Archive for martin belam
The perils and pitfalls of allowing, and moderating, online comments
Sky News this week has pulled the plug on its news discussion boards because, Although the boards were very popular, a small number of people had hijacked them and reduced the level of debate to meaningless abuse. At Sky News we welcome robust debate about the news, but we want it to be of a [...]
How the press should make corrections
Earlier in the week I blogged about how some parts of the press are still very backward when it comes to a willingness to admit error and make proper corrections. A great example of how to do it well by the Nieman Journalism Lab has been spotted by Martin Belam over on his blog.
How will paywalls alter online commenting habits?
Of course, if newspaper paywalls don’t turn out to work outside the existing niches such as the Financial Times, their impact on general online commenting habits will be very limited. But let’s assume for a moment that paywalls work well enough to spread across various newspaper and other sites. A core feature of paywalls is [...]
Televised leaders debate: the technological winners
When I first wrote about the winners and losers from Thursday night’s TV debate between Brown, Cameron and Clegg I only briefly touched on technology: Winner – TV Loser – internet The TV audience peaked at just under 10m, far more than any online audience for a UK political event. TV kept on broadcasting whilst Facebook [...]
When two hypes colide: Wikipedia and user-generated data
Martin Belam is one of those who has picked up on the story about the number of people contributing to Wikipedia falling away. He makes the reasonable comment: Not entirely convinced by this argument. Yes edit wars and holier-than-thou editors on Wikipedia can be frustrating, but frankly, with over 3 million English language articles already [...]
