Digital & Social Media
Rebecca Sentance
Digital Journalist
United Kingdom
Freelance digital journalist with strong social media and online editing skills.
United Kingdom
Freelance digital journalist with strong social media and online editing skills.
Digital & Social Media
By day, she's the Communities and Partnerships Manager at OpenCorporates, ensuring that data is used for social good. By night, Hera Hussain helps women to empower themselves through technology with the organisation Chayn. Chayn is a small, volunteer-driven organisation which mainly works with women, primarily in countries such as India and Pakistan, who are victims of domestic violence.
While browsing data visualisations on Pinterest the other day, I came across an interesting-looking tool: Sociotope, a social media experiment which takes the data people leave behind in social networks and turns it into an interactive data visualisation. The free-to-use web app works with Twitter, Facebook and soon Google Plus.
The Interhacktives pick out the best of a mixed batch of #AdviceForYoungJournalists. If you were on Twitter yesterday, you probably noticed the trending hashtag # AdviceForYoungJournalists, which was sparked off by a bitingly cynical blog post from financial journalist Felix Salmon. His advice to young wannabe journalists contacting him for guidance is this: don't become journalists.
Throughout most of its ten-year history, people have been threatening to leave Facebook. There are plenty of good reasons for doing it, from Facebook's constantly mutating privacy policies to its decision to turn users into test subjects without their knowledge or consent.
It's been a few days since the climax of Facebook's "real name" saga, and the furore seems to have mostly died down. Facebook has officially apologised to the hundreds of drag queens, members of the LGBTQIA community, DJs, stage performers and others who use pseudonyms on Facebook for the policy which forced them to switch...
If you've been following events in the crowdfunding or online tech startup worlds at all, you might have heard of the controversy surrounding Healbe GoBe, an over $1m Indiegogo campaign to fund a device that medical science says can't possibly work. A startup-focused news site called PandoDaily has been leading the charge on the investigation into...
Last entry I talked about the evolution of "crowdthings" - such as crowdsourcing and crowdwisdom - which bring together the vast amounts of people connected by the Internet to achieve a complex task, or even just to carry out a simple task in an unforeseen way. Now we’re seeing the power of crowdsourcing in a crisis as the online public helps out in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
On the Internet today, we see an awful lot of things with the word "crowd" in front of them. It makes sense – after all, the Internet is about bringing vast amounts of people together from all around the world to make new things possible. The most exciting thing about being online is seeing what innovative results can come from combining those people with the wonders of technology and a few ingenious ideas.
Local News & Business
We all know that Hackney is a hub of bright new ideas and bold business innovation, with startups and pop-ups flocking to the borough to set up shop. But which are the sexiest startups to launch in Hackney recently? Here are our four picks: You've never had coffee like this before.
Has there ever been a better time to be queer in Hackney? This might seem like an odd question to ask with two LGBT favourites in the area, The Joiners' Arms on Hackney Road and The Nelson's Head on Horatio Street, both closing their doors ...
PEOPLE whose neighbourhoods are blighted by fly-tippers say they are fed up with the council's lack of action.
NEWS that Tesco is pulling out of a development at Bexleyheath this week has been met with widespread disappointment and dismay.
London's first ever board game café recently became the third crowdfunded business in the past year to make its home in Haggerston, Hackney. The café, Draughts, opened in a converted railway arch on Acton Mews last Saturday, 15 November. It raised a large portion of its funds from a campaign on popular crowdfunding website Kickstarter in August.
A woman who underwent treatment for bowel cancer whilst pregnant has turned her experience into an opportunity to educate and enlighten others - with a graphic novel. Matilda Tristram, 32, who was a resident of Hackney Road, Haggerston at the time of her diagnosis, was faced with the heart-rending choice of having an abortion, delaying treatment, or risking the chemotherapy that could harm her baby in unknown ways.
Draughts Café, which is located in a converted railway arch on Acton Mews in Haggerston, is the brainchild of board game lovers Toby Hamand and Nick Curci. It was partly funded by a highly successful crowdfunding campaign on website Kickstarter last August which raised more than double its target of £10,000.
The 11th century St Mary's Church, in North Stifford, was transformed into a bright and educational art space on Saturday as part of the Thurrock Art Trail 2014.
A FATHER has turned a personal project to create a picture book for his daughter into a nationwide campaign to promote and encourage children's literacy.
ESSEX estate agents claim that the local housing market is currently at a high, in spite of the traditional six-week quiet summer period. With housing prices climbing steadily and buyer confidence improving, the market shows every sign of moving out of the recession.
Student Media
Another NUS National Conference has wrapped for the year, with the torrent of hashtags and updates on Twitter dwindling to a steady trickle. In case you didn’t manage to catch the action at the time, or want to relive the highlights, we’ve rounded up 13 tweets which sum it all up: the speeches and the challenges, the policy and the parties.
The UK Pirate Party has just published its 2015 General Election manifesto, probably the first crowdsourced election manifesto in the UK. The party has been crowdsourcing its policy ever since 2011 when it launched the project ' Steal This Manifesto', using a dedicated subreddit to open discussion on what sort of policies they should adopt.
As a young person in the UK today, a member of the "digital generation," you could be forgiven for thinking that none of the major political parties really care about or understand digital issues. It's hard to take any politician seriously who says things like "the minute you talk about downloading software, my brain goes [...]
BEX SENTANCE reveals the most eccentric professors at Cambridge, erotica and all. We've all got that one lecturer who likes to use a banana instead of a laser pointer, or that supervisor who randomly exclaims during a supervision to not be wearing underwear then expects you to just blithely continue discussing Proust.
BEX SENTANCE rounds up some more of our most wonderfully weird academics. Last time around we brought you a posse of eccentric male academics. This time it's the ladies' turn.
Fandom & Geek Culture
Webcomics fans had some exciting news recently with the announcement that Noelle Stevenson's is being made into an animated feature film. Nimona is a fantasy webcomic revolving around the antics of a fiery and fearless shapeshifter called Nimona and the not-so-evil supervillain, Ballister Blackheart, to whom she appoints herself sidekick.
It's no secret that fanfiction is kind of a big, queer playground. Writers take nuances and subtext and run with them, or else flat-out create alternate realities. Sometimes this tendency seems extreme, especially in slash fic where every male character and passing acquaintance is a potential couple, but it's a symptom of a much bigger issue.
If you're a reader of fanfiction, chances are you've met the holiday fanfic on your web travels, especially at this time of year when challenges, communities and collections themed around the festive season are springing up all over.
We've made it through another NaNoWriMo more or less in one piece, and if you're feeling particularly brave you might even have looked back over your novel since the month ended. Across thirty days of frenzied writing, there's room for a lot of odd things to creep into your novel.
What is a fandom classic? I can't remember exactly when I first started seeing this term used around fandom communities. Like most fanfiction jargon, I think I picked it up subconsciously. Either way, it wasn't hard to infer what it meant: literature has literary classics, fanfiction has fandom classics.
As you might have gathered from previous posts on this blog, I'm constantly fascinated by the innovative ways in which different projects on the Internet make use of crowds. I've covered Tomnod's use of crowdsourcing in global crises and the "crowdplaying" of Twitch Plays Pokémon. Then on 1st April, xkcd - "A webcomic of romance,...
Last Friday was my birthday (hooray, another year older!) and as I move more into the world of journalism with the aim of hopefully doing a postgraduate course in it next academic year, I asked for a couple of books on the subject. One of those was We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People,...
Gaming
Last Friday afternoon I went down to High Cross United Reformed Church in Tottenham, to a gathering of NthGen Interactive's fighting, portable and card game-focused London Games Society. London Games Society meets up once a month, normally on a Saturday, but this month was a bit different thanks to the epic fighting game fest Revolution 2014 taking place over the following weekend.
Video Games Amino is a portable gaming community. And by that I don't actually mean a community for players of portable games (like, say, Video Games Amino DS London or our very own Portable Gaming Centre) - I mean a gaming community that's literally portable.
Trigger Warning: This review contains some discussion of depression in the context of a game. The free indie PC game Depression Quest came onto my radar about a month and a half ago, after I saw a Twitter shout-out to support the game on Steam Greenlight.