links for 2009-06-27

Gudo Fawkes cites mainstream media failure to check a tweet on 26/6/09: "On Wednesday Guido gave a presentation to the Press Association on the future of digital journalism. Looks like Guido could teach them something about checking their sources…". Surely not possibly the same Guido Fawkes who on May 20th this year reckoned a tweet about the date of the next election was genuine because "Nick Brown’s Twitter account has been deleted. Think that suggests it was genuine". I'll eat his hat...

"So this poses a question: What will it take to reach the point where a non-tech industry actually reports on itself?". My gut reaction is that it will take the economy to recover to the extent that 'reporting' will not be seen as a fringe time-wasting, "Hang on, we're paying x-thousand pounds for our B2B magazine subscriptions" type of activity...

Via Martin Stabe who was sceptical about this, and I agree. Robert Niles says "How hard would it be to tweet: 'TMZ reports Jackson has died. We cannot confirm. Working on details'? Or 'No confirmation on rumors about Jackson's death. We're in contact with authorities'?". It wouldn't be hard at all, but I'd soon get really pi$$ed off with a news alert from a trusted MSM source that kept sending me messages saying "A blog / tweeter / bloke in the pub said x, but we can't verify it yet, still, thought we'd pass the rumour along"

"The wire service AFP, the Daily Mirror, the Times, Sky, the Evening Standard, the Telegraph (even though it has taken the story down) and even we at the Guardian were duped into publishing a tribute to Michael Jackson on a Twitter account purportedly from MP and foreign secretary David Miliband". D'oh!

"The items covering the death of the vocalist on Quincy Jones' greatest album". Meow.

"Andy Koh, Alvin Lim and Ng Ee Soon of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore researched 1224 bloggers worldwide. Looking at blogger ethics, the researchers concluded that: 'Personal bloggers valued attribution most, followed by minimizing harm, truth-telling and accountability respectively. Non-personal bloggers valued both attribution and truth-telling most, followed by minimizing harm, then accountability. For both groups, attribution was most valued, and accountability least valued.'"