Girl brags of riot activities on Facebook

Facebook comment from photo on Vancouver Riot Post Your Photos

These snitches gathered photos of rioters and encouraged people to tag anyone they recognized. As well, they gathered screenshots of Facebook users bragging in their statuses about their illegal exploits.

On Twitter, the Vancouver Police Department encouraged the public to submit tips, photos and video through the Crime Stoppers account.

And on Tumblr my favourite tactic – a public shaming project.

And it’s not just snitching on a local level that’s going on.

The Globe and Mail reported this week that social media users are helping NATO fight Gadhafi in Libya. “On Twitter, Facebook and other services, they discuss satellite images, vessel tracking data and the latest gossip from their sources inside the country.”

NATO officials have acknowledged that social media reports contribute to their targeting process – but only after checking them against other, more reliable, sources of information.

Regular folk are combing satellite images to find clues, such as military vehicles, to report coordinates to NATO.

As ever more content producers post their works, and with a growing, world-wide audience as witness, it will become more and more difficult to hide any bad behaviour. In this way, social media can be a society’s conscience.

Tanya Croft, Eli Purchase, Jean Escalante, Kyle Thomas and Megan Holsapple watch Taylor Moore's presentation on online interactive games at North of 60 Blog Camp, April 2, 2011.

Had a great time at my first North of 60 Blog Camp over the weekend. Thanks to Nancy Zimmerman for organizing the event, and to the other participants who shared their geek-knowledge. Here’s what Tweeters had to say about the event:

Collect the best photos, video, tweets and more to publish them
as simple, beautiful stories that can be embedded anywhere.

The resulting story, shown below, can then be easily placed into a webpage, or linked to from Storify. Here’s what the one below looks like on its page.

The service is in Beta testing for the time being, and you must request an invite to use. Storify is being used by some large media companies to cover events such as the uprising in Egypt – both CBC and The Globe and Mail created Storify pages. And with the recent announcement that Storify raised $2 million in its first round of funding, it looks like we’ll be seeing even more Storify embeds on the pages of news sites.

It’s a great tool for breaking news, but could also be used “to remember an event through what people share, whether it’s a conference, wedding, election or natural disaster,” says its profile on Crunchbase.

How would you use Storify?

Firstly, if you haven’t already, set up a Facebook username under Account>Account Settings. The obvious choice would be your full name – or the nearest equivalent if that’s been scooped.

Then, add an account to iChat. If you haven’t used it before, it will open to this window, otherwise open Preferences and add account.

Change your server settings in Preferences

Set new account type to Jabber. Enter username@chat.facebook.com as the account name, substituting the username you chose. Enter the same password you use for Facebook.

Expand server options and enter chat.facebook.com as the server and 5222 as the port. Leave SSL and Kerberos unchecked and press Done. It’s that easy – and iChat is a much nicer interface than Facebook!

For editing, capture from tape creates few problems. But the rise of video-to-disc systems means most camera manufacturers record in codecs that that are highly compressed and not designed for editing.

Which means that a lot of times you could end up with video that doesn’t play so well in your Final Cut Pro and Avid editing systems.

So after coming across the article To Transcode and Not to Transcode? I started thinking that using Premier sounds pretty sweet.

For those of us not using Premier I recommend using Streamclip, which has a feature I find very handy – File>Show Stream Info (cmd, i) will give you all kinds of useful information for import, such as frame size, and kbps.

What is your workflow, do you transcode before editing? Will Premier capture a bigger market share because it’s so handy to edit using native file formats?

So without further ado, here are a few of my favourite journalism sites on the web today.

Journalism coders

Hacks and Hackers is a digital community of people who seek to inspire each other, share information (and code) and collaborate to invent the future of media and journalism.

Sadly the meetups for this group are far away from where I live, but I follow its founders Burt Herman, Rich Gordon, and Aron Pilhofer on Twitter and find its Q&A site helpful. Have a question about media and technology, post it here and knowledgeable journalist/coders will jump in to help you out.

News University

Poynter’s newsu.org is a wonderful interactive journalism training site, and many of its courses are either free or cheap. (And we all know how much journalists love free stuff.)

I have taken some fantastic free courses such as Multimedia Reporting: Covering Breaking News, Video Storytelling for the Web and Online Project Development. I advise you to go and create an account, and to follow newsuniversity on Twitter.

The Nieman Journalism Lab

The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.

The J-lab’s Twitter stream is a great source of news about, well, news.

Recent stories include How The Guardian is pioneering data journalism with free tools, Calmness, curation, cat porn, and The NYT’s depressing list of most looked-up words

Lastly, a not-totally-journalistic site

I am going to throw in Read Write Web. I didn’t include it in the top 3 as it as more a general technology blog, but it has plenty of stories of interest to journalists and is well worth a follow on Twitter.

That’s my very unscientific list – what are your favourite journalism sites?

As a graphic designer for the Ottawa Chamber Music Society, created a series of ads for the Ottawa Citizen; produced promotional brochures. Tasks: graphic design, photography.

While working at the Graphic Advocate, organized the production of four monthly publications: Atlantic Fisherman, Southender, Bedford Magazine and Dartmouth Laker. Tasks: managing freelancers, editing, photography, writing.

At the Halifax Daily News, worked to strict deadlines in a high-pressure newsroom. Tasks: page layout, headline writing, copy editing and choosing stories and photos for publication.

For Xtra.ca, created a series of news stories with quick turnarounds. Tasks: research, storyboarding, shooting and editing.

Work in Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Flash.

Arctic Apocalypse Zombie Walk 2009

Folk on the Rocks 2009

George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary, B.C.

Vancouver Pride 2008

Developed/redesigned/implemented:

• Mailchimp email marketing system
• Redesigned bloggers page and added dynamic content using RSS feeds and various social media channels
• Designed Ad Contests page
• Created and maintained page for Yellowknife’s 2009 civic election (page no longer live). Coding/design and creation of 20+ Flash videos with interviews of candidates.
• Designed alancoatm.ca

My portfolio website is at ehargreaves.com

View recent work on Flickr channel.