May 2013
5 posts
“Facebook arguably invented modern social networking, and is still the king. But...”
– Yahoo’s Tumblr Deal Is a Bet on a Shift in Social Media - NYTimes.com
The Evolution of Online Psychology - broadstuff →
A guide to the discussion at the ChinwagPsych event, which focused on the new fields of digital psychology and anthropology. One take-away from all this is that in the era of big data you can end up with big mistakes with correlation if you aren’t testing real hypotheses.
Crowdsourcing is here to stay — now it’s about... →
Jay Rosen rather neatly summarises the challenge of crowd-sourcing in an interesting piece from Matthew Ingram:
90 percent will never participate, so what do we have for them? 10 percent might engage, but you have to have the right ask, the right incentives, the right UI. One percent are your core contributors, but you have to find them, deeply engage them, compensate them. That is way harder...
Why E-Mail Newsletters Won't Die →
“As much as we’re told e-mail isn’t sexy, no one sends more e-mail than Facebook or Twitter,” says Berry, the former chief technical officer of the Huffington Post. “And the reason they do is we’re all on e-mail and it brings you back” to the site that sent it.
The wisdom of the crowdpleasers →
I love it when the Economist just shakes off its analytical and empiricist chains and comes up with something as mad as this — almost all the world’s problems could be solved if leaders followed the advice given in the lyrics of popular musicals.
And can the Phantom of the Opera really have grossed $5.6 billion?
April 2013
14 posts
Visualisation of how Facebook users' interests...
Stephen Wolfram has analysed the data from a million Facebook users who have his analytics tracker and come up with some fascinating findings including this visualisation of how age affects the interests of users.
It’s almost shocking how much this tells us about the evolution of people’s typical interests. People talk less about video games as they get older, and more about politics and the...
The crowd-sourcer's dilemma →
The conditions under which crowds can be wise are rather restrictive: members need to be diverse and to be thinking independently of one another. There are online techniques for harnessing such intelligence but they are almost certainly less engaging than the immersive approaches taken by sites like Reddit. This is according to James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds:
The problem from...
Twitter is becoming the first and quickest source... →
This is from a ‘quant’ — someone who dispassionately analyses data to extract investment buy or sell signals. He’s taking the same approach to the world of financial information and drawing the rather startling conclusion that Twitter is becoming the dominant source:
Consider that there are always going to be more smart people outside of your firm than inside. It has to...
1 tag
How LinkedIn Quietly Built a Massive Media Empire →
Interesting numbers here on the page views generated by LinkedIn Today. LI seems to have taken the Huffington Post model to a completely different level. And in the mean time, made its core service, which was always a bit worthy, really very interesting.
LinkedIn’s 300 influencers may generate over 4.5 billion page views and 45 million comments this year - an average of over 12 million...
Four ways the media failed in covering the Boston... →
The News Editor for Quartz nails the reasons why mainstream and web native media got it so wrong over the Boston marathon bombings.
He suggests there’s a kind of web version of ‘Gresham’s Law’ in which an oversupply of media drives down the quality.
A new equilibrium might be struck with greater specialisation and the demise of some organisations. But until that time,...
A brief lesson in letter-writing - FT.com →
The Financial Conduct Authority, Britain’s new regulator, is getting into behavioural economics. It published a couple of papers earlier this month and one, an investigation into how to get victims of mis-selling to respond to letters telling them how to claim, has been written up by Tim Harford in the FT.
There turns out to be science in effective letter-writing. In the FCA experiment, the...
The Media Doesn't Own The Story Anymore →
Buzzfeed possibly understands the new world of networked information better than any other news operation. So this analysis of why social networks and mainstream media struggle with breaking stories like the Boston Marathon Bombing is worth reading. The conclusion sums up the challenge: the profusion of sources necessitates not only greater sifting but also an awareness that those new sources are...
Markets Insight: Wake up to the Twitter effect on... →
Gillian Tett in the FT reports on MIT research into the performance of investors on the social platform eToro. Here, as in other walks of life, the best performers appear to sit on the edge of networks where they can draw connections between them.
“Social traders” who received information from a wide variety of social groups – and copied a range of gurus – performed 10 per cent better than...
“There is nothing particularly special about Facebook’s platform, or...”
– Report: Teens are, like, totally bailing on Facebook - Fortune Tech
How might your choice of browser affect your job... →
The Economist looks at data from Evolv and considers how ‘big data’ might help recruiters find the right people. A couple of things that struck me as interesting:
applicants who have installed a different web browser on their computers stay in their posts for 15% longer, on average, than those who use the default pre-installed browser. Evolv suggests this could demonstrate...
Cory Bergman: Why journalists are now responsible... →
ckanal:
Thought provoking post from Cory Bergman
via corybe:
Earlier this week, a thread on Branch asked journalists what they’d like to see at this year’s Online News Association’s conference, the biggest annual meeting of digital journalists. Many of the responses focused on making things, which is a refreshing new addition for an industry that…
I see that journalists must take more...
“Anyone leading an organization today is already managing a crowd—whether it’s...”
– http://summ.hbr.org/2013/04/when-ted-lost-control-of-its-crowd/ar/4
March 2013
15 posts
“Experts said the “Harlem Shake” phenomenon was emergent behavior from the hive...”
– You didn’t make the Harlem Shake go viral—corporations did – Quartz
Monetizing Journalism by Moving It Closer to the... →
This piece focuses on the chutzpah of Fortune selling a bespoke content marketing service that does not use its own writers. Whether it is a good idea or not for a journalism brand to provide such services, the article underplays the sheer effort required to find good writers in specialist areas who are able to deliver what is specified to deadline. The management overhead of all that is huge and...
“Whether you are a trader, a salesperson, a fund manager, a Master of the...”
– Twitter Is Disrupting Sell-Side Research - Business Insider
“Recent activist footage claimed to show the remains of a Chinese-made cluster...”
– How Brown Moses exposed Syrian arms trafficking from his front room | World news | guardian.co.uk
“George Orwell in 1944 lamented the divide between wordy, stilted written...”
– How social media improved writing - FT.com
1 tag
Drones begin to show their development promise -... →
Drones have a bad rep. But they can be a force for good.
“on a weekend, with a high degree of local knowledge and nuance required, the...”
– Twitter Beats The Sell-Side After Cyprus Bailout - Business Insider
UN's Human Development Index puts Britain behind... →
A classic chart of the day from the Economist. Britain is behind Italy and Spain on the UN’s Human Development Index, which aggregates things like life expectancy and education in addition to economic output. It is also only two places higher than Greece. But the bigger picture is one of major advances in human development in recent years. This tends to get lost in much of the commentary...
4 tags
“Just because you go to a Paris cafe with a book on philosophy and the newspaper,...”
– The big power shift in media: BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti [SXSW] | memeburn
London's open source 17th Century supremacy of the... →
The craftsmen who ran the clock industry in 17th and 18th century London had a sophisticated view of how to keep the trade innovating that bears more than a passing resemblance to the techniques behind 21st century wonders like Wikipedia and Linux.
Blogs Outrank Social Networks for Consumer... →
Two important findings from Technorati’s 2012 Digital Influence Report: 1) consumers rate bloogers more highly than social networking when it comes to influencing their purchase decisions; 2) small communities are more trusted than large ones.
There is also an interesting finding on the definition of an ‘influencer’. Brands see this as mostly do do with size of network....
Social Networks in the Infrastructure - broadstuff →
Alan Patrick, who predicted (accurately in my view) that the piracy phase of social media would not last, is now forecasting that social networks will become invisible:
1. It seems to mee that the we are way past the huge innovation of the early adoption phase, in fact it may even be that phase is coming to an end as reports of Facebook usage dropping in its early markets picks up. 2. The next...
February 2013
18 posts
Algorithms in the dock →
Legal action is being taken against tweeters and other social media users sharing names and photos of the killers of Jamie Bulger in contempt of a British court injunction. This post identifies how, inadvertently, Google and Twiiter algorithm changes made it easier to find this content.
“The problem with our people is that the better they are, the less cooperative...”
– Martin Sorrell on What’s Next - Harvard Business Review
1 tag
“The keys to success, they found, were to tweet positive messages, write clearly...”
– Happy, snappy tweets gain the most Twitter followers - tech - 26 February 2013 - New Scientist
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“People who tweeted photos allegedly of child killer Jon Venables are being...”
– BBC News - Twitter users: A guide to the law
Tabloid Chic: How Racy Headlines Unlock Money and... →
Piece suggests that interest in headlines was in decline (without any evidence) but is now back with a vengeance as the fight for attention on social media turns everyone into a tabloid sub-editor.
Most interesting however is the proliferation of technology allowing journalists and others to test the effectiveness of different headlines in the same way as Google Ads optimises on the most...
“The shift to real-time marketing was on full display during the Super Bowl and...”
– When Did Twitter Grow Up? | Digital - Advertising Age
The utter irrelevance of online ads →
1 tag
A Day In the Life Of An Advertising Newsroom |... →
The concept of an ‘advertising newsroom’ will fill some with despair but it seems inevitable given the rise of social media and growing evidence that, in the words of Tom Forenski, ‘every company is a media company’,
Guess Which Buzzfeed Piece Is An Ad « The Dish →
Andrew Sullivan uses Buzzfeed’s coverage of the new Playstation to identify some ‘church and state’ issues arising as web native publishers blur the distinctions between editorial and advertorial.
“In classic press management, there are two basic approaches. At one end of the...”
– The dangerous delusions of the White House press corps and the president | Poynter.
When Terrorists Take to Social Media - Deana Kjuka... →
Trying to stop terrorist groups from using social network sites is like playing ‘whack-a-mole’ and if the material isn’t in english then it is much more likely to be left alone.
LinkedIn as the ideal publishing platform →
Because it scales and connects like a Tumblr. But also because it is transparent and organised along professional lines. Like a conference.
Net Wisdom →
“…it seems to me almost inevitable that a new business model for reading and writing online will prevail in the future, which consists of readers rewarding directly the writers they admire. Almost inevitable, because this is by far the most efficient economic arrangement for both parties, and there are no longer any significant technological obstacles to its general adoption.”
...
Politico on the White House's content marketing →
The substance of this piece is that 1) the Obama White House engages with mainstream media only when it suits its agenda; and 2) now there are more communication channels this is decreasingly often. Surely 1) is true of all politicians at all stages of media development, and 2) is true of all subject areas not just politics.
“Prof Castronova believes these links will only deepen. “In a generation, we’ll...”
– Real lessons from virtual worlds - FT.com
