Conrad Communications

My recent post on journalism schools getting rid of public relations receive an Editor’s Pick from journalism.co.uk – “The Essential Site For Journalists.” Thanks, Laura Oliver.

Information Week was kind enough to pick up our analysis of the Twitter Vote Report. K.C. Jones writes:

The Twitter Vote Report was subject to human judgment and technological error, according to two bloggers from Reno, Nev., who analyzed the network.

Bob Conrad, a doctoral student at the University of Nevada, and blogger Ryan Jerz found that the volunteer effort to track and publicize voting problems during the 2008 election was not truly objective, as planned.

The social media project aimed to capture field reports of voting problems through volunteers who texted and blogged to the site, but Conrad said it had “so many potential loopholes that its result should be interpreted only as a glimpse at the sharing of views of a relatively small number of voters.”

He said that Twitter Vote Report was a novel opportunity for people to share voting experiences online, but the processes for collecting and posting material contained “too many subjective interpretations of what to post to be considered reliable examples of the average voter experience.”

Read the complete story here. The analysis was also written about by Angela Gunn at BetaNews.

Twitter Vote Report: An analysis

My colleague Ryan Jerz and I conducted a study after the 2008, which looked at the Twitter Vote Report.

Read it here: http://twurl.nl/7edve8

I’m now on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nvbob

This month’s subscriber edition of Alternative Press Magazine is a photograph taken by Bob. Here’s the telling of the story by the fine folks at Photoshelter.com.