Wanderlust

The Blog feature is well established at the GlobalPost. Blogs about almost any subject can be found in the website. Because of the many international correspondents, the blogs are updated daily and reveal interesting stories about less known matters. 
Wanderlust is a thought-provokinglog about sexually related news that happens around the globe. The GlobalPost, specifically Iva Roze Skoch, takes a funny and controversial approach to this difficult topic. Her blog entries range from relatable human stories to less known facts about the animal kingdom's sexual relations.
I chose to focus on a specific post that Iva wrote on Feb. 28th that talks about social media tools in relation to sexually transmitted diseases. A very effective Aids awareness campaign in Finland suggests using the same geo-location symbols commonly used in Foursquare placed on the genital area to refer to the number of sexual partners at that moment. This eye-opening idea could persuade people to use condoms and other precautions when having sexual encounters. 

Blog posts like this one really help in raising awareness and show readers from around the word how remote countries like Finland are fighting AIDS. I like the relation between such a terrible disease and modern social media devices. I will certainly keep an eye on this blog and suggest y'all do the same! Until next week, be safe! 

The Greenery

One of my personal favorite sections in the GlobalPost website is Green. This portion of the website is dedicated to issues covering everything from clean energy, pollution, climate change, to conservation, ecosystems, wildlife and many more.

Updated frequently, this section really does a good job of uncovering interesting news stories from around the world. The section is divided into 3 subsections : Global Warming, Wildlife news and Energy. With the "green" tab, GlobalPost demonstrates how they are involved in almost every field of interest and show great awareness of the outside world. This is definitely a point in their favor and really helps readers and subscribers to become more aware and conscious of efforts to save our environment from degradation and pollution.
If it wasn't enough, GlobalPost uses extremely reliable sources such as Associated Press  to give further credibility to its articles. 

Tweet Tweet

Twitter is a growing social media engine that lets people post 140 character "tweets" from their account. It's main advantage over other social media tools is its immediacy and almost live coverage on any event happening worldwide. Even the Pope has joined twitter and promised to tweet at least once per day, in this lent period.

GlobalPost has a really good twitter page that counts more than 40,000 followers. Being one of their followers is an amazing opportunity at keeping up to date with all the major events, controversies and news-worthy stories that happen on a daily basis. It has produced more than 16,000 tweets so far. Counting so many foreign correspondents really helps the GlobalPost be a satellite for news coming from all over the globe. What differentiates the GlobalPost from other news agencies on twitter is its use of multiple sources as links related to their tweets. In the past 12 hours they have generated 72 tweets on issues ranging from the terrific train crash in Buenos Aires to the Zanzibar music festival .

The GlobalPost is on the forefront of online news and their twitter page confirms their excellent use of the many media devices that the internet offers to reach many more readers.

OFF Beat

One of the better and more original sections of the GlobalPost is "Off Beat."

This tab is filled up with original stories that always have a humorous and interesting spin to them. 

I think it interesting and positive to have a slightly more amusing and funny section specially when the audience is subjected to so many sad and bloody stories across all news platforms. My only complaint for this section is the fact that the last article dates back to January 25th and there are just a few others in the whole section. 

The Off Beat section

The most recent page presents a power point story regarding the slow decay of the United States as reigning power of the world. The slide show was offered by its author to be published solely in the GlobalPost. If you want to visit the authors full website click here . 

The illustrated book composed of 64 slides is a political narrative done in classical cartoon form depicting what the author thinks was the reason for the recent economic crisis and how he thinks the US is going to get out of it. Using statistics and superheroes to demonstrate the problem Thomas C. Ramey, the author, really gets his message out by making it easy for the audience to acknowledge the problem and agree on his solution. Although the author gave publishing rights to the GlobalPost, it is also possible to buy a printed version of the book on Amazon.

A great feature that has become a trademark on any well respected blog or online website is the Facebook comments. When looking below the site, there are a few comments of people who look at the article and feel the need to post something that will end up on their Facebook. Remember, the Facebook feature is made for you to write on  not to ignore! 

Finding opportunities in direct competitors

The Global Post is an online newspaper that brings information together to create articles and stories regarding international news and conflicts. We live in a time where the information travels fast across the Internet. The audience has an extremely vast array of websites to choose from to get their daily information.

 Speaking to the VP of the Global Post, Charles M. Sennott, I discovered that he is not afraid of its competitors.  Instead, he treats the competition as an opportunity to get different sources for the same news story. In the case of the Egyptian revolution for example, the Global Post collaborated with another news organization to ensure complete coverage of the historical moment.

One of the Global Post's closest competitors is the Foreign Affairs, this news website is very similarly set up but fails to incorporate as much media interaction as the Post. On a positive note, Foreign affairs has a very interesting section focused on classroom activities for I.R &Politics courses.

Classroom section - Foreign Affairs Online

Visiting the Global Post website daily, I have noticed that the section on the Egyptian revolution has not changed. I think this is an interesting choice because although the focal point of the revolution has already been reached, the Global Post wants to keep on track with the story for further developments. New circumstances occur on a daily basis in Egypt, a desperate country  about to have its first democratic elections. Just yesterday 74 people were killed in the worst soccer-related incident in Egypt’s history. An interesting article was published, which included links to blogs that point out the influence of soccer fans within the revolution. 

 Charles M. Sennot offered an interesting antidote to prevent any story from plunging into boring repetition: focusing on one specific person he will see how that person lives their life and how the revolution has changed that life.