Newspaper Talkback… and LBS

Hello, Ms Grumpy here. It’s raining, the office is too cold to sit in, I’ve got the sniffles and I’m miffed at Australian IT. Now what have they done I hear you say? Well. Let me tell you. It’s what they haven’t done. And that is engage in discussion.

Jeepers, we all know, right, that dialogue is THE critical focus going forward for traditional media? Umm that was a rhetorical question. Traditional media MUST set up dialogue similar to talkback radio on the ‘net. I wrote about it last year in the Australian Financial Review – such a funny cartoon. Shame Blogger/Google/Picasa/Whatever is down and I can’t publish it here.

…anyway, back to my gripe at The Australian IT section. When you go to the main page and look for their dialogue page, you find one called Your Say on the right hand side. There are 3 links – July 4, July 5 and the most uptodate one, July 11. It’s now July 21.

A couple of days ago, I wrote two snappy (and snippy) pieces, a few lines each, and sent them in, just to see if A) it was automated, meaning published immediately, or moderated or B) if they were just slack in publishing our little nuggets of information. It was B. Sure, maybe my couple of lines on two seperate subjects weren’t considered worthy of publishing, but seriously, nothing since July 11? Someone is either setting the bar too high or just not checking the submissions. How many times do you thing people will bother sending in info, if they won’t be published. Gosh a basic tenet of creating an online community dialogue is to reward the participants. This is an example of anti-reward.

If you have a newspaper online – turn moderation off, turn ranking and ratings on, add a pottymouth button to notify others and a moderator of possible naughty content in a response, and… well there’s about 5 more things they should do, but that would be telling!

Oh and what were my two Australian IT comments about? After all, by having a blog I can self-publish. So pfft to AustralianIT. Heh. One was about Calendar Girls article – I joined the IT industry so I didn’t have to act like a supermodel, and because it’s not geared to women who look like super models. I actually like working with my pink ugg boots on… Hmmm maybe it was mention of my pink uggies that turned The Australian off? o.O

And the other one was an article by Ian Grayson called We Know Where You Live about Tenseng claiming something about being a market leader in LBS in Australia tho their products aren’t live yet. They should look to Mobiles2Go, who actually have iKids up and running here. Are there any other LBS products in Australia that are live? Hmmm, I think I’ll do my next bloglet on LBS in the region – so important for the next phase of integrating offline and online communities, no?

Technorati Tags Online Communities, Location Based Services, LBS, Australia, Mobiles2Go, iKids, The Australian, australianit.com.au, Ian Grayson