A New Age of Crisis Reporting?: Media, the Oil Spill, and You

As the oil from the BP Gulf coast spill continues to flow into the Gulf of Mexico, the attention of the nation seems to focus on it more and more. As one of the worst environmental disasters our country has ever seen, it is garnering huge media attention across platforms and is sure to be one of the biggest news stories of the year. ...

Oscar Sunday Gets Social on Facebook

As most of you may know, this Sunday is the 82nd Academy Awards.  While I’m not happy with some of the retro changes (let’s be honest and say that the ten Best Pic nominees could’ve been whittled down to four films, including one that was completely overlooked, The Informant) we’ll see in this weekend’s ceremony,...

Top 10 U.S. Olympic Athletes on Twitter

While the Vancouver Olympic games have the attention of TV audiences across the globe, the Twitter-verse’s attention seems to have followed.

As these athletes compete for Olympic gold, competition is also on for sponsorship deals and marketability, and the number of followers for each athlete’s Twitter account is a strong indicator of the athlete’s public popularity....

The Problem with Retweets

As most probably know, Twitter is in the process of launching a version of the widely used retweet on its own platform.  The move has caused some controversy, as the way retweets has been implemented by Twitter is much different from the unofficial protocols that Twitter users developed organically on their own. ...

Using Twitter Lists to Judge Influence

If you’ve used Twitter for awhile, you know that judging the influence of a Twitter user by their number of followers is a dicey proposition.  Lots of Twitter users are obsessed with their number of followers, and work to inflate their stats in ways too numerous to mention here.  The end result is that some Twitter users will have thousands of followers who consist mostly of other social media “experts”...