When a celebrity death, or news of a water shortage pop up on twitter – how can we cut the fact checked truth from the outright lies?

This week Gareth, Shane and Dave talk with Damien Mulley (homepage, twitter) about the upcoming Irish blog awards, social media fact checking and online marketing.

“Irish blogging is not dead”, claimed Mully, “twitter has improved and [is encouraging] blogging”, by removing the flippant posts and encouraging more thought out updates on blogs. He also suggested that the number of new Irish blogs and bloggers may be due to an increase in unemployment.

We moved onto the idea that blogging is a echo chamber of opinion, not fact checked news. Recent research shows that less than 5% of outbound links from Twitter link to News Sites (with ~60% linking to Social and Entertainment sites). We quizzed Damien on the accuracy of information on Twitter, as he claimed he used twitter as his main news source. [9:37] Damien proposed that the Wikipedia model of self-correction will in time become dominant, driven by a heightened criticism of any source, commercial or otherwise.

And finally, we moved to Marketing. [21:42] When it comes to online marketing, is it possible to advertise online without Google? [23:42] When does a company using twitter to promote their product become a spammer? [26:26] And can you imagine your customers working to be marketed to? Valve have pulled it off with a recent Alternate Reality Game to launch their latest game, Portal 2.

So is all marketing an evil mind control mechanism, or with creative tact can it be a constructive way to reach out to customers, and maybe gain some new ones? Leave you thoughts

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Friday March 19^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 14:00pm.