottled water? Tim Windsor has a thought-provoking post at Nieman Journalism Lab today, noting that bottled-water producers know something newspapers do not: How to sell something people can often get for free. In much of the developed world, tap water is free and clean, yet people will shell out $6 or more for a bottle of water.  Windsor asks: Is online news content like gasoline, a “necessary commodity that people will begrudgingly pay for, because they have to” or bottled water, ”a necessary commodity that’s packaged in a way that finds a happy and willing customer base?”

A colleague and I tossed the idea around a bit this afternoon. How are water and news content different? The same? Are we buying bottled water because the product has been marketed to us as necessary. Or is there something else we’re buying? 

After some thought, here’s what we hit upon: We’re buying bottled water (and by we, I mean other people. I’m strictly anti-bottled water for environmental reasons) in part because of marketing. When I was growing up, we ran the tap. The only bottled water was pricey and snooty Perrier. So part is marketing; the consumer was persuaded that he or she “needed” bottled water, perhaps because it is perceived as  cleaner or healthier.

Some are buying it because their tap water stinks (literally, like sulphur or other minerals.) The water may be safe to drink , but it may not taste good.

We decided convenience, which Windsor mentions, is the main reason people buy bottled water. It’s a seemingly small convenience. But in today’s frantic world it looms larger. Consider me as I make the hurried dash from work to after-school program pickup to home to get my son ready for his Little League game. As a non-bottled-water drinker, I waste, say, a good three or four minutes hunting for a sports drink bottle that is clean and has a cap that fits and then filling it with ice and water for my son to tote to his game. It would be easier to grab an already-filled, chilled bottled from the fridge.

So could readers could be marketed to want to pay for news content on the Web? Perhaps, but I doubt it. The problem still comes back to why pay for what you’ve been getting for free. Imagine if bottled water were handed out free for years, and then someone decided to charge. It wouldn’t fly. (And that doesn’t mean news organizations should have charged for online content from the beginning. Some tried; it didn’t work.)

Back to the water analogy. If people are paying for convenience when they buy bottled water, charging for news content will only work if readers feel they are getting something else — not just news. Something they want desperately. Something that makes their lives easier the way grabbing a bottled water from the fridge does. But what that is, I don’t know. I wish I did.

Social media editor: So The New York Times has appointed a social media editor, Jennifer Preston. She jumped in with both feet, tweeting:  “How Should @nytimes be using Twitter?” Old Media New Tricks offers some smart strategies for Preston, including “Interact with your followers, and follow them. The Times account only follows Times employees right now and does not respond to followers.” Bravo.

How to use Twitter: Found a frank post today that spells out in “How to Use Twitter and Not be a Douchebag.” Good advice for journalists or anyone on Twitter. Best takeaway from blogger Adam Darowski:  ”It’s not all about you.If you’re going to get anything out of Twitter at all, you need to immediately check your ego at the door, listen to people, and build relationships. Talking about the things your or your company are doing will only get you anywhere once you’ve already joined the conversation.” One quibble, which I noted in a comment on Darowski’s blog: He’s not a fan of retweeting; I am.

Why to use social media: Kyle Lacy isn’t writing for newspapers with his dripping-with-sarcasm list of 10 reasons your business should not be on social media. But he could be. He makes the point that only a business that purchased a dial-up modem to “save money” would want to skip the benefits of social media. His best reason not to be on social media: “You find that building ‘trust’ in a marketplace is a waste of time.”

It’s time for some short-takes: stuff I find interesting around the blogosphere for journalist bloggers:

Blogger tip — be alert: I’ve visited this topic before, but it warrants repeating. You can’t blog in your niche well unless you’re reading what others are saying and know what’s going on in the news. One way to do that is to set up alerts through Google. I’d recommend an alert for your name (you want to eavesdrop on what’s being said about you) and your niche. Darren Rowse, at ProBlogger, offers some great reasons why you should do this, and he gives a step by step how-to.

Beatblogging: Great post at BeatBlogging that explains that a journalist with a blog isn’t necessarily a beatblogger. Beatblogging requires a two-way communication with the reader — through comments, through e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, you name it. I love this post because it points out that the interaction has value on its own — not just as a means to bump up blog hits. Yes, interaction may do that; but the value is in conversing with readers.  The post also gives great list of best practices for beatblogging. (Full disclosure: The post mentions my Family Life blog as a beatblog.)

Online first:  Martin Langeveld  blogs at the Nieman Journalism Lab about how newspapers must change themselves to become online-first.  Among his suggestions:  blow up the organizational structure, connect with readers on social networks they already use (like Facebook);  rethink work flow; outsource the irrelevant. I’d add one more: Build on existing online applications that work, rather than create your own. That way — you go to the reader, rather than force the reader to come to you.

Be you: As I’ve said many times before, blogging is a personal medium. It’s not a news story online, although beatbloggers will report news. Blogs need to have personality — your personality. So how do you be you online? The Daily Blonde has some great tips for doing that. Best takeaway: “People want real.”

Using social media: Mashable reports on the Colonel Tribune, the Twitter face of the Chicago Tribune. Daniel Honigman, Tribune Interactive’s  social media strategist, told Mashable the colonel was created last year because the Tribune realizes people were conversing outside its Web site, so the colonel is a way to join the conversation — be the voice on the Web. I like this idea because it uses social media to join a conversation, not just to drive up Web hits. The colonel has become so popular he holds regular tweetups (in person gatherings of people who met on Twitter.) Cool idea.