There was plenty of information on Twitter, but the city was silent.
There has been talk in council of using Twitter (for a full list of councillor social media links, check out Kyle’s listing.) I think that’s a good start, and keeping its website up-to-date would be another avenue.

Nanaimo's website features emergency warning registration form

For instance, the city of Nanaimo website features a prominent Emergency Notification link on its homepage. You register with a form and can receive emergency notifications via telephone or email. The phone/email you receive will detail the nature of the situation and give instructions on what to do.

This is a great idea, I think Yellowknife should adopt it. How about you?

With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success.

I recently began to use Twitter at work and decided it was time I got around to signing up for an account with HootSuite to make it easier to tweet from both work and home. I already knew this tool allows for scheduled tweets but I didn’t know that you can:

• manage user profiles to let multiple people tweet from same account
• “Enable auto track” to add initials to tweet
• embed Google AdSense to generate money from your tweets
• tweet your RSS feed (advised to select frequency of tweets so as not to appear spammy)
• collect stats on click-throughs of your links

For more information on this great Twitter power tool, I recommend this blog post by Chris Spagnuolo.

CNN, Facebook partner

Interesting story on journalism.co.uk about CNN’s plans to incorporate social media into its coverage of President Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20.

So of course I had to log on and become a Facebook fan of CNN to see what it was all about. The event promo says:

What will your Facebook status say when Obama becomes President? CNN.com and Facebook are partnering to enable you to update your status, and follow you friends’ updates, while you watch the inauguration live online, all on http://cnn.com/live …
Whether you’re at the office, at home, at the library, or anywhere else, you can share this moment in history with your Facebook friends live, as it happens.

The story links to NPR (National Public Radio), which is requesting help with its social media coverage, including

• Mobcasting: audio recordings of voicemails left by listeners about their thoughts and feelings on inauguration day
• An inauguration tag of #inaug09 for Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blogs, etc
• Maps of user-generated content

iReport blog gathers news from masses

The maps feature is also prominent iReport, a site run by CNN with the disclaimer: “Only the stories marked ‘On CNN’ have been vetted by CNN for use in CNN’s global news coverage.”

Its world map feature lead me to a report on this fun gadget, a HD Video Recorder Snorkle Mask with Lights, shot at the CES in Las Vegas.

This massive crowd-sourced blog generated 225,003 reports worldwide last month, 1,085 of which ran on the CNN site also. That’s quite a content generator for the amount of resources needed.

Big media sites have redesigned their websites to accept user content and now use of social media tools. A TechCrunch post cites a Pew Survey that most Americans are getting their news from the Internet rather than newspapers. Although it states that TV still beats both the Internet and newspapers as a news source, it goes on to say, “give it a couple more years and the Internet should overtake that as well.”

But online advertising won’t always pay the kind of cash that a full page ad can. No wonder the newspapers have been turning their photographers into videographers … a 15 second commercial at the beginning of a clip can be a money spinner.

There is some good news on the horizon for media geeks though …  MediaShift states that, “As newspapers and broadcasters slice their senior-level workforce, they are also quietly building their digital and online teams.” And a Fast Company story points to the impending retirement of aging baby boomers and a new tech boom.

Plus for us West Coast Canadians … the 2010 Olympics is rumoured to be creating a job or two …