I don’t have a Facebook account. At least, not yet, as I have mentioned in another blog post I shared over here not so long ago. But from that to say “[…] sites such as Facebook could be costing firms over £130m a day” is a bi…

Maybe it is the time now to turn things around and instead of coming up with study after study on how much harm social networks can do to your business, why not show how much good social networking is doing to your business? What about doing another st…

It’s this approach that dominates Australian media reporting on social computing generally - take the most outrageous or fear-laden claims of massive dollar losses, time-wasting, pedophiles, stalkers and the like and report it as real news without adequate research. If these reporters want to do justice to their bylines, they’d be reporting an equal number of well-researched stories on the successes of bands using MySpace, businesses saving huge losses of knowledge through social computing use, engagement of geographically dispersed communities and the like.

Even the follow-up story in yesterday’s AFR was half-hearted. It got around five column inches on the right side of page three, still mostly discussing the spurious $5Bn figure. Ross Dawson’s comments were reduced to a sentence in the last paragraph.

My take, and I think that of several others including Laurel Papworth, is that unless a social computing story involves bad news, it’s given little more than lip service by the Australian media. Compare Australian reportage to that in the US and Europe. Hell, I’ve even been quoted in US media on Australian politicians using Myspace.

If News is encouraging the use of social computing in its business, it should probably be doing that policy justice by reporting good news (particularly for business and education) around the tools rather than building concern around staged issues like the story this week and the stupid teens posting harassing videos on YouTube. Or at the very least, balancing their reporting with positives around these tools.

I think the Australian media perspective is a significant factor in the very slow uptake of these tools by Australian business. I’d love to be proven wrong and would be more than happy to recant my position if I was.

The NEWS.com.au article leads with the story and then balances it with at least equal content regarding the benefits and use cases. Why are you so upset about that? NEWS.com.au ran a lead story about how cool Facebook is a while back - and posted a mass photo of employees who use it regularly on the homepage. They (we) have a Facebook group - which is linked to in the article and has a screenshot displayed. Membership is actively promoted!

I work there but I have no involvement in the editorial production. But I do think you’re crazy to be upset by the way NEWS.com.au covers Facebook

Naturally, none of this constitutes any kind of official statement from my employer, or even an expression of anyone’s opinion but my own