Tag Archives: TV Talk

TV Talk: Television’s Twitter Trends

I love television, so I blog about it over on TV Talk. Here’s a piece I’ve written recently about how the use of social media on TV is awkward and unnatural, and how comedy could show us how to do it better.

If you’re like me, then you will cringe when a television show goes to their social media hub to see “What Twitter thinks”. It’s clunky and always awkward and my understanding of the show hasn’t been improved by username7543 saying “LOL”. Or even worse “Let’s get this trending”.

Ross Noble's Freewheeling on Dave | Photo: UKTV

Social media is seen as such a huge part of people’s daily lives that everyone wants to tap into. It’s not enough that when watching television you are encouraged to tweet along with their suggested hashtag, they want to read your tweets out as well. Disregarding the studio full of talented people in favour of this. It’s strange though because TV is using social media in a way that normal people don’t. Unless the comment is so spectacularly amazing people don’t discuss a topic and then read a tweet out loud, so surely TV programmes need to start using social media in a way that normal people use it. And comedy seems to be the best at doing this.

To read the rest of this piece head over to TV Talk

New Year, new projects

Looking towards 2012 I am thinking about new projects I want to start to keep me amused throughout the year. And with that I mean take up New Year resolutions that have a journalism theme to them.

I do, for the moment, have a job that is based in journalism, but these new projects would be extracurricular and a chance to try out some new things too.

My first resolution is to keep a One A Day blog. I did it last year with photos and hosted it on Tumblr. I lasted until October when a number of things happened in one month and keeping it up to date slipped out of my mind. But I enjoyed it and it has made me take more photos, and some of those are even in focus.

This year I am planning on being more ambitious and I am going to do something different each day. One day a blog, another day will be posting a photo and so on for the whole week until it comes back full circle for the start of a new week. So this will make me be creative, do something different and it will all be for fun. Hopefully a few friends will join in as well.

Last year I used Tumblr, which was great and is a nice little blogging tool but I should have made separate accounts because my oneaday photos got confused with me reblogging silly pictures from the internet. So this year I am using Blogger, here is the currently empty site. I am already regretting that decision because it took an hour to figure out how to customise it and not use one of their horrible preset themes. But I have about five WordPress sites already and by using Blogger I can get to grips with another blogging site.

Secondly I have a little television review site called TV Talk, that I set up with a friend. It is a site used to review television programmes and in 2012 I would like to focus a bit more on it.

We get a regular group of readers each week, nothing spectacular, but I want to write for it regularly and be able to show it off as something to be proud of.

And lastly, I want to find a use for this website. It was set up as a way to get my CV and work online and this year I finally got it to a stage I like. But the posts are random rants and interviews that I am proud of and I want it to become some sort of professional blog, but I have a whole year to think what I can do with this place.

So fingers crossed this is what will happen in 2012. I have written it down now which means it is a bit more permanent than just a thought, nevertheless wish me luck.