Engaged Reading Digest: revisiting old community connections

Finding a role as a community hub

The past few weeks have seen communities, trapped in varous degrees of lockdown, need to organise themselves more than every before. In most places, that's centred around Facebook groups, or WhatsApp chats.

But one newspaper has made an effort to become the hub for its city:

How a Boston Globe website started connecting those in need because of coronavirus with those who can help

“We love our city and these are our neighbors. It’s a difficult time and if we can make a difference, we will.”

Nieman LabHanaa’ Tameez

Now, just imagine they continue to take that community-centric role after the crisis has passed…

Flickr revamps its groups admin

Remember Flickr? It was the hot thing in online photo sharing before Instagram came along. Under new owners SmugMug, it's been undergoing something of a renaissance.

We used to use Flickr as an excellent way of building community around user-generated news photos. Maybe now is the time to revisit that idea?

Your group admin experience just got a whole lot better.

We’ve begun rolling out a number of tools that should make it easier and more intuitive to admin your Flickr group.

Flickr BlogJordan Sendar

LinkedIn soups up its Pages

Three key changes for LinkedIn Pages:

• You can invite people to follow pages
• You can stream to your page with LinkedIn Live
• You can choose to post to the page as an individual or a organisation

This looks promising - it could well make the pages more useful as a voice of both the company and the individuals within it.

LinkedIn Pages adds several new features including Invite to follow, LinkedIn Live integration and more - MSPoweruser

Over 50 million organizations currently use LinkedIn Pages to engage with their customers, prospects and employees. To improve the LinkedIn Pages experience, Microsoft added recently added several new features like Employee Notifications, Kudos and Team Moments, Community Hashtags and more. Today, L…

MSPoweruser

Handy Podcast Tool

I'd not come across this before, but it looks like a really useful way of creating a "call-in" podcast. Useful for making your audience part of the show.

Riverside.fm: Record your remote podcast with video + local audio and let your listeners call in.

Grow your audience by creating a radio-like podcast where your listeners can call in live and ask their questions with video.

riverside.fm

Live-streaming from a DSLR or GoPro

Handy guidence as the world reorients around video. I'm planing on experimenting with livestreaming from my GoPro in the next few days.

How to use a dSLR or GoPro as a webcam | PCWorld

Webcams are hard to find. But if you have a dSLR camera, GoPro, or camcorder lying about, you may be able to conscript it for the same purpose.

PCWorldAlaina Yee

The problem with Zoom

Like everyone else, I've been working extensively over Zoom. I'm using it for the online versions of my courses. My daughter used it earlier to catch up with her primary school friends.

But there are some serious problems with its security.

Zoom under pressure

<p>It’s the kind of problem many companies would love to have: suddenly people are using your product by the millions, to the point that it has become mission-critical for many, including journalists. Unfortunately for Zoom, what caused the demand (the company says 20 times more people are using the…

Columbia Journalism ReviewMathew Ingram

Happily, the company seems to be comitted to addressing them, after the terrible publicity of the last few days:

A Message to Our Users - Zoom Blog

To our Zoom users around the world, Whether you are a global corporation that needs to maintain business continuity, a local government agency working to keep your community functioning, a school teacher educating students remotely, or a friend that wants to host a happy hour to spark some joy while…

Zoom BlogEric S. Yuan

Still, consider yourself warned.

Have a lovely weekend, all.