Twitter has been great because it adds a value to my life I just can’t get from other services. Where else can you just poof have a conversation with a major CEO, or managing editor, or a long-revered photojournalist? Professionally it’s been great. Heck, I even landed my job at the Center for Sustainable Journalism on Twitter.

But, I’ll admit, with all the junk floating around I find it laborious to sign on, check someone’s feed and do a through evaluation of their personality traits every time I get a “new follower” update in my inbox.

Honestly, I’ve gotten to the point that I can tell pretty much everything I need to know about you from the graphic in my e-mail.

My primary use of Twitter is for professional development and staying connected with others in my field. I have a few friends, but I’m just not the ‘let’s live tweet the season premiere of XYZ’ kind of guy.

With that said, the little graphic that ends up in my e-mail is basically your cover letter. You are tasked with convincing me (and everyone/anyone else) that you’re actually worth following. Here’s how to do it:

1. Make the link between your profile name and you obvious.
   Sorry FernGuyz87, but after a while I WILL forget your name was George from that conversation we had 10 months ago. Make the connection between who you are and/or what you do with your name. If you get a good, widely-known name that may be worth keeping (I’m facebook.com/multimediajournalist, for example), but otherwise go with your real name or an easy to understand – and short – abbreviation. Not doing this can show a lack of attention to detail.
2. Tell me what you do and offer some insight into your personality or life, quickly.
   Bio box time. Give your title, or perspective title, who you are, and (indirectly) why you’d be interesting to follow. The point, I think, is to have fun with it a bit. Twitter is more informal to platforms like LinkedIn, allowing users to have normal, day-to-day type communications and get to know some interesting people that may not have otherwise met.
3. Are you a follower or leader?
   I hate to sound like a marketer, but your ratio of the number of people you follow compared to the number of people who follow you does matter a bit. Don’t go follow 800 people when only 60 people follow you. It says much more if you have 60 followers and only follow 20 people. Big numbers aren’t the most important things.
4. You’ve only sent four tweets… ever?!
   Seriously? You’ve only sent four tweets? Well, if you are a real person, you should use it more. Honestly, following you probably wouldn’t add any value to my day. The main thing is, though, that is a quick indicator that you’re looking at a junk, spam or bot account. If you’re new to the game play around and talk to some random people before you try and get a follow back from your idol. You may only get one shot. On that note, the best way to get followers is to, well, tweet a lot. Go figure.
5. How many mutual friends do we have?
   If you do everything else right then I don’t put much weight on our mutual friends. Twitter is great for meeting new people. But if I’m still a little weary I’ll check this box out. Obviously, the more friends we mutually follow (and that follow each of us) shows you’re a cool cat and we can be friends.

So, that’s my advice for optimizing you profile to get more follow-backs. What’s yours? Oh, if you want feel free to follow me on Twitter

In the social media world things tend to change quickly. A year may as well be a decade, or at least it seems. Videoinfographs.com has put together a great, engaging video infographic with the tweet, liked and +plus-ed trends of the year. One of the most interesting? More people are now on Facebook than own cars in the world…

With new years right around the corner one has to wonder what’s in store for 2012. With this brief look at the year past we say cheers to the futures.

Developing an online presence for professional development can no longer afford to be an after thought. Increasingly companies are turning to web and social media sites when looking for perspective employees or considering applicants during the interview process.

The same report by Career Xroads found more than a quarter of hired job seekers found their new position based on professional referrals. Fortunately, many possible referrers are online too, greatly enhancing our abilities to stay connected and expand our established networks.

Social media sites are a great way to do this since they’re designed for person-to-person interactions. In the end, however, social media may just be a part of your overall web persona.

LinkedIn, the only social networking site set up specifically for professional networking, is a good place to really expand your network, showcase your talents and leave a digital footprint that appeals to perspective employers. With more than 100 million professionals on the site, and 44 million of those being in the United States, LinkedIn is a strategic platform to accelerate your career goals – but only to the extent you’re willing to maintain your presence on the site.

Creating a half-completed profile, posting unclear or grammatically incorrect information or showing that you don’t understand how to use the platform can be detrimental to your job efforts.

These five tips should help you build, enhance or expand your LinkedIn job-hunting tactics and push you one step closer to that dream job.

1. Complete your profile:
   We mentioned this briefly above, but it really is important. Fill out all relevant information that is RELATED TO THE JOB you’re after. Consider omitting unrelated experience unless it adds credentials toward the position you’re after. Upload a professional photo and keep the content of your profile professional and well edited. Personalize your URL.
2. Work your connections:
   LinkedIn offers a number of ways to connect to your existing address books online and find existing connects. Use these to get started. Ask close connections for recommendations of your work. Try NOT to connect with people randomly. Those tactics may work well on Twitter or Facebook, but LinkedIn is about developing a real, tangible network of industry connections. With that said, don’t be shy about asking for an introduction to someone you’d like to meet through a shared connection. Most experiences I’ve had with this have been very positive.
3. Build your reputation:
   So you’ve tapped out your personal network and run into another hurdle in your job hunt. Now what? LinkedIn offers a number of groups around industry and other topics. These can be a great place to meet people in the field, show off your knowledge and possibly catch the eye of an industry recruiter.
4. Update your profile:
   Think of your LinkedIn profile as your online resume. Get someone (friend, career advisor, anyone really) to spell-check your work. Connect your other social and other web sites to your profile, along with basic contact information like an e-mail address. Make yourself easy to find, understand and appealing to busy recruiters and others tasked with the hoopla of hiring. Extras, such as multimedia elements or embedded slideshows can add a bit of flare to your efforts.
5. Share often:
   Compared to Twitter and Facebook, conversations on LinkedIn tend to be a little slower-paced, taking place over the course of days instead of seconds and minutes. Many people sync their LinkedIn profile with other, more active sites such as Twitter or a blog RSS feed. This isn’t a bad idea, but make sure your content is relevant and professional. Also, consider the size of your following on LinkedIn and their usage patterns so you don’t overwhelm them with updates.

Really, these are kind of the basics, but they tend to get overlooked. Feel free to add your advice below. If there’s a big enough response we’ll do an intermediate, or more-focused, post on leveraging LinkedIn for job hunting.

Up next, the five reasons you don’t get followed back on Twitter.

The Public Insight Network (PIN), a platform that helps journalists and citizens reach beyond PR professionals and media pundits to connect with experts and influencers within the community they serve, will basically serve the same function, but with the added ability to raise money from the communities PIN connections help forge.

For the time being at least, not much will change for Spot.Us or PIN. Here is an excerpt from the e-mail Spot.Us sent to community members early yesterday:

For the moment the functional changes to Spot.Us are minimal. Our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy will be updated along with reporter contracts on December 1st and we encourage you check back then (don’t worry, the changes are Kosher to Spot.Us’ values and ethos). I will remain at the helm but working with PIN to hand over certain responsibilities (this will be the last year I file our taxes!). We will remain on a credit system which means if a story doesn’t reach its goal you’ll receive credits back in your account and you can use those to fund a different story. Over the next few months, we’re going to be gradually integrating Spot.Us and PIN in a manner that pushes forward our vision for a media that is responsible and responsive to the public’s needs. It’s going to be freak’n awesome!

It seems like a solid idea. PIN and Spot.Us are connecting dots for journalists, pooling critical resources like sources and funding in a single place. It will be interesting to see how the collaboration/merger evolves.

Spot.Us brings a community of more than 12,000 members (about half of which have actually donated to a story) to PIN’s network of more than 120,000 sources. Presumably, the Spot.Us aspect of the company should see considerable growth and increased engagement as story pitches find their way in front of a larger pool of experts and community members interested in the topic(s).

The Public Insight Network is operated by American Public Media, the largest owner and operator of public radio stations in the United States.

Photo credit: Jules Brelaz

Competing for attention in the digital age is no easy task, and it takes a keen business sense to be successful. While journalists are good at journalism, what many of these start-ups lack is the business skills to find sufficient revenue to remain sustainable. Just 69% of respondents to this survey even have a business plan, and just 13% ranked their senior management team at the top in business skills.

And it seems that nothing too innovative is being done  (yet) by way of generating revenue. The highest ranking revenue streams are foundation grants, individual donations, and advertising. There is hope, however. The vast majority of respondents are optimistic that the journalism-heavy organizations can be successful in a business environment.

It will be interesting to see where these organizations are in a year.

Here is the full study.

Computational Journalism is defined as the application of computation to the activities of journalism such as information gathering, organization, communication, and dissemination of information, while upholding values of journalism such as accuracy and verifiability.

I am publisher of our Center for Sustainable Journalism’s Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, JJIE.org.
We are only folks covering juvenile justice with professional journalists everyday. People apparently like what we are doing because we have 31,000 unique visitors a month and about 2,000 page views a day. Still we think we are only scratching the surface of our full potential.

How can we use computational journalism or the very smart crowd at Georgia Tech to help us answer these questions?

Can computers reach out and pull in this kind of information for us as we just sit back and watch it happen:

• Who is professionally covering juvenile justice?
• Who is interested in juvenile justice?
• Who is writing about it, producing content, but is not a professional?
• Who is studying it?
• Who is affected by it?
• Who works in the juvenile justice space?
• Who is simply interested in the topic?

Once we identify all those individuals in those groups how can we make them aware of what we are doing and bring all their energy, thought and production into the JJIE.org?

Then how might we provide added value to them that they might support us financially?

Got any answers, let us know. Thanks.

With nearly seven out of every 10 households now subscribing to broadband services more Americans are using high-speed internet than ever before, yet disparities still exist along socio-economic, demographic and geographic lines, according to a new Census data report by the Department of Commerce’s Economic Statistics Administration (ESA) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

The report, “Exploring the Digital Nation: Computer and Internet Use at Home,” found a strong correlation between broadband adoption and socio-economic factors such as income and education, but said the differences didn’t explain the entire gap in adoption rates along racial, ethnic and geographic lines.

“Closing the broadband adoption gap is a priority because Americans increasingly need 21st Century skills to succeed in today’s economy,” Acting Deputy Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank said in a release.

Sixty-eight percent of Americans households used broadband to access the Internet in their home in 2010, a four percent increase from 2009. Additionally, about nine percent of households access the Internet outside the home, bringing the total percentage of Americans online to about 80 percent.

Dial-up Internet access, which was the preferred way to get online until  the mid 2000′s, continued it’s decline in popularity from five percent in 2009 to just three percent in 2010.

The NTIA, a co-author of the report, offers grant programs focused on the development and expansion of public computer labs and digital training. The agency hopes to increase access and skill sets of those without a computer in the home, but nearly half of the respondents in the study said they didn’t have Internet access in their home by choice, citing the lack of interest or need.

Overall, Internet access among households has increased nearly four fold since 1997, yet exact numbers vary largely by state and other indicators. Geographically, urban families are more likely to have high-speed internet access in their homes than their rural counterparts.

Demographically, Asian households had the highest adoption rates with 81 percent of homes reporting broadband access. White households came placed second with 72 percent, followed by Hispanic and black households at 57 and 55 percent respectively.

Also among the findings, households with young children were more likely to have broadband in the home (78 percent) and older households, particularly age 65 and older, were less likely to have access (45 percent).

In 2010, 71 percent of households were online compared to just 19 percent in 1997. While adoption rates continue to climb, more than a quarter of American household still don’t maintain Internet access in the home.

Dial-up Internet access, the most popular way to get online until the mid-2000′s, continued it’s downward trend with just three percent of households using it to connect in 2010, compared to five percent a year earlier.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, argues for complete transparency (thus accountability) on the Internet. Christopher “Moot” Poole, founder of the image message board 4Chan, argues for the anonymity and the freedom it brings.

Both perspectives affect how we interact and communicate online and increasingly within the world around us as our culture becomes more and more tech-saturated.

In this presentation Echols and Duda examine each argument and the respective founder’s real-world actions within the historical context of communication and interpersonal studies.

How has context collapse reshaped the way you communicate on and offline?