How to use Sina Weibo to leap the Great Firewall of China

Sina Weibo is being called the Chinese Twitter

That’s not quite right. It’s actually more of a hybrid between Twitter and Facebook.
You can do a lot more on it than you can on Twitter.
You can group related messages together as conversation threads, and post photos and videos directly within messages. It’s got emoticons too.
It’s a bit smaller that Twitter, at 140m users to Twitter’s 200m, and a lot smaller than Facebook, which has around 750m active accounts.
But Sina Weibo – Weibo translates as Microblogging -  has grown massively since launch in August 2009 and, according to Wikipedia, is the most popular social media site in China, with 90% of the market.
Here’s Penn Olson on what Twitter could learn from Sina Weibo: http://www.penn-olson.com/2011/01/04/twitter-could-learn-from-sina-weibo/

Here's my presence on the site: http://weibo.com/andybull

Open it in Chrome and you can get an English translation.
I'll be using my own experience of setting up, tweeking and using Weibo in the material that follows.
There’s been a flurry of publicity about Weibo recently, with English-speaker celebs including Bill Gates and Tom Cruise creating presences.
And Radiohead just joined, with an authenticated account, and just the one tweet (as I write) to say they were testing it. Which won them over 56,000 fans (which are what Weibo calls followers) last time I looked. Here's their page:

So why should you be interested?

Well, apart from the opportunity to build a community in China, which is fascinating in itself, if you want to reach this audience you can’t do it with western social media platforms.
Facebook, Youtube and Twitter are all banned, together with a lengthy list of lesser platforms. Here's Wikipedia's latest on what's not allowed.

How to do it

The main problem to overcome, if you aren’t a Chinese speaker, is how to follow the instructions to sign up to the website and iPhone app.
There were stories in the tech blogs that an English version is available.
There isn't, as far as I can see, but no worries.
An American doctor - Richard Saint Cyr -  living and working in China has blogged some really handy tips, and Bill Bishop has produced a 23-screen Google doc that takes you through all the features of the site. I've used their guides to establish my own account, and must give them all the credit for the tips you'll find here.

Next: Getting started. How to open an account and see the Weibo site in English

Paper.li brings Twitter closer to perfection

We all know Twitter's shortcomings, but we tend to overlook them because of its  great strengths.

Chief among them is the tap-always-on aspect. The tweets just keep flowing and, if you follow hundreds of people, as most of us do, then even with the use of Hootsuite, Tweetdeck etc to dam the important ones into pools you can dip into later, plenty of them are still washed away without you ever being aware of them.

I'm not suggesting Paper.li is the complete answer, but it is one very interesting one. It takes a snapshot of your Twitter stream each day, and turns it into what it calls a daily newspaper. I'm not sure why they've called it that rather than a daily news website, which is what it looks like.

I've only been experimenting with it today, so there are a lot of questions about how it selects items that I can't answer for now. But what it creates is impressive.

Here's a grab of mine

and a link.

It's interesting to see the categories that it selects for tweets in your stream. I found it valuable in alerting me to significant tweets that I wanted to retweet, but which I'd have missed if it weren't for this application.

One of the many things I like about it is how it mirrors the areas I try to cover in my tweets. Among them: jobs, media and technology, as below.

I was alerted to the app by Journalism.co.uk, which has been checking their paper.li out today too, and was equally impressed.

Refining the art of freelancing

Freelances are not only the journalists hit hardest by the recession, they are also in the best position to innovate their way out of it. 

That goes particularly for newly-qualified journalists – and there are going to be thousands of them on the streets in a few weeks as a new crop of graduate and post-graduates is unleashed on an almost non-existent jobs market.

OK, but how do you innovate? Here's a round-up of smart ideas.

Tweet your way to a job

If you tweet avidly you could apply for a job in a hot new category: social media specialist. The New York Times reports that: “The position of social media specialist, introduced by companies like Comcast, General Motors and JetBlue Airways, has become the hottest new corporate job among the Twitterati.”

Stay close to journalism

This time last year Dave Lee was a newly-qualified freelance in search of work. He says the one crucial tip is, whatever you have to do to make ends meet, stay close to journalism.

He says: “So what if there aren’t any full-time reporting roles on newspapers. Are the pages empty? No! They’re still full of words, pictures, stories. All of which are — until Murdoch invents some sort of Churnobot — written by humans. You’ll struggle with local newspapers, they don’t have much of a budget, but you could have better luck elsewhere. On the web, in the nationals — they all need writers.

“So if you need to work at Sainsbury’s — do it. Work lates. Get a job in a pub.

“Just spend your day being a journalist. Get shifts, even if it’s one day a week. Apply for anything that’s remotely near to a newsroom. Work on the reception if you have to.

“You need to make sure you’re in the industry when it’s back on the way up.”

Make your pitches multimedia

Whether you are newly qualified, long-term voluntary freelance or newly redundant, you need to up your game. Michelle Vranizan Rafter regularly posts great advice on her blog, including tips such as New ways to use LinkedIn to find story sources and Why freelances should shut up and innovate

She says they must “think outside the printed page for new markets, new opportunities and new ways of conducting your writing business. The need for good writing isn’t going away – people with good communications skills will always be sought after. But the medium, the format and the styles are changing. So adapt with the times."

For example, make your pitches multimedia   She advocates adding audio, video, maps and other digital information to pitches because it:

• Makes story packages more interesting, upping the chances that an assigning editor will bite.
• Makes full use of the interactive nature of the online media
• Establishes you as a writer who gets Web 2.0 technology

“Some publications are already starting to request that writers include multimedia components in their pitches. Just yesterday, a freelance acquaintance shared this letter from a regional publication that’s asking freelancers to include audio or video in their pitches:

“Beginning with the March 2009 issue of XXX, we will begin enhancing our website with article-related content. The content will include photos and audio and video recordings -- anything that helps to tell a story or bring it to life.

"For example, if you’re pitching a restaurant, let us know if you’d be able/willing to provide a short video of the chef preparing a dish or offering some kitchen tips. Have a great music group you’d like to write about? In your pitch, tell us if an audio recording could be available for the web.

"As you research your stories or even when making a pitch, let us know if you see or think of an opportunity to help showcase an article online.”

She issues this appeal to freelances to share ideas about how to squeeze more money out of the work they do.

Finally, one recently (and reluctantly) redundant staffer turned freelance is writing a blog at Journalism.co.uk to chart their search for work. It’ll keep going until the work starts flowing and is already offering a great insight into how it is done.

Tweets from the past - could this be the future?

Archive material can provide context and lend meaning to a current event. 

At least, that’s what Keith Hopper believes, and he’s invented a way of using archive text for that purpose. It’s called NRPbackstory – NRP is America’s National Public Radio.

Here’s a post from Joshua Benton and Neiman Journalism Lab on how it works which includes this essential information:

“NPRbackstory uses Google’s Hot Trends data to determine what topics people have suddenly started searching for in large numbers. It uses NPR’s API to search the archives, then uses Yahoo Pipes to create an RSS feed that then gets cycled into the NPRbackstory Twitter account.”

 

The NPRbackstory Twitter account is here

Follow that account and you get relevant material from the archive to match current hot topics.

Here’s the inventor on how and why he did it

Twitter is growing up

I know plenty of people think Twitter is more hype than substance, but the evidence is growing that it is becoming an important component of the web, how we use it, and how we find information.

For example, take the stat that 10 per cent of Twitter's downstream traffic - that is, where users go after Twitter - is BBC news. So it's clearly being used as a tool for finding out what's happening by a sizeable minority of users, not just for micro-blogging about the inconsequential.

Some users find it's the first place they go each day, even before RSS feeds. At Cybersoc they have set the ball rolling on a survey of how people use Twitter

The London Daily Telegraph has published a list of all its staff who use Twitter. Meanwhile, one twitterer set up a bogus Daily Mail Twitter account and, he claims, immediately got over 700 followers, which he says is about six times more than the "official" Daily Mail twitter. Actually it had 216 followers when I checked just now.

But who needs any of that when twitterers have their own online newspaper, which, it is intended, will be made up entirely of their tweets.

Yet there are signs that Twitter is outgrowing its 140-character content limit. So here comes TwitBlogs. Which is Twitter, only more. So are they diluting the USP, or is this a better form of blogging?