The Sri Lankan President’s Twitter archive

Excerpt from a much longer piece I wrote for Groundviews (The Sri Lankan President’s Twitter archive and Propaganda 2.0: New challenges for online dissent), dealing with an archive I created that captures every single tweet published by the Sri Lankan President’s official Twitter account, and why this is so important. ### It is evident therefore […]

Twitter for Newsrooms: What’s missing?

Twitter for Newsrooms is a new resource from Twitter clearly aimed at journalists who to use the platform. It’s basic stuff, but useful for journalists coming to Twitter for the first time, and I am inclined to translate this into Sinhala and Tamil for my classes at the Sri Lanka College of Journalism (SLCJ). There […]

Behind the scenes: How to upgrade a citizen journalism website

Updated 22nd December 2010 with list of plugins used on the site. Groundviews launched its new version today. It was a radical departure from the look and feel of the old and first version to the new avatar. Old / original version Current version Counting articles and comments, Groundviews has, at last count, well over […]

Politicians and Twitter in Sri Lanka and the elsewhere

Image courtesy the Economist, Sweet to Tweet The Presidential and parliamentary elections held this year in Sri Lanka saw a number of candidates, in the run up to election, open accounts on Twitter. Leading politicians like Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sarath Fonseka, Champika Ranawaka, Sajith Premadasa and Milinda Moragoda, amongst others were extremely active on Twitter. Save for […]

Lists of the best Twitter accounts on Sri Lanka

After incorporating Twitter’s @Anywhere functionality to Groundviews, I was inspired create two lists of Twitter accounts I follow on a regular basis. The first was a list of the best Twitter accounts on Sri Lanka, currently featuring 14 feeds. The second was a list of the best Twitter accounts by Sri Lankan bloggers, currently featuring 15 […]

Dopamine and humanitarian aid

Boomers had the zipless fuck. We have the clickless give. With a line like that, you know the article you’re reading is going to be irreverent, intelligent and incisive. How Twitter + Dopamine = Better Humans by Scott Brown on Wired is all three. It is also a cogent critique of the generation of humanitarian […]

The mind-boggling growth of Twitter

I had just published Archiving every single tweet on Twitter: Two parallel initiatives when I came across this graphic visualising the growth and scale of Twitter. The original can be seen here. In Sri Lanka, I’ve pioneered the use of Twitter for new models of journalism. Through Groundviews, we have used it to cover, inter alia, […]

Commonwealth Expert Team on social media use during presidential election

The Final Report on 2010 Presidential Election in Sri Lanka by the Commonwealth Expert Team issued on 15th February 2010 interrogates briefly the use of social media during the campaign, This election campaign saw the two main candidates and their supporters make wide use of social media sites such as Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, as […]

Sunday Times in Sri Lanka – Another groundbreaking first in online journalism

Unhappy with “hosting” Twitter, the Sunday Times has now converted its own Twitter feed to, get this, a protected account. Not that the Twitter feed of the Sunday Times worked in the first place. This is to my knowledge the only Twitter feed in the world today belonging to a traditional media owner that has […]

Sunday Times in Sri Lanka “hosts” Twitter!

Not satisfied with such pathbreaking initiatives in the “professional” print media industry in Sri Lanka such as using Wikipedia to defame and plagiarising content from Flickr, the Sunday Times in Sri Lanka proudly announces today that it has “linked up” with Twitter and will be “hosting” the service to boot! Journalist Surekha, understandably a little […]