I decided to track Roger Ebert’s death through social media. (Storify embedded below.)

I tried to limit myself to posts only by people rather than publications or organizations. I also tried to use information only contained in the post itself, rather than allowing myself to click-through a given link to get more info. This made it easy to curate the emotion around Ebert’s death, but hard to learn any actual information about his life.

I made a Storify from tweets of people at Bradley Manning’s pretial hearing today. You can find it here or below.

When I opened my computer on Sunday morning, my twitter feed was overrun with messages about #OpIsrael. The hacker’s collective Anonymous had targeted Israel for the second time–the first being in November of last year–with the aim of “wiping Israel off the Internet”.

I decided to focus on #OpIsrael for this week’s assignment; I thought it would be interesting to follow a purely online phenomenon through social media, especially considering the issues of credibility and verification that are associated with an ‘anonymous’ and open hacking collective. Here is the result of this process:

http://storify.com/julialindau/opisrael-the-collective-power-of-hackers

While the nation’s sports fans were inflicted with March Madness, a different sort of mania swept New York basketball fans as the Knicks came off their 13th win in a row last night to clinch the Atlantic Division title, the first for the franchise since 1994.

I curated accounts of the game from news outlets, sports blogs, Twitter and Facebook, and created this “newspaper” using paper.li. (Click through to see the full paper.)

My sources include tweets and Facebook posts mentioning the Knicks, the NBA and various Knicks players, the Twitter feeds of sports news outlets and basketball blogs, and YouTube videos mentioning the Knicks. These sources yielded some photos that were “actualities”– taken and posted by fans actually present at the game. However, the bulk of content (articles, posts, videos) still ended up being accounts written by professional journalists, and shared across the web.

Late Monday night, the Louisville Cardinals beat the Michigan Wolverines to win the NCAA Championship. My Twitter feed was filled with commiserating Michigan fans, except for my friend Charlie Ticotsky. Ticotsky, who is the Government Affairs Specialist for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, was following a different double-digit score on April 8, the vote count in the Massachusetts State House in favor of the Transportation Bill.

97-55, transportation bill passes

— Charlie Ticotsky (@CharlieTicotsky) April 9, 2013

Continue reading →

I chose to “report” (curate? curaport?) on the floods in Buenos Aires last week and their aftermath. One thread that emerged for me on sifting through the vast amount of commentary, images, crisis management, and communications was a thread of solidarity. Many people participated in communicating places to help others, expressions of emotional support and commented on how amazingly the whole country had come together. This was in combination with a strong critique of the local, provincial and federal government’s efforts to support those affected. There were (and are still) failures to get power and water restored, lack of response measures, and disputes over the number of dead (53 or 54 depending on whose count you believe).

I wanted the story to highlight the people’s efforts of solidarity and used the video at the beginning of the story to frame the lack of government response. I adopted the Global Voices style of quoting and then translating media for an English-speaking audience. This “story” feels like it could have gone on indefinitely as I could have kept clicking on different feeds and information related to the floods and curating quotes and images. So at some point I had to stop not because of “completeness” but because of time limitations. I wonder if this is often the case for reporters culling from social media? How do you get through all the data???

Here’s the link:

http://storify.com/kanarinka/buenos-aires-esperanza-tras-la-inundacion-hope-aft

Surprised by how much Thatcher-bashing occurred in real life and on Twitter following the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (RIP), I did my Twitter story on these strong negative reactions. You may read it on Storify here.

Here is the link to Storify.

See my Storify here.