Content Analysis: USF, Sam, and Delaney ScoopIt accounts
To begin, I was very impressed by the USF ScoopIt. It is
very up to date and had multiple stories on some days. It also had a
very good mix of sources, and the most surprising (and also refreshing)
were local blogs. I love SFist and the Bold Italic so it was very
pleasant to see the university account posting articles from those
sites. Sometimes the way USF posts on other platforms (like its Twitter
on occasion), is for a different audience than students: for example
appearing a tad too promotional for my taste or something. I understand
that USF messaging and social media is created for many audiences, like
parents, alumni, donors, etc., yet I believe prospective and current
students should be the most targeted. With that in mind, the USF
ScoopIt account very much addressed students as the main audience, which
I really enjoyed. A lot of the content came from student work such as
the Foghorn and instagrams. The glaringly neglected student work I
noticed though was USFtv: after seven pages I saw no videos from the
station posted. This obviously saddened me on a personal level.
Anyways, in general the content on the USF ScoopIt was intriguing.
Regarding the student accounts made by Sam and Delaney,
both ScoopIts interested me in different ways. For Sam’s, focusing on
urban agriculture, he covered a topic that I know little about but would
like to learn more on. So his stories were very cool to read and his
posts came from a lot of his experiences which was a lens I liked. I
could tell how much passion he has for farming and he had quite a lot of
content. It has since dropped activity but Sam’s account is great. As
for Delaney, she had three topics but one caught my attention the most:
San Francisco Happenings. I think this topic is relative to all USF
students, or any city dweller for that matter. Her account is outdated
but the posts she did have on her ScoopIt were really fun. Especially
all the events in the city and articles on activities she found that
were free, which she commented was her favorite price. Mine too
Delaney, mine too.
Form Analysis: USF, Sam, and Delaney ScoopIt accounts
Overall, I like the organization of ScoopIt. The
platform is very visual but I wasn’t overwhelmed. It reminds me a lot
of Tumblr’s and Pinterest’s setups; ScoopIt is sort of a hybrid between
the two. With Tumblr, there’s only one panel for content and you scroll
down to the next post, and with Pinterest everything is presented like
an online bulletin board (as per its name). Yet with ScoopIt, it takes
the best of both these platforms and creates a middle ground of content.
There are two panels and multiple stories that are easy to see and
move on to. Therefore, I find ScoopIt to be a visually better platform
in comparison. (As a side note for context, I do go on Tumblr but avoid
Pinterest. Pinterest is too busy for me and not very useful to what I
like social media for).
As a reader, having a variety of posts on a screen
available and separated into pages (instead of never ending scrolling,
like Google images for instance is the example that immediately came to
mind) is nice. For ScoopIt as a media for information, I mostly see
benefits. Posts can come from all over the internet or can be user
generated. Different media can be posted as well, such as articles or
videos. All in all, ScoopIt appears to be a quality platform as an
audience member. The three accounts I read off were all similar in
these traits.
Reflection:
After looking through those three accounts I definitely
am eager to produce my own ScoopIt topic. I had never heard of this
platform before this class, so it’s a new media I now know about. It’s
also nice to see that USF has been using it for some time; there were
over a hundred pages of content on its account. The next fun step for
my experience with ScoopIt is deciding what topic I want to make a
thread on. Delaney had a great one, as mentioned in my content
analysis, so I may be somewhat inspired by her.
Curating:
I now have used ScoopIt for a little while and have two
topics I’m curating: Hillary Clinton Media and Intriguing News. I keep
track of these topics regularly through different sources so ScoopIt
does really well in bringing them all together. Having links, or for
this platform “scoops”, to articles from all over the internet is great.
And it allows you to add comments, which is a nice feature as well.
With Twitter I can retweet or reply to stories which is fine for quick
interest, but with ScoopIt I can be more detailed and can more visibly
see everything. Twitter also only lets you have one thread of tweets
and ScoopIt lets you organize by topic. Curating has been a lovely
addition to my daily media consumption.