Storify is a way to put stories together using social media outlets. You come up with your title and figure out what you want your story to be about, and Storify will provide you with the tools to search the various social media outlets, and you choose what stories they pull you want to add to your story. You arrange them the way you want and you can credit any tweets you use and then publish it. Sounds pretty awesome right?

Well, the downside is that it’s going to be kind of difficult to find tweets and facebook posts, etc, that are about hard news events, not impossible, just difficult. You also have to have an account with Storify, which, as we learned in our class, is very hard to get. It took me at least a week to get the invite, but I want to say it was even longer than that. Another problem with Storify is what are the odds that the story you’re looking for has already been made in Storify? Chances are it hasn’t been done yet, so in an effort to save others that effort you create your own so that you won’t have to scower the social media scene by hand. In reality though, the effort it took you to create that story will probably have been even more effort than it would have taken you to just look it up separately.

I think the idea behind the program is a good one, but I think it’s more useful for someone who is looking to create these stories than it is for someone who wants to use these stories, at least until it becomes less selective in its invites. When it becomes open for everyone to use, then I think it might rise in popularity, but until then, it’s a little stunted.

And since I did get an invite eventually, I did create a story so here is mine: The Hunger Games

Last Wednesday there was apparently a hacker attack on Sony’s Playstation Network, and as a result of the breach, Sony has shut down the Playstation Network until further notice. When I tried to log in Wednesday only to be denied, I took to the internet and was largely unable to find the source, except for a few tweets from other disgruntled users. That day the Playstation Blog posted a vague couple sentences about the outage, and angry users took to facebook, twitter, and the blog scene over the following days to voice their irritation, but the majority of the complaints were about the lack of information.

Several people cried for a twitter response from Sony regarding the issue and when the network would be back up. The next day a new blog post went up that was equally vague but at least gave users a time frame. However, it’s now the 26th and the network is still down, so what little information we received was incorrect. Playstation users are taking to the Playstation Blog and twitter to take out their frustrationsClick to view slideshow.

The incident is really showing that users in a digital age want to be in the conversation and they want prompt and informative answers to their questions. I think one of the biggest lessons Sony will learn from this experience is the fact that with all this social media at their finger tips, they are going to be expected to be more on the ball. As you look at the progression of blog posts Sony has done, you can see that as time went on and more and more complaints came in, they figured out that users wanted more concrete information and they’ve worked to incorporate it.

But with days of little to no information, and plenty of threats by users to drop PS3 for XBox, the damage may have already been done. What do you think? Can Sony recover from their crippling social media train wreck?

Cosmo Cover

leaving only 19% who said they loved their Twitter’s.

So my question is, how realistic is this? Is twitter really that unpopular? Well I can shed a little light on this. First of all, the survey was taken out of context. I looked up the survey done by the Pew Center, and that 14% is the largest percentage of users, so the majority of users were in that age range, and the majority of users are women. So the spin that the Cosmo article gave it was a little incorrect. More interesting than that finding was the fact that 8% of American adults who use the internet use twitter. But the article in question ignores that fact.

My favorite part of the article, though, was the poll in which 81% of readers said that only marketing executives are excited about Twitter. I might not be the best person to ask about Twitter, this I know, but I kind of agree with the poll. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that marketing executives take Twitter too far. When you post every five minutes, every single day, you’ve gone too far. CNN I’m looking at you. Part of my problem with Twitter is that there is so much useless information posted all the time that it’s impossible to keep up with and not worth the time. If I wanted that information, I’d go to the website. I can see where Twitter would be nice if people didn’t post so frequently, but it’s just too much too fast.

Personal Twitter accounts are kind of worthless unless you’re creating your own brand, so this is probably why people say they aren’t very attached to Twitter. It’s useful for marketing, but if you’re looking into a personal account, you might as well just get a Facebook where there is no character limit.

Elizabeth Hilpipre works for the Nebraska Humane Society as the social media guru. She’s singlehandedly taken their stale facebook page and generated a ton of likes. They are currently up to about 14,000. She explained to our group about how’s she’s gone about social media and the biggest lesson I took from our talk is targeting your audience.

Elizabeth talked about how originally they just posted photos of the animals, and those weren’t getting a lot of response. So then she started doing little videos and giving them cute titles and the feedback went through the roof. She realized that what her audience wanted was cutesy things. Words like puppies and kittens get the biggest response, and animals named after food or colors tended to get adopted faster.

She found that facebook was the best way to reach an audience in the roughly 18 to 24 age range and it’s helped her bring in some donations from that crowd, which is traditionally a very hard range to market to. It’s all about knowing who you’re trying to reach and figuring out what is and isn’t working. Elizabeth realized that people needed to feel more engaged in their facebook page so she began posting videos and asking questions, and responding to comments.

Probably one of the most important tips for sucess in social media is staying on top of it. It’s a conversation. She spends hours and hours a day responding to messages online, but it’s obviously paying off very well. And that constant dialogue keeps your page fresh in the minds of your viewers and keeps them coming back. It’s also important to try new things on the web because it’s always changing. What works today might not work tomorrow, and what’s hott today might be gone tomorrow; so it’s important to keep an eye out for trends. I think if anyone wanted any social media tips, they could definitely take some pointers from Elizabeth.

Mobile devices like the iPad are replacing traditional outlets like print.

I think the reason that less people report reading newspapers in any form is because social media outlets like twitter and blogs are posting the same information, but it’s faster and more convenient to find than traditional news stories. Social media makes news more readily available, and it will be interesting to see what new kinds of outlets will be emerging to replace traditional news sites. As a journalism student, it’s pretty interesting to speculate just how much the journalism field will change.

Already Creighton is integrating the Journalism and Computer Science departments and merging them together to create young professionals who can both navigate these outlets and programs, as well as create them and understand how they function. Programs like that will be creating the next generation of news and news outlets creators and I think there are even more changes ahead.

I don’t think that traditional news sites will ever fully die out though. At least I hope not. Coming from a small town, everyone still gets and relies on the paper to get their information, and even more technologically savy folks, like my mom, rely on news websites to get their info and I really don’t see that changing. If you’re a poor person you can’t afford emerging technology, you’re lucky to even have a computer, so you’re dependent on print. And if you’re from a rural area or own a business, you depend on the news to know market trends and get forecasts so you can better anticipate changes in your business. I don’t see that ever changing either. So the fear that maybe news will die out altogether I think is probably unlikely. But like I said before, it will be very interesting to see how our news outlets change.

Together, Inc. Logo

for. We decided on Together, Inc. which is a food bank near campus. But it’s so much more than a food bank, it’s all about homelessness prevention so they provide documents, food, furniture, clothes, rent assistance, etc. Anyway, we had to critique their facebook page and then try to revamp it. Today I revisited their page and it’s actually looking pretty good.

They have utilized their tabs really well, posting their hours, location, and contact information in the Info tab, and then they have pictures of all the staff, a couple pictures of the building, and then pictures of some of their events in their Photos tab. There is a tab for video but nothing pops up, so that needs work, but they have a decent video presence on their wall. They post about once a week which I think is a fair amount. I know personally I wouldn’t want to see posts from something like a nonprofit every day. It just gets annoying when a business or nonprofit posts too often, you lose interest and their posts become less relevant. But Together, Inc. keeps it pretty relevant with posts mainly about upcoming events or thank you’s for large donations.

I think if they wanted to improve the page they will definitely need more video. Anymore every one is interested in getting their information via video. Stories are made much more real when they are taken off the page and you can see things in real time. I think if people are checking out their page, they are there to get their hours and location (check), or to check out upcoming events and ways to get involved (check). So overall I think their page does a pretty good job. They only have 250 likes, but I think that’s just because their page isn’t advertised much. I think maybe facebook ads would probably be pretty useful for them because then they could draw more people in to their page and they need that because they really don’t have many likes.

For the past year and a half I’ve felt a growing unease with my place in life. Growing up I’d always wanted to change the world, where as peers wanted to become rock stars or firemen. I’d sort of forgotten about that though, giving in to the idea that one person couldn’t change the world, but after taking a particularly inspiring theology class, I resurrected it. I was torn between what I thought I was supposed to do and what I wanted to do with my life, and so like anyone in crisis, I prayed. I prayed fervently for signs as to what I was supposed to do. Oddly enough they were every where, and I recognized each one but I was too afraid to take them. For instance, I’d pray one night for a sign, and the next day I’d see a billboard saying “Be the change you wish to see.” Every time. It was the weirdest thing.

At the same time as all this, I’d been hearing from tons of people that I should read “The Hunger Games”, and I’d ignored it all along, just like all those signs, probably realizing it would change everything. But when my really inspiring theology teacher brought it up, I finally decided to give the books a look. I read all three in under three days. The day I finished the last one I was driving home, and I began to cry. I wasn’t particularly sad, but I was deeply moved by these books, and very scared for what I was sure I had to do next. So one final time I asked God for a sign, and I turned on the radio and hit seek. I landed on a song, the exact lyric at the time going something along the lines of give up everything, don’t be afraid, go change the world. I’m not even kidding. If I could remember the lyric exactly I’d post the song, but I didn’t think to make note of it.

So what change am I looking for? How is this all relevant? Well the change is best illustrated through the books. The Capitol, the ruling power, gets entertainment out of watching these children suffer and murder each other, the people of the Capitol are mindless drones doing whatever they are told, and not questioning anything, not caring for the problems of the rest of the world because they are taken care of. They are all about fashion and what’s on tv.

The Capitol is America if you haven’t guessed and I’m so disgusted by it. Now don’t be offended. Before you zoom over to the comments to berate me, think about it. What do you look at on the internet? How do you use social media? Do you retweet CNN or do you retweet Perez? Do you watch the news? If so what do you pay more attention to? Which celeb is getting a divorce or the problems in Cairo? This isn’t supposed to be a post about how we are all stupid, but rather a post to get attention. A call to action if you will.

Maybe I won’t change the world, but if I don’t try, I’m no different than a citizen of the Capitol. So my challenge to you

Save the Children logo

is post less about your life or shallow materialistic things, and instead start thinking. Break out of the box, and find something that is actually meaningful to post about, or if you’re not a twitter or facebook junkie, try donating to a cause. A lot of things require very small donations but you can make a huge difference. Cut back on pop money and sponsor a kid on savethechildren.org. Be the change.

My thoughts? I want to agree with this and in most ways I do, but I think it’s a tricky argument that is hard to navigate. I would agree that we are becoming totally dependent on our social media tools which I think is ridiculous. Granted, I have a twitter for class and I keep up with it for the most part, but in all reality, I despise twitter. I think it gives people an excuse to talk about their every move, and facebook isn’t much better now that it has that application where you can tell the facebook world where you are. Not only do I think this is stupid, but it’s also dangerous. People post that they are going to be out of town and thieves find easy targets.

Not only that but take a look through your friends list. I guarantee you have like twenty friends on there you’ve never even talked to. Tools like facebook are an excuse to make people feel connected when in reality they will never talk to these people. And then you have another twenty friends, maybe more, that you talk to about once a month. You grab a basic rundown on what’s going on in their life and you feel satisfied in saying you’re still friends because you facebooked. Whatever happened to the days of going out to lunch or grabbing coffee to catch up with old friends?

And as much as you might not want to admit it, you know that you have still more friends that you will run into on a daily basis but whom you’ll avoid by texting so it appears you didn’t see them and you have a legitimate excuse to ignore them. Why? Because we don’t like to hold face to face conversations any more. We don’t even like talking on the phone anymore. Why have a lengthy conversation with someone when a couple texts will get you the information you need? Why have an awkward exchange with the pizza delivery guy when you can order online?

Social media is giving us a chance to have more ‘relationships’ that are actually very shallow and not important and it’s hindering our progress towards making lasting relationships. We are a lazy, I-want-it-now society. Technology is our drug of choice, and social media is our enabler.

I am a critical thinker who hopes to one day change the world with either my writing or through my actions.

My fingers are straining at the keyboard. My brain is willing me to elaborate. But I will leave it at that to avoid a run-on sentence and keep it short and sweet.

So why is that my sentence? Here again, I will try to reign myself in on the answer, but at the heart of it…I hate what we’ve become. As my college journey is nearing its close, I hate what I see in the world and often in people around me and I’m realizing more and more what’s important to me and what I see as the purpose of life. Technology plays a huge part in this. We’re so engrossed in social media and technology, which I don’t deny plays a heavy hand in my life as well, that we’re ignorant to the worlds problems. I don’t want to be that person anymore. I want to help people, I want to make a difference. The point of living isn’t to go to work 9 to 5, come home, eat dinner, sleep, and do it all over again. Life is about helping others. I want to more fully live that. If you’ve ever read “The Hunger Games” trilogy by Suzanne Collins, you will see the catalyst in that movement. I recognized that Americans are the citizens of the Capitol, and the other districts are other countries. The books were incredible and extremely powerful, and they made me realize, I want to being fighting along side Katniss, not with the Capitol.

Both blogs had a post about how the recent Arizona shootings were covered via twitter and how that lead to a spread of false information. According to lostremote, several news outlets like NPR and Reuters reported incorrectly that Rep Giffords had died after the shooting, when in fact she is still alive. It lead to the topic of where news is heading when social media like twitter, which is not controlled and monitored as closely as traditional news sites, are the leading forms through which people seek their news.

It also lead to the discussion of whether or not you should be able to delete your tweets if they are incorrect. Some bloggers felt that if tweets are to be taken seriously, you shouldn’t be able to edit or delete them because they wouldn’t be stable. However, it was also argued that if you couldn’t delete your posts or edit them, then you’d have dead news like newspapers, stale and boring and incorrect. The solution that I thought was best was the idea that you should post a correction post, stating that the information was false, acknowledging that you messed up, but correcting yourself as well.

Overall both blogs were incredibly interesting, but as I stated before, this is why the internet should be wary. If it is true that twitter and blogs are becoming the more popular avenues by which news travels, then we should all be more careful about checking out those tweets and posts and making sure that those stories match up with others to be sure that the information we are receiving and possibly passing on is correct. And then, of course, the even bigger problem, even scarier, is the fact that if this is true, then someone might actually mistake my blog or twitter for news….heaven help you if you do…