Also up for the award are Erica Ehm, who set up the online magazine YummyMummyClub.ca, and YouTube personality Nadine Sykora.

The winners will be announced on December 6th at the finale of nextMEDIA Toronto, one of Canada’s leading digital media conference.

The social media maven award recognizes “medialites that demonstrate innovation in creating and connecting online communities.”

It goes on to explain that  “the top Canadian social media mavens will have demonstrated leadership in the field, skillfully using social tools to bring in likes, check-ins, tweets, and more to deliver an unparalleled level of community engagement.”

The Digi Awards, formerly known as the Canadian New Media Awards, are described as“Canada’s premier showcase of the remarkable digital media companies, projects, products and pioneers that are placing Canada at the forefront of the international mediascape”.

The Canadian New Media Awards were founded in 1998 as Canada’s first nationwide platform recognizing the achievements of the fast-developing digital media landscape. They were rebranded last year as the Digi Awards.

The Digi Awards are organized by Achilles Media.

Here are the slides and audio from the talk, titled Share, Like, Recommend: Decoding the Social Media News Consumer.

Abstract: Social media is becoming ever more ingrained in the experience of news consumers. Social networking sites are evolving from being more than spaces for personal exchanges, becoming one of the mediums for sharing and recommending the news as users appropriate computer-mediated technologies for their own purposes. While the dissemination of news through social interaction has always played a role in the diffusion of media, sharing is becoming central to the way many experience the news. Research into how networked publics are reframing the news and shaping news flows suggests people are using social media to complement, rather than replace, more traditional media sources.

“The Active Recipient: Participatory Journalism Through the Lens of the Dewey-Lippmann Debate” is included in the second issue of the #ISOJ Journal, the official research journal of the International Symposium on Online Journalism.

The journal is published as an e-book, currently available on Amazon’s Kindle store. Other formats will be added so that the e-book edition can be downloaded for a variety of devices, such as iPhones, iPads, Nook and other e-readers.

A print on demand version is also available in paperback.

To give you a flavour of the paper, here’s the abstract:

Professional news outlets are providing numerous opportunities for the public to contribute. This study draws on the perspectives of Walter Lippmann and John Dewey to examine how journalists view participatory journalism. Based on interviews with journalists from two dozen newspaper websites, as well as a consideration of those sites, we suggest that news professionals view the user as an active recipient of the news. As active recipients, users are framed as idea generators and observers of newsworthy events at the start of the journalistic process, and then in an interpretive role as commentators who reflect upon professionally produced material.

A pre-publication version of the paper is available from the ISOJ 2011 conference site.

The paper draws from research conducted for the book, Participatory Journalism in Online Newspapers: Guarding the Internet’s Open Gates, published in April 2011 by Wiley-Blackwell, by Jane B. Singer, Alfred Hermida, David Domingo, Ari Heinonen, Steve Paulussen, Thorsten Quandt, Zvi Reich and Marina Vujnovic.

The decision follows a comprehensive, multi-level review of my teaching, research and service at the UBC.

I would like to extend a heartfelt thank all to my colleagues at the Graduate School of Journalism, at UBC and the global community of scholars for their support, encouragement and friendship.