1. Sharing sharing sharing

Unlike other blogging platforms (eg. WordPress, Blogger) sharing is built into the DNA of Tumblr. It takes one click to repost a great image, quote or video from one Tumblr blog to yours. This rewards blogs that have great and well-defined editing, aggregation and curation. If you find great content and post it, it’ll get shared. Find enough great content and you’ll make yourself a destination.

Example: The Daily What. The popular blog finds the best, funniest and wackiest stuff online — odd videos, funny headlines, gobsmacking stories. Getting something on the Daily What pretty much means you’re getting reposted, liked and commented on by dozens if not hundreds of people.

2. Showing off your editorial voice

A number of publications use Tumblr as a great platform for their editorial voice by finding and posting a mix of self-produced content and things from other publications. Others trawl the seemingly endless waters of the internet for great finds. For a new publication, or one without a big recognizable name Tumblr is another way for you to show potential readers what you’re all about.

Example: Worn Fashion Journal‘s Tumblr. An indie fashion magazine out of Toronto, the Wornettes find photos, illustrations and articles that inspire them. It gives the magazine a way to keep their magazine out there and I get the feeling that it helps the editors, contributors and interns sharpen their ideas. (Disclosure: I’ve contributed to Worn)

3. Visuals

Most CMSes and blogging platforms are designed with text in mind. It’s understandable considering that text is the dominant medium for many media outlets. Tumblr, on the other hand, is great for visuals. It actually seems to be designed with photos and graphics in mind.  There are tons of templates that are designed for photoblogging and it’s easy to design (or find) a template that’s visually rich and striking.

Example: The National Post Tumblr. We started the blog as a way to get the Post’s beautiful graphics, illustrations and photography on to a space where it could really take centre stage. Tumblr was the perfect fit. Want another great example? The New York Times’ T magazine Tumblr has pictures so big you probably want a 24′ monitor to really make it work.

Other notable Tumblr blogs:

The Washington Post‘s Innovations Tumblr cherry-picks the best digital journalism out there and gives us an inside glimpse at some of the great things their online team is doing.

A visually-heavy blog from a radio network? NPR’s Tumblr picks the best stories and lots and lots of images. A smart way of inserting yourself into the Tumblr community and conversation.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t include Newsweek‘s Tumblr, the granddaddy of media Tumblrs. Reading Newsweek’s Tumblr feels like a conversation with the smart and cosmopolitan writers and editors who work there.

If you’ve been reading this blog you’ll know that twitter is a huge part of my personal and professional life. On Friday, I reached a pretty big personal milestone and sent out my 10,000 tweet. Yes, it means I tweet a lot. Some of it is inane, but I try my best to keep it entertaining, informative and relevant.

I’ve had the chance to talk to journalism students about using social media to build their practice and I can’t stress how useful twitter is. So in honour of 10,000 tweets I want to reiterate the three things I’ve learned about twitter:

1) It’s a great way to ‘meet’ people in journalism

In a recent post, I expressed my admiration for the Atlantic’s online strategy. Through some odd game of six-degrees of separation, one the online editors for the Atlantic, Jared B. Keller introduced himself. I’ve had the chance to trade jokes with him and swap ideas with someone working at one of the most interesting outlets in journalism today.

I’ve also found it easier to go up and introduce myself to fellow journalists and editors who I’m already following on Twitter. Hey, at the very least you can ask them about that link they tweeted a few days back instead of engaging in small talk about the weather.

2) It’s a great way to keep up with the news

If you follow the right people and sources on twitter you’ll pretty much always have something to read. If you’re a freelancer looking for an idea, twitter can help find an idea for your next story or at least keep tabs on what other publications are doing. If you’re a beat reporter follow other people in your beat and relevant publications to have a curated stream that’ll keep you on top of what’s happening.

3) It’s a great source of breaking news *

The Mumbai terrorists attacks, the miracle on the Hudson, Toronto’s G20 protest, the Egypt revolution. I used Twitter as a news gathering tool when covering all of these stories. It’s an imperfect medium, and it won’t replace actually having reporters on the ground, but you can’t ignore it anymore.

* Except of course, when it isn’t. Hoaxes can spread easily on Twitter, so remember to verify before retweeting.

I suppose it was only a matter of time until Tumblr became a part of the news ecosystem.

A lot of users go to Tumblr for funny animated gifs or photos of hot girls but the recent events in Egypt actually saw Tumblr become a place to find great coverage, analysis and photos of the uprising in that country.

The blogging service has apparently rolled out edited tag pages, in this case #Egypt, to pull together the best content being published about that story. The Atlantic, which has an active presence on Tumblr, is one of the editors, which gives this little experiment some mainstream media cred.

It’s not as important as Twitter, or al-Jazeera’s compelling live coverage from Cairo, but it’s an interesting use of the Tumblr platform and the addition of human curation makes the feed much more usable than Twitter — do a search for #egypt and #jan25 and you’re inundated in seconds.

Maria Popova a.k.a. @Brainpicker

I save more links by Brainpicker than any other single person I follow on Twitter.

A writer, design nut and seemingly all-around interesting person, Popova manages to find wondrous stuff daily.

From her site:

Brain Pickings is about curating interestingness — picking culture’s collective brain for tidbits of stuff that inspires, revolutionizes, or simply makes us think. It’s about innovation and authenticity and all those other things that have become fluff phrases but don’t have to be.

Good Magazine @goodfeed

Based in Los Angeles, Good started as a magazine dedicated to showcasing people and organizations trying to come up with solutions to the world’s problems. The magazine has expanded online and their Twitter feed is one of the ways I keep up with their work.

Slate @slate

I’ve been a religious leader of Slate for many years and there are few online-only publications as smart and interesting. Slate has a more political and current-events bent than some of the previous feeds I’ve mentioned but there’s a great deal of levity there.

Honourable mentions: Can’t forget the smartypants at Wired and Fast Company, both of whom have excellent Twitter accounts. Also, I wouldn’t be a nerd worth my salt if I didn’t mention BoingBoing, the original “Directory of Wonderful Things”.

Now, I find myself doing something a little bit different. Using apps like Instapaper or Read It Later, I simply save articles to read later (usually on the commute home). It’s not unlike using your PVR to record your favourite show, or downloading podcasts because you can’t be glued to your radio at 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning.

The National Post’s new apps have integrated timeshifting features and I explain them here.

For media outlets ‘timeshifting’ of reading is something that they’ll have to cope with as more and more users flock to mobile and tablets for their reading. Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton argued that it was one of the key trends to look out for in 2011.

And if Read It Later’s own data is any indication it’s changing consumption patterns dramatically. Pushing people to read on iPads and smartphones and away from reading longer materials at the computer. It may even change the way some journalists write as this article points out.

How would that change the way we write? Well, first of all, someone would have to figure out (through web analytics hopefully) what the general cutoff point is for making the read-it-later action, i.e. how long does an article have to look for someone to want to save it for later.

There are also questions of monetization. Programs like Instapaper and Read It Later often strip out ads and minimizes layouts. So how do sites make money off people who save their articles to read later? Is it an acceptable cost? Remember that TV execs that decried ‘timeshifting’ and PVRs as theft were pretty much ignored by consumers.

Right now, I think most media outlets see Instapaper and Read It Later as being enablers for consumption of content and not as threats. This might change if large numbers of their readers stop reading articles on their site, where ads can be served and their reading, interaction data, etc. can be tracked.

There are a lot of great journalism minds on Twitter but not many of them can bring a Canadian perspective to the table. The three people below live or work in Canada and bring that to their tweets and insight on the future of journalism, tech and social media.

1. Craig Silver @craigsilverman

I’ve been following Craig’s work on Regret the Error for quite some time and he’s turned a seemingly small idea (examining mistakes in newspapers and magazines) into something much, much bigger. He’s also involved with some great projects (PBS Mediashift, OpenFile).

TBD’s Steve Buttry also has this great blog post on how Craig has built up his practice as an entrepreneurial journalist. On a personal note, I was fortunate to meet and spend some time with Craig at the ONA conference in Washington last October and he’s also a great guy.

2. Mathew Ingram @mathewi

I dare you to find a journalist in Canada as knowledgeable about social media as Mathew Ingram (OK, maybe Amber MacArthur). For years Mathew helped build the Globe’s social media and web strategy. A few years ago he left the Globe to become a senior writer at GigaOm, where he gets some great access to social media and technology’s brightest minds. His work at the Mesh conference has also helped bring a lot of those great thinkers here to Toronto.

3. Alfred Hermida @hermida

Alfred Hermida teaches at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism, the journalism school in Canada that’s doing the most interesting work online (an Emmy-award winning project on e-waste, a feature on sustainable seafood where students partnered with the Globe and Mail) Are you taking notes Ryerson, Carleton, Kings?

Following Alfred has given me better insight into what journalism students should expect from their journalism schools and their instructors.

A few others: I’d be remiss if I didn’t include my friend @KimFox who helps run social media efforts at the CBC and also @TimFalconer, who’s a great mentor to the students at the Ryerson magazine stream.

Hey, who says Storify has to only be used for “serious news.” I’m sure those guys like zombies as much as the next guy.

One of the reasons for the popularity of social media app Foursquare is its social gaming aspect. Accruing all those badges, beating out friends and strangers for mayorships is strangely addictive. This New York Times article talks a bit more about that:

While Foursquare has been talked about in corporate boardrooms as the next big thing in social media — it has some 2.5 million users — it has also spawned a more trivial pursuit: a petty and vicious battle over virtual pieces of turf.

Strangers are locked in bitter rivalries. Workplaces have been carved up into virtual battlefields. College campuses have become factionalized. Even some homes have become social media minefields.

Not bad for a feature that was never part of the original concept for Foursquare. Dennis Crowley, a founder, said the idea for becoming a mayor was born from a passing joke made by Chad Stoller, a friend and adviser, about the huge amount of time that Mr. Crowley and his partner, Naveen Selvadurai, were spending in a Greenwich Village cafe, hashing out their Web idea. “You two should be mayor,” Mr. Crowley recalled Mr. Stoller saying, in reference to the cafe. (Foursquare shuns the stuffy “mayoralty.”)

Indeed, Foursquare badges are so popular that the start-up has partnered with some big real-life partners to create badges (The History Channel, Zagats, Discovery). The company also has curtailed creating new badges because they’re apparently inundated with requests.

On Facebook games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, annoying as they can be, are also huge. Zynga, the company that created Farmville is valued by some at around $4-billion.

So what does this have to do with reading? While the act of reading is a personal one, what you read is a huge part of the social lives of many readers. Whether it’s keeping up with the latest instalment in a popular series, checking out the latest hipster author or finishing romance novels three at a time, many readers like to share what they’re reading.

E-readers and reading apps could easily add social gaming components easily. We’re not talking about Farmville for the literary set here, but something that could genuinely enhance the reading experience and maybe help spur sales too.

A few examples:

Goal-setting

Earlier this month Foursquare announced a partnership with Runkeeper to distribute fitness badges for running certain distances, meeting goals, etc. This could easily be applied to your reading habits. I set a goal earlier this year to read 52 books this year. Knowing there’s a social badge that exists would’ve been an extra incentive for me to stay on track. Need to read a book by the end of the month for your book club? Develop an app that sets deadlines for reading and rewards you a badge or something similar when you meet your goal.

Showing off your interests

Love fantasy novels, detective fiction or romance? What about a badge that shows off your love for these genres? Publishers could easily partner with an e-book distributor to dole out these virtual rewards. Got a series that’s taking off? Create a badge when people buy all the books in it.

Indie publishers could band together to create an “indies do it better” badge that’s given out when you buy a certain number of books from selected publishers.

A publishing house could create a badge to celebrate an anniversary, an event, etc.

Push sales

Create timed badges that are given when people buy books the first week (or month) of publication.

Spread the buzz

If you’re the Giller Prize (or the Writers Trust, or the Governor-Generals) why not create a badge every year that’s given out when someone buys one (or two, or three) of your nominated books.

Despite all the talk of the death of magazines and newspapers, it’s actually easier than ever before to read great long-form journalism.

Most, if not all, major publications place their content online. But unless you spend all day surfing magazine websites and skimming RSS feeds like an 11-year-old hopped up on Mountain Dew, you’re not going to find all the great stuff out there.

Fortunately, I recently found two websites that can help you find great long-form features online.

Longform.org and Long Reads are both very similar and they curate features new and old from magazines, papers and websites. They’re both run out of Brooklyn, so the focus is mostly American publications. They’re both big fans of the Instapaper app for your iPhone, which helps mobile users read articles by stripping them of fancy website formatting and saves them later.

Both of the services look like labours of love and both Longform.org and Long Reads on Twitter, so why not follow them both? Another useful long-form gold mine is Give Me Something To Read which is a selection of articles saved by Instapaper users.