Tools and tips to build an online community

JD Lasica gives a good presentation here at an ethnic media publishers at San Francisco State University the other week.

His strategy?

1. Be first with breaking news
2. Leverage Twitter
3. Enable conversations
4. Community video
5. Online petitions & causes
6. Geocoding & citizen photography
7. Google map mashups
8. Facebook communities

Tools to Build an Engaged Online Community

View more documents from JD Lasica.

In praise of the ball point pen

Apparently the ball point pen comes top of the necessary items in a journalists kit bag.

ballpoint pens are as valuable as a reporter's notebooks and press passes.It is for this reason that journalists latch onto ballpoint pens like squirrels onto nuts.
Without their ballpoint pens, reporters are rendered useless and feel as vulnerable as they do without fedoras.

writes Christopher Ortiz,adding that

At any given time, a journalist will have anywhere from two to 20 of ballpoint pens on their person, as well as another hundred or so squirreled away in various drawers, glove boxes, purses and brief cases.This isn’t so much because journalists are afraid of being caught without their trusty writing instrument so much as it is because such pens are becoming a rare commodity in the modern day newsroom..

RSS has reached a peak

I happen to think that RSS is one of the best tools that a journalist can have so I was surprised to read that its use may be recahing a peak

According to research by Forrester

Nearly half of interactive marketers use RSS, but consumer adoption has only reached 11%. Of the consumers who haven't adopted RSS, most don't understand how RSS is relevant to their lives and the way they seek information. If marketers expect to reach a critical mass of consumers by using content syndication, then they must take on the burden of education

Mind you as Micro Persuasion says

Still, while feed adoption may have crested the idea of online opt-in communications is just getting going. The Facebook newsfeed, Twitter and Friendfeed are perfect examples of opt-in vehichles that bring content you care about to you. In each case, you're total in control. You can unsubscribe from individuals or groups and tailor the stream so that what you want finds you.
RSS is only one form of opt-in communications. The potential is bigger when you look more broadly to social networking. This larger promise still holds and as the technologies become more invisible the newsfeed could even one day subsume RSS.