Twitter

#Hashtag10: the best hashtag fails in a decade

Neville Hobson Leave a comment Business, Communication, Social Media, Society, Twitter
Hashtags

How did we manage before Twitter? is a question I often hear, asked by a range of different people from casual personal users to immersed influence marketers. I’ve found it a great tool over the past decade to help me connect with others, share thoughts and opinions, bookmark ideas and join up the dots in conversations. It’s that latter aspect that is especially useful thanks to the hashtag, a device created by Chris Messina that came to the fore a decade ago as a means of connecting people and the conversations they have on Twitter surrounding a particular topic. Today, the hashtag is ubiquitous as a highly-effective connectivity tool in use in almost immeasurable ways and across the wide spectrum […]

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Mastodon, the hot new social network like Twitter, kind of

Neville Hobson 2 Comments Communication, Experiences, Experimenting, Social Media, Social Networks, Software, Twitter, Web

A new social network started up six months ago and began picking up speed last week as it echoes the early days of Twitter. It’s called Mastodon and was born out of frustration with changes being made on Twitter, according to an interview with founder Eugen Rochko in The Verge. Last year, after Twitter began moving away from a purely chronological feed, Rochko began building the back end for what would become Mastodon. Instead of building a unified service, Rochko envisioned something more like email, or RSS: a distributed system that lets you send public messages to anyone who follows you on the service. Anyone can create a server and host their own instance of Mastodon, and Mastodon works in […]

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How Twitter Works – a legal opinion

Neville Hobson Communication, Journalism, Law, Online Media, Public Relations, Reputation, Social Media, Social Networks, Society, Trends, Twitter, Web
Royal Courts of Justice

Most reasonable people are aware that if you publicly publish something defamatory about someone else that is false, you can be sued for libel. If you lose the legal case, it can be expensive for you in terms of damage to your reputation as well as a financial cost. (Related: the difference between libel and slander in UK law.) And I’d add that most reasonable people are also aware that the same rules on libel apply to all methods of public communication, including online. So, for instance, if you tweet something bad about someone that’s false, they can sue you for libel. Which is precisely what happened in the case of Jack Monroe vs Katie Hopkins, the judgement of which was published on March […]

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Lights, camera, action: the unexpected rise of live online video

Neville Hobson 16 Comments Communication, Experiences, Marketing, Mobile, Social Media, Social Networks, Software, Technology, Trends, Twitter, Web
streaming mobile video

Facebook and Twitter are no longer simply text platforms but mobile video channels battling to turn consumers away from TV

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The metamorphosis of Twitter

Neville Hobson 19 Comments Business, Communication, Experiences, Marketing, Online Media, Social Media, Social Networks, Society, Technology, Twitter, Web, Weblogs

I remember when blogging first captured the attention and imaginations of early adopters and online adventurers in the early part of this century, not long after the dot-com bubble burst. It was a time of discovery, learning new things and being part of something that was a great equalizer. For the first time, the Average Joe and Joanna could very easily and quickly have an unfiltered open voice on topics that might show up in online search results alongside other reports, narratives and opinions, typically from the mainstream media and big organizations, and expose their thinking and ideas to others anywhere in the world. Other people might leave comments on your blog and recommend your posts to their friends and […]

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