Many non-profits, NGOs and International Organizations are of two minds when it comes to sharing photos on the internet. On the one hand, they want their material to be shared as widely as possible, on the other hand they want to have total control. The decision matrix in this blog post will help you decide which photos to share and how.
No matter where you stand on the debate surrounding Invisible Children’s work, from a marketing point of view the Kony 2012 campaign is an amazing success. We now have the first data and analysis showing why the 30 minute video turned viral. The short answer is: it took a lot of work!
On March 31, the US state department will launch a global man-hunt. Internet users in New York. Washington D.C., Stockholm, London and Bratislava will be given mugshots of five individuals (one per city). Whoever manages to catch within the 12 hour time-limit will be given 5,000 USD. Welcome to terrorism-hunt 2.0.
Yesterday, Facebook announced that it would introduce the new Facebook timeline-layout for all Facebook pages on March 30. This means you have one month to get ready. This blog post contains some suggestions that can help you create Facebook covers in no time.
I just finished a four-week online course called “Tech Tools for Emergency Management”. The course is run by TechChange and covers some of the new digital tools that have been much talked about in the context of emergency response, such as Ushahidi, Open Street Map, Frontline SMS and social media in general.
As many of you know, I’m quite critical when it comes to how to the impressive information gathering possibilities of crisis mapping tools turn into actionable information for responders. On LinkedIn someone shared a video with me today where Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier addresses some of these concerns.
For the past three days I have been following the coverage of the Liberia elections on liberia2011.ushahidi.com. Unfortunately, I’m far from impressed. To be clear: this is not the fault of Ushahidi: After all, Ushahidi is just the technical platform and it is the responsibility of others to feed the system information, but it shows the limitations of crowdsourcing information.
The BBC has now published elements process for verifying social media content, which makes for an excellent read. What emerges is a process that is more like that of a traditional intelligence agency, than what most people had in mind when joining journalism school.
