Sure, Big Data Is Great. But So Is Intuition

It was the bold title of a conference this month at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and of a widely read article in The Harvard Business Review last October: “Big Data: The Management Revolution.” At the M.I.T. conference, a panel was asked to cite examples of big failures in Big Data. No one could really think of any. Soon after, though, Roberto Rigobon could barely contain himself as he took to the stage. Mr. Rigobon, a professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, said that the financial crisis certainly humbled the data hounds. “Hedge funds failed all over the world,” he said. The problem is that a math model, like a metaphor, is a simplification. This type of modeling came out of the sciences, where the behavior of particles in a fluid, for example, is predictable according to the laws of physics. In so many Big Data applications, a math model attaches a crisp number to human behavior, interests and preferences. The peril of that approach, as in finance, was the subject of a recent book by Emanuel Derman, a former quant at Goldman Sachs and now a professor at Columbia University. Its title is “Models. Behaving. Badly.”

Claudia Perlich, chief scientist at Media6Degrees, an online ad-targeting start-up in New York, puts the problem this way: “You can fool yourself with data like you can’t with anything else. I fear a Big Data bubble.” She is worried about a rush of people calling themselves “data scientists,” doing poor work and giving the field a bad name. Indeed, Big Data does seem to be facing a work-force bottleneck. “We can’t grow the skills fast enough,” says Ms. Perlich.

“Models do not just predict, but they can make things happen. That’s not discussed generally in our field.” Models can create what data scientists call a behavioral loop. A person feeds in data, which is collected by an algorithm that then presents the user with choices, thus steering behavior.

Personally, my bigger concern is that the algorithms that are shaping my digital world are too simple-minded, rather than too smart.

Read more at the New York Times

What is Big Data? Research roundup, reading list

Data can be text and numbers but can also include maps and images. An array of machines — from underwater sensors and pet collars to mobile phones and traffic signals — can capture reams of data waiting to be sliced, diced and analyzed. In recent years, technological advances have expanded the types of Big Data that can be harnessed and stored — and who has access to these data.

Proponents see it as enabling new businesses and promoting transparency in markets and government. Detractors fear that this transparency will extend into the personal realm, as was the case when Target’s data crunchers correctly determined from shopping patterns that a teenager was pregnant before she had disclosed her condition to family members — or the store.

Big Data involves not only individuals’ digital footprints (data they themselves leave behind) but, perhaps more importantly, also individuals’ data shadows (information about them generated by others).

Read more at Journalists  Resources

So What if Tons of People Read That 'Snow Fall' Story on the Times Website?

Maybe that New York Times multimedia beauty of a story, "Snow Fall," should be the future of long-form journalism after all — because it sure did bring in a lot of readers. Whether it was enough to merit the effort, though, remains to be seen. John Branch's avalanche narrative and its fancy design have racked up over 3.5 million page views in one week.

The Times, of course, does long, reported features all the time, but as The Atlantic's Derek Thompson pointed out, "There is no feasible way to make six-month sixteen-person multimedia projects the day-to-day future of journalism, nor is there a need to."

Read more at The Atlantic Wire

News, Politics Dominated Social Media TV

The biggest single-day social media activity came from the presidential election this November -- with some 17.4 million social media interactions. Researcher General Sentiment looked at all social activity from social platforms, as well as news channels. This was followed by Hurricane Sandy (9.4 million), the battle over anti-piracy legislation (8.7 million), and the second presidential debate (7.6 million) and the vice presidential debate (6.87 million).

The biggest entertainment event of the year -- in terms of single-day social media activity -- was CBS' "Grammy Awards," which posted 6.8 million in social media. After this came NBC's Summer London Olympics.

Read more at Media Post

E-book readership rises sharply

The number of Americans reading electronic books rose sharply over the last year while the population of printed book readers slightly declined, according to a survey. The trend highlights the massive popularity of e-readers and tablets that have flooded homes and schools in the past year. About 33 percent of Americans 16 and older now own an e-reading device such as a Kindle or iPad, up from 18 percent last year, according to Pew Research. Read more at the Washington Post

In 2013 the internet will become a mostly mobile medium

The year 2002 was a turning-point for the telephone, invented 126 years earlier. For the first time, the number of mobile phones overtook the number of fixed-line ones, making the telephone a predominantly mobile technology. During 2013 the same thing will happen to the internet, just 44 years after its ancestor, ARPANET, was first switched on. The number of internet-connected mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers, will exceed the number of desktop and laptop personal computers (PCs) in use, according to figures from Morgan Stanley.

That does not mean that mobile devices will displace PCs altogether. The rise of mobile phones, after all, did not mean that fixed-line phones stopped working, even if their number is now in decline. The centre of gravity of the internet will have shifted.

Read more at The Economist

in 2013: Wearable computers

Sometime in the first few months of 2013, people wearing strange-looking glasses will start to roam America’s streets. Project Glass, the brainchild of Google, looks like a rather bizarre pair of glasses, but is in fact a mini display screen mounted in a flexible frame that also incorporates a camera, a microphone and a computer.

This gizmo, which lets users see e-mails and other stuff on its screen and take photos and record videos using its camera, is the most ambitious initiative to date in the emerging field of wearable computing.

Read more at The Economist

New York Times gets into original ebook business with Byliner

The New York Times wants to capture a bit more of that creativity by producing timely ebooks with the publishing startup Byliner. The deal means the Times will publish around a dozen nonfiction narratives in 2013. A number of newspapers use ebooks as a means for repurposing and repackaging their reporting for a different audience. But Gerald Marzorati, the Times’ editor for editorial development, said the Times will go beyond rehashing its reporting in ebook form and plans to develop original stories that will be exclusive to the platform. Most Byliner originals (are) stories that fall somewhere between a long magazine article and a short book... Amazon has said it sold more than 2 million Kindle Singles in the program’s first 14 months.

Read more at the Nieman Journalism Lab

Local news gets automated

One thing that’s clear is that local journalism, when produced by full-time, professional journalists, is expensive — possibly too expensive to justify the revenues for many kinds of stories. Just ask AOL’s Patch, which has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in its 850-plus local news sites around the country, so far achieving only modest returns.

Read more at the Nieman Journalism Lab

The year responsive design starts to get weird

Over the past year, the idea of responsive web design has taken hold in a growing number of newsrooms...more things in our lives are going to become connected to the internet, capable of displaying news for us when we find ourselves with a moment. And many of those things are going to have bigger, better screens than our tiny smartphones do now. So if I can start a great, long-form story on my coffee table, send it to my bathroom mirror as I brush my teeth before going to bed, and finish it on my iPad before falling asleep, why wouldn’t I?

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The Scariest Thing About the Newspaper Business Isn't Print's Decline

Google made more than $20 billion in ad revenue this year, more than all U.S. print media combined. In 2006, magazines and newspapers sold $60 billion more in ads than Google did.

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Facebook, Social Nets Lead Search Terms

For the fourth year running, online consumers searched for “Facebook” more than any other term in 2012, according to new data from Experian. Even more impressive, “Facebook” queries accounted for 4.1% of all searches this year, which represented a 33% increase year-over-year.

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"Gangnam Style" first video to hit 1B YouTube views

The wildly popular "Gangnam Style" music video by Psy has gone where no YouTube video has gone before. Earlier today, the official video surged past 1 billion views, making it the first clip on the site to ever hit that mark, and the latest in a long line of feats for the popular video. Last month, "Gangnam Style" surpassed pop star Justin Bieber's "Baby" video to become the most popular YouTube upload of all time. Bieber's video, which at the time had 805 million views, was beaten in just five months.

"Gangnam Style" has also earned a Guinness World Records title as the most-liked video in YouTube history with over two million digital thumbs up.

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Magazine Launches Outpace Closures In 2012

There were 227 new magazines launched in 2012, according to Mediafinder.com, an online database of magazines owned by Oxbridge Communications. Launches significantly outpaced closures, with just 82 magazines shuttered during the year.

The number of new magazines launches was down slightly from 2011, when 239 new magazines debuted. The number of closures dropped even more dramatically, from 152 in 2011.

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20 Tech Trends That Will Define 2013

Devices on our bodies will multiply. Sensors, cameras, input methods, and displays will work their way into our clothing. They’ll listen for commands and whisper in our ears. Our environment will respond to us in new and interesting ways. The proliferation of large displays and projection technologies will relegate the small display on our phone to private or a constrained set of tasks. A new layered interaction model of touch, voice, and gesture will emerge as important as consumption: the continuous exchange of what we are doing, where we are, and who we are with. This will again work into the collective memory, attaching to our legacy--bringing in a new type of patina effect. It won’t be the same as physical degradation yet will offer fresh stimuli that allow for more meaningful navigation and recall.

Emerging tools and services will help translate our needs and desires into cloud-based automation. They will proactively work on our behalf, guided by our permission and divining our intent. Existing services such as Google’s Prediction API, which offers pattern-matching and trainable machine learning capabilities to developers, and IFTTT, which offers intuitive, user-friendly, and cloud-based rules engine expressed in simple “if this, then that” terms, are representative of the trend toward empowering more automated, if not quite yet artificial, intelligence for our digital alter-egos.

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The Internet of Everything

We are rapidly heading into a new era that will not be measured by the number of users, devices or connections. What is changing the world, profoundly, is the value those connections make possible. When we connected the first 500 million devices to the Internet, it seemed to reshape our lives. But now we are on the cusp of a transformation that connects everything to the Internet. Highways, buildings, farms, satellites, solar panels, cars, milk cartons, cows … everything.

Each of these connections brings its own unique value, and the value increases even more with the exponential growth in potential connections between everything. These connections, combined with access to the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, will empower people in ways that we never imagined. Connections between people, between people and context-aware sensors and machines, and between machines themselves will help people turn data into actionable information, resulting in richer experiences and unprecedented value for individuals, businesses, communities and countries. We’re just starting to experience the phenomenon that we call the “Internet of Everything.”

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WordPress launches version 3.5

WordPress launched version 3.5 of its popular blog management software today.

WordPress.com, the free blog service hosted by parent company Automattic, has close to 400 million monthly unique users, as measured by Quantcast, Mullenweg told me. Add in users of WordPress.org blogs, which are hosted by ISPs or by users’ own web servers, and that number nearly doubles.

In other words, blogging is far from dead, and Facebook and Twitter haven’t killed it: It may even be undergoing a bit of a renaissance.

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YouTube to Power New Media Businesses of the Future?

Life is good at YouTube. It’s already the largest video network globally and the second largest search engine — and with over half of content marketers migrating an increasing share of their $40b+ budgets to video in 2013, YouTube is now uniquely positioned to become the go-to platform for building sustainable media businesses of the future. But it’s not in the bag just yet — this is at least the fourth major social platform that has tried to capture brand mindshare in the last few years.

We’re seeing YouTube engage in many efforts to re-invent itself as a destination for premium content (including, but not limited to, its funded channel experiment) and focus on key pieces of missing infrastructure will ultimately determine the success of the media businesses built upon the platform in the years ahead.

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Study says half of media buyers will try native advertising in 2013

Native advertising — like a brand’s Tumblr blog or a sponsored tweet — is generating a lot of hype. "Native advertising” is being hailed as the ad format of the future by everyone from venture capitalist Fred Wilson to BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti. Now, a survey suggests brands are ready to put down serious money to try it out. This could be good news for web publishers — as soon as people can agree on what the heck native advertising is.

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Number of jailed journalists sets global record

Worldwide tally reaches highest point since CPJ began surveys in 1990. Governments use charges of terrorism, other anti-state offenses to silence critical voices. Turkey is the world’s worst jailer. Imprisonment of journalists worldwide reached a record high in 2012, driven in part by the widespread use of charges of terrorism and other anti-state offenses against critical reporters and editors, the Committee to Protect Journalists has found. In its annual census of imprisoned journalists, CPJ identified 232 individuals behind bars on December 1, an increase of 53 over its 2011 tally.

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The ability to determine the location of a person’s gaze is opening up an enormous range of new applications

Eye tracking can do more than just help designers by revealing visual shortcomings in websites, advertisements and product prototypes. More than 9,000 paralysed people operate computers and wheelchairs using eye trackers (most survivors of spinal injuries and neuromuscular diseases retain control of their eyes). The technology is also being used to alert drowsy drivers, diagnose brain trauma, train machine operators and provide surgeons with “a third hand” to control robotic equipment. Costs are falling so quickly that mainstream consumer use of the technology may not be far off. Haier, a Chinese maker of household appliances, recently unveiled a prototype TV controlled by a viewer’s gaze. Eye tracking may also find use in desktop computers, video-games consoles and e-readers.

For the time being, the main use of eye tracking is in design and marketing. Trials involving just a few dozen viewers of an advertisement, website or product design can reveal exactly what looks good and what does not. Software sold by iMotions, a Danish firm, creates colour-coded maps that show where gazes glide, linger, or twitch back and forth in frustration. Such “heat maps” can reveal more about how well an advertisement will work than asking people to express themselves in words, says Peter Hartzbech, the firm’s boss.

The ability to use eye tracking to control a computer has obvious advantages for disabled people, but fans of the technology believe it could become a widely used input technology for the able-bodied, too. Moving an on-screen cursor with a glance is much faster than using a mouse, for example.

Another use is in e-readers. Researchers at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence and the University of Kaiserslautern have created a program called Text 2.0 that uses eye tracking to analyse how a displayed text is being read. If the reader lingers on a foreign word, Text 2.0 can display its translation. Lingering on a word and then sweeping one’s gaze to the right margin calls up a definition. If the reader starts to skim, the software dims common words. The program could be used by authors to see which passages caused readers to stumble or skip ahead.

Read more at The Economist

Why journalists should explore the business side of news

BuzzFeed has drawn a lot of press this year for the success of its social advertising product. The company’s advertising wing is an agency that works with advertisers to create sponsored content in the BuzzFeed mold. These aren’t just your classic advertorials — the pages in the magazine with the slightly off typeface and the bad writing. This is content infused with the voice and sensibility of BuzzFeed itself, tailor-made for its audience.

Versions of the agency model are in place at organizations such as Forbes, Gawker, The Huffington Post and the Atlantic. I’ve also heard echoes of this model in conversations with forward-thinking sales managers, who approach companies not just to solicit advertising, but to pitch marketing expertise in a variety of domains — not just display ads, but search engine marketing, social advertising and more.

The point is that all the innovation and work we put into doing journalism may produce more value than mere space for advertising adjacencies. As we develop our ability to work with data, produce info-rich experiences for mobile devices, or experiment with distributed reporting, we may hit on tools and techniques valuable enough to help subsidize our journalism. But if we’re not attuned to those possibilities, they won’t exist.

It feels easier to just say journalists should minimize all dealings with their business-side counterparts. But that feels deeply wrong to me. Ethical behavior is not about trying to avoid situations that might challenge us to behave ethically. Ethical behavior is about regularly thinking through our values and how they should be applied, and then acting accordingly.

Read more at Poynter

Navigation technology: Using satellites to determine your position only works outside. A new approach is needed indoors

DIGITAL navigation surely ranks as one of life’s high-tech bargains. Thanks to free Global Positioning System (GPS) signals broadcast by American satellites, and free online maps from companies like Google, Nokia and Apple, all you need is a smartphone with an internet connection to pinpoint your location on the Earth’s surface and call up maps, directions and local information. Unless, that is, you are indoors. And even if you are outdoors in a built-up area, the lack of a clear view of the sky can prevent GPS working properly, because its satellite signals are easily blocked by roofs, nearby buildings or even trees. For positioning to work indoors, where people spend most of their time, new technologies are needed.

Locata, an Australian company, recently unveiled a system of powerful transmitters whose signals can penetrate walls or cover large outdoor areas such as airfields. The beacons within the network are synchronised to within a billionth of a second, and can allow a receiver to determine its position to within less than a metre.

There has also been headway in cutting through the tangle of competing standards that has discouraged investment in infrastructure. In August a group of 22 technology companies including Nokia, Samsung and CSR formed the In-Location Alliance. This trade organisation is dedicated to building indoor-location systems around two technologies, Bluetooth beacons and Wi-Fi signal mapping. It may finally give the indoor positioning industry something it currently lacks: a sense of direction.

Read more here

Online Paywalls and the Future of Media

The most realistic outcome—and one that has already been happening in many legacy newsrooms—is that online paywalls will make up some, but not all, of the revenue that's been lost on the print side. Therefore these huge media outlets will shrink somewhat, and probably demand more from each employee, but they will not disappear. In the long run, the overall number of professional journalists will probably shrink, at least until online media figures out how to monetize itself as well as print did. (Since print newspapers were for many decades small monopolies virtually capable of printing money, this is unlikely.)

This does not mean that paywalls will work for everyone. Paywalls will work for content that is worth paying for. An easy way to determine whether content is worth paying for is to ask: is content that is more or less the same freely available at a million other places online? If so, you should not put your content behind a paywall, because people will just click somewhere else for it.

Examples of media outlets that can support paywalls: high quality national newspapers (NYT, WSJ, probably the WaPo, and... ?), sites that offer quality financial news to an audience for whom a paywall's cost is negligible (WSJ, FT, Bloomberg), sites that cater to very specific niche audiences with highly specific news that can't be easily found elsewhere (Politico, trade publications of all types, small local newspapers), sites offering very high quality proprietary longform journalism published on a frequent basis. Additionally, magazines that maintain their quality should be able to offer online subscriptions to their loyal subscriber base.

Examples of media outlets than cannot support paywalls: mediocre or shitty newspapers that have decimated their newsrooms, shitty magazines with little quality content, sites full of mostly opinions and listicles and other entertaining but easily reproduced things of that nature, most blogs.

This will all work itself out in the space of a generation. Which is no comfort to all the journalists who found themselves laid off before it got worked out.

Read more here

Google+ Is Growing at Facebook Speed

Google today announced that it has 135 million active users checking their Google+ streams each month, up from 100 million in mid-September. If you run the math, that means Google+ is now growing at the same pace as Facebook when it was similarly sized.

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Governments and internet firms are wrestling with the rules for free speech online

In June Google revealed that 45 countries had asked it to block content in the last six months of 2011. Some requests were easily rejected. Officials in the Canadian passport office asked it to block a video advocating independence for Quebec, in which a citizen urinated on his passport and flushed it down the toilet.

Most firms do accept that they must follow the laws of countries in which they operate (Nazi content is banned in Germany, for example). Big internet firms can prevent users accessing content their governments consider illegal, while leaving it available to visitors from countries where no prohibition applies. Some pledge to be transparent about their actions—Twitter, like Google, releases six-monthly reports of government requests to block information. It also alerts citizens when it has censored content in their country.

Legislators in America want more firms to follow suit. In March a congressional subcommittee approved the latest revision of the Global Online Freedom Act, first drafted in 2004. This would require technology firms operating in a designated group of restrictive countries to publish annual reports showing how they deal with human-rights issues. It would waive this for firms that sign up to non-governmental associations that provide similar oversight, such as the Global Network Initiative. Founded in 2008 by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and a coalition of human-rights groups, it has since stalled. Facebook joined in May but only as an observer. Twitter is absent, too.

Read more here

The Key To Social Media Marketing? Focus, Focus Focus

When it comes to social media marketing, small to medium-sized businesses often make the mistake of dedicating boundless resources trying to be all things to all people.

“Don’t overstretch yourselves trying to do everything, you’ll just get exhausted,” panelist Scott Gerber of Young Entrepreneur Council directed the crowd.

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Why 'Tweeting Like Crazy' Doesn't Always Boost The Bottom Line

“I’ve been tweeting like crazy, and my business still isn’t booming!” Heard that before? It’s a common mistake made by many small to medium-sized businesses – you tweet every hour and update Facebook every 10 minutes; you’re on LinkedIn, Foursquare, Pinterest AND Quora. All this social media is bound to yield results, right? Wrong.

Social media is just part of the marketing equation. All three panelists agree that a business’s social media efforts must be meaningful and purposeful, or else they can become a useless and time-draining exercise.

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Social Media Breathes New Life Into Branded Content

Branded content (is) a strategy that lends itself perfectly to social media. In early August, for example, General Mills teamed up with AOL to launch its new site Live Better America. Lifestyle articles from AOL’s Huffington Post and recipes from General Mills pepper the sponsored site, which aims to create conversations about healthy living. Readers engage and spread the word through social media: tweeting, pinning and discussing things they’ve seen there. And who is most often featured somewhere in the conversation? Why, General Mills, of course. This is an example in which branded marketing has made a perfect transition into social media marketing.

If you’re thinking about diving into the creative world of branded content and social media, it might be a good idea to keep these pointers in mind:

Develop a voice. You don’t mess around with your logo, so be focused in creating a pitch-perfect social media presence.

Embrace the nuances. Consumers are smart, so branded content should be subtle.

Be seen at all the right parties. Where your content is published matters. Be sure to research the sites and outlets your customers frequent and respect.

Get it out there. This is where social media is your best friend. Get a real distribution plan for your branded content and execute it well — in some cases, you may even want to consider using a content distribution platform.

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‘Just the facts’ isn’t good enough for journalists anymore, says Tow Center’s journalism manifesto

Of the dozens of assertions in a wide-ranging “manifesto” about the altered state of journalism from Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, this one stands out:

Journalists are not merely purveyors of facts.

The authors can foresee a world where 90 percent of news reports are written by computer algorithms that convert data into narrative structures and where many newsworthy events are first described by connected citizens rather than journalists.

The result:

The journalist has not been replaced but displaced, moved higher up the editorial chain from the production of initial observations to a role that emphasizes verification and interpretation.

Working between the crowd and the algorithm in the information ecosystem is where a journalist is able to have most effect, by serving as an investigator, a translator, a storyteller.

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Why old media stocks are on top today

Big media companies were supposed to die outright along with the old tube TV set. At least that was the thinking a few years ago as up-and-comers Netflix (NFLX) and Hulu let you bypass commercials, and Facebook (FB) and YouTube made it possible to create and share your own material. Given that, the recent performance of old- vs. new-media stocks might surprise you. This year the legacy players have shot up 34%, more than twice the gain of the S&P 500. Yet Facebook has fallen 45% since it went public in May. Why are the old guys ahead?

In short, Americans still like to watch television, especially live sporting events and buzzed-about series. Average time in front of the TV is up since 2003, from 2.6 hours a day to 2.8, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. What's more, even as more consumers watch shows online, traditional media are finding ways to earn money off that shift by creating live streaming tools and cutting deals with Netflix and Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500). Social media firms, on the other hand, are still struggling to figure out a profitable business model.

To cash in on the majority of Americans who still watch TV, favor broadcasters with must-have content. Traditional broadcast networks are thought of as the industry laggards: too dependent on ads, audiences shrinking. CBS (CBS, Fortune 500), a true pure play, is off 13% since the start of a disappointing fall TV season. But therein lies an opportunity. CBS leads its peers in potential syndication deals and has nine of the top 20 shows.

"The value of broadcast is enormous," says David Bank, equity research analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

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Old Media, New Tricks: R&D

the seven-year-old New York Times R&D Lab acts as a tech startup of sorts inside the New York Times Co. With 20 staffers, the lab’s mix of crazy smart technologists, programmers, designers and business brains are charged with the Sisyphean task of developing tech innovations and new business models to help the struggling Times weather an uncertain future.

(A project called) Ricochet appears to hold the greatest marketing potential. The program allows brands to buy ad space around articles relevant to their messages that can be then distributed via a unique URL. The highly targeted program could potentially revolutionize now-imprecise ad exchange audience targeting.

Following the Times’ lead, the Washington Post Co. last fall launched WaPo Labs, which also focuses on emerging technologies. The Philadelphia Media Network, publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, this year launched the Project Liberty Digital Incubator with a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation. Meanwhile, the incubator project infuriated members of the Newspaper Guild union, as it coincided with the March layoff of 19 staffers plus 21 buyouts.

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10 Twitter Power Tips That Guarantee More Retweets

Retweets are the backbone of the Twitter network. Thanks to the ripple effect, a retweet allows any user’s message to be seen by any and everybody – theoretically at least, your single tweet could reach 140+ million people.

Here are 10 Twitter power tips that will get you a ton more retweets.

Have a short and sensible username – Twitter allows a maximum of 15 characters for usernames but the longer yours is, the more awkward it is for people to retweet your messages, particularly if they’re long and you’re being retweeted by second (and third, and fourth) generations of users who prefer the old style retweet. You can change your username at any time. If it’s more than 10 characters, I’d seriously think about it.

Leave enough space to allow people to retweet you easily. Twitter vets rarely use the new-style retweet. If they have to edit your long tweet to be able to retweet you, most won’t bother, and those that do risk botching your magnificent prose. It’s worth memorising your Magic Retweet Number. But if you’re lazy, always leave at least 20 characters at the end of every tweet.

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Google’s Internet Service Might Actually Bring the U.S. Up to Speed

Google’s effort to install a blazingly fast, gigabit-per-second fiber Internet service in the two-state metropolis of Kansas City—a speed 100 times faster than the national average—is a radical new business direction for the company, and perhaps provides an unorthodox model for how to rewire parts of the United States. If Google’s business model for actually getting fiber built pans out, it may usher in a new era for privately built broadband.

Compared to many countries, the United States has slow and patchy Internet service. While a few areas enjoy very fast service, overall the United States ranks 24th worldwide in speed, with consumers receiving an average of 11.6-megabits-per-second download speeds.

The entry of superfast Internet may aid local entrepreneurship. An effort called Homes for Hackers is trying to get Kansas City homeowners with Google Fiber service to give free rooms to developers for three months, and a collection of local startups is betting the service will attract new companies.

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8 social-media changes since the 2008 elections

A week after the 2012 elections, here's a look at some of the changes in the social- and digital-media landscape in the U.S. since 2008. Here are eight developments worth noting:

1. Facebook: 2008 was, indeed, a long time ago. At the end of that August, Mark Zuckerberg announced that his service had crossed 100 million users, a far cry from the billion milestone it would hit within four years.

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GIF': The Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year

In a move sure to delight BuzzFeed fans, the Oxford American Dictionary has announced that 2012's word of the year is "GIF." GIFs, a longstanding part of internet meme culture, are simple, jerkily animated images. "The GIF, a compressed file format for images that can be used to create simple, looping animations, turned 25 this year, but like so many other relics of the 80s, it has never been trendier," explains Katherine Martin, Head of the U.S. Dictionaries Program, at the Oxford Dictionaries blog.

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Prime-time TV's shrinking picture

This fall, 38% of young-adult prime-time viewing on the major networks (and 23% of all viewing) consists of previously recorded shows, Nielsen says. That's up from nearly zero a decade ago.

"This year has really sort of been the tipping point that we've been expecting," says Leslie Moonves, chairman of CBS Corp., which owns CBS, Showtime and half of CW. Increasingly, "overnight ratings don't mean anything."

Nearly two months into the new TV season, ratings for three of the four big networks are down 10% to 30% from last fall. One cause for alarm is that overall TV usage by young adults ages 18 to 24 is down 9% since this time last year, more than any other age bracket.

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Retweeting Without Reading? Yeah, It’s Happening– and It Affects Journalism Strategy on Twitter

Your assumptions are probably right when you notice a weirdly fast retweet, or see a RT of something that you already recognize as not true: Zarrella’s study implies many people tweet a link without even clicking on that link. Forget about “RT are not endorsements.” RTs may not even be an acknowledgement that a particular link was clicked, let alone read.

In other words, almost one in every five tweets generates more retweets than clicks. This suggests many people pass on a link without looking at it, and perhaps even worse, vetting it.

A blind retweet may be helpful for pushing your brand out there (which, true indeed, can be a fair goal—see more below), but it may not be helpful for the prime goal of journalism: informing the public.

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The New Algorithm of Web Marketing

Publishers and broadcasters have long tried to offer advertisers the right audience for their products. Want to sell pick-ups to people who like sports? Buy ads at halftime during a football game. Selling luggage or airline tickets? Buy ads in the travel section of a newspaper or Web site.

In digital advertising, that formula is being increasingly tested by fast-paced, algorithmic bidding systems that target individual consumers rather than the aggregate audience publishers serve up. In the world of “programmatic buying” technologies, context matters less than tracking those consumers wherever they go. And that kind of buying is the reason that shoe ad follows you whether you’re on Weather.com or on a local news blog.

That shift is punishing traditional online publishers, like newspaper, broadcast and magazine sites, who are receiving a much lower percentage of ad dollars as marketers use programmatic buying across a much broader canvas.

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Video games are behind the latest fad in management

As video games have grown from an obscure hobby to a $67 billion industry, management theorists have begun to return the favour. Video games now have the dubious honour of having inspired their own management craze. Called “gamification”, it aims to take principles from video games and apply them to serious tasks. The latest book on the subject, “For the Win”, comes from Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, from the Wharton Business School and the New York Law School respectively.

Some video-game designers are opposed to the idea on principle, arguing that gamification is really a cover for cynically exploiting human psychology for profit.

Messrs Werbach and Hunter accept much of this criticism. Indeed, they go out of their way to warn aspiring gamifiers of the many pitfalls they face. Trying to enliven boring, unskilled work is risky, they say: presenting cutesy badges to call-centre staff can easily come across as patronising rather than motivating. Workers already toil for a reward—money—and will be suspicious of attempts to introduce a new form of compensation that costs their bosses nothing. The authors cite psychological experiments suggesting that intrinsic rewards (the enjoyment of a task for its own sake) are the best motivators, whereas extrinsic rewards, such as badges, levels, points or even in some circumstances money, can be counter-productive.

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Newspapers versus Google

In Germany politicians are considering a bill to extend copyright protection to excerpts of newspaper articles appearing in search engines’ results, thus enabling publishers to collect payment for them. Google is the main target: some German newspaper executives say it benefits from showcasing their material in search results on its news aggregator, Google News. A similar bill has been proposed in Italy. French newspapers want the same. On October 29th President François Hollande warned Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, that if French newspapers’ demands for compensation are not met by year-end, France may pass a law akin to the German one. Austrian and Swiss publishers are thinking along similar lines.

Giving away the headline and first sentence of an article supposedly dissuades readers from clicking through to the newspaper’s website to read the entire story.

Newspapers are also claiming that copyright law is on their side. America’s laws are more relaxed than most of Europe’s, so search engines’ use of some material from articles qualifies there as “fair use”. But in Belgium a group of newspapers sued Google for news copyright infringement and won. The company is appealing against the ruling but is likely to have to pay some damages.

The real issue behind all this, however, is the decline of traditional media. In France not a single national newspaper is profitable, despite around €1.2 billion ($1.54 billion) in direct and indirect government subsidies, according to Olivier Fleurot, the boss of MSLGROUP, a communications firm, and a former chief executive at the Financial Times, part-owner of The Economist. In 2011 newspaper advertising globally amounted to $76 billion, down 41% since 2007, according to the World Association of Newspapers. Only 2.2% of newspapers’ advertising revenues last year came from digital platforms, and even these are vulnerable to ad-blocking software.

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TV Usage Of 'TV' Continues To Erode

The amount of time Americans spend watching “TV” via a traditional television set continues to decline, according to the latest edition of Nielsen’s quarterly Cross Platform Report. While television remains the overwhelming means most people use to watch “television,” usage of the medium declined 1.7% over the past year, according to the second-quarter 2012 report. While still minuscule in total time spent watching TV, mobile phones were the fastest-growing means of watching television over the past year. All other sources were either flat (the Internet) or declined (DVD/Blu-Ray, video game platforms) in terms of TV usage.

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E-Books Finally Get Traction in Japan

The Japanese are avid readers; the country’s publishing industry generated $22.5 billion in revenue last year, according to the Japan Book Publishers Association. A decade ago, long before the Kindle revolutionized the publishing world in the U.S., Japanese authors were writing novels using text messaging and readers were catching up on their favorite novels and manga comics on their mobile phones.

“People don’t want to buy the machines because there’s not very much content, and publishers aren’t keen to invest in the content because there aren’t many e-readers,” says Hamish Macaskill, managing director of English Agency Japan, a Tokyo literary agency.

Finally, though, Japan’s e-reader dark ages may be ending. EPUB 3.0, the latest open-standard software for digital readers developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum, an electronic publishing trade group, can display Japanese text vertically. That’s unlocked the door for some newcomers to the e-reader market, allowing them to use the same standards they use elsewhere rather than technology exclusive to Japan.

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Wireless Charging

Madison Square Garden, Starbucks, Delta Air Lines Sky Clubs, and other venues are starting to embed charging stations into tables and bars as a service for their customers and for the cachet of providing a cutting-edge technology. The charging time is comparable to wired connections. Problem is, there isn't yet a common standard, so enabled phones won't work with every charging surface.

The first North American cars with Qi built in could come out in mid-2013.

To hedge their bets, some automakers and other companies are testing multiple standards. Others are embedding several technologies into their gear. The ultimate winning standard of wireless charging may not emerge until at least 2014.

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Electronic copyright laws are bugging readers—and authors

Cracking the digital-rights management (DRM) that secures works that are distributed electronically, such as e-books and films, is illegal in many countries. But it can be tempting when rules seem unfair or arbitrary. Calibre, a free software programme, can be fitted with a third-party plug-in to strip the DRM from proprietary e-book formats. It has over 11m users. Other more furtive means are available too. David Price, head of piracy intelligence at NetNames, a brand-protection firm, says no DRM system has yet remained uncracked.

Cory Doctorow, a blogger and author (who gives his books away free on the internet) says “rotten lawmaking” has set market terms that nobody wants—including many authors and publishers, who would prefer a more open system. In July Macmillan was the first book publisher of the “Big Six” to free its science fiction and fantasy e-book range from DRM. It termed the restrictions on copying and moving content a “constant annoyance”, for readers. In August Harvard Business Review Press launched an outlet for e-books, also DRM-free. In October sales of the “Humble eBook Bundle”, a package of no-locks books for which consumers paid whatever they wanted (and chose how to split it between the author and a charity), was a big success. The average price paid was a record $14. Consumers seem to reward authors who trust them with their content.

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The merger of two big publishers shows the book business’s challenges

In only three years the page has turned for electronic books; American publishers generated $2.1 billion in revenues from them last year, up by more than 3,200% from 2008, according to BookStats, which tracks the industry. In theory e-books offer better margins, because they are cheaper to produce. But publishers fret that customers will soon expect to pay less for all books. That won’t be so good for profits.

And an even greater threat than Amazon looms. According to Claudio Aspesi, an analyst at Sanford C Bernstein, a bank, the march of Penguin and others into digital formats could make them more vulnerable to piracy. E-books are easy to share by e-mail and speedy to steal: it can take around four seconds to download a pirated version of “The Help”, a novel about servants, but over three hours to download the film. If piracy hits publishing like it hit music, profits could evaporate, he says. Here’s hoping for a happier ending.

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Papers like GOP

When it comes to audience, the American newspaper industry looks a lot like the Republican Party. The print audience — the audience that still responsible for 80 percent or more of almost all newspaper companies’ revenue — strongly parallels the Romney vote in almost every category: age, ethnicity, and gender. Older, White, and male. Read more here

New Ways to tell Stories

The Guardian's graphic novel here.

Activision, the Anti-Zynga

According to industry tracker NPD Group, the number of people in the U.S. playing video games fell by 5 percent last year, to an estimated 211.5 million from 222.5 million. Among the categories that declined was light PC gamers, comprising people who play a few minutes a day on Facebook and other PC-based platforms.

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GoPro Widens the View of Its Customer Base

GoPro cameras allow action-sports enthusiasts to take professional-quality videos. Of the million or so HD Hero2 cameras the company sold in 2011, many were purchased by consumers who don’t have thrill seeking on their minds. Couples are leaving them on tables at weddings instead of disposable cameras. On Oct. 17, Woodman Labs introduced a new model called the HD Hero3 that’s 25 percent lighter and 30 percent smaller than its predecessor. It offers better resolution, clearer audio, and slower slow-mo. The HD Hero3 comes in models priced at $200 to $400, each with built-in Wi-Fi that allows people to control their camera remotely using an iPhone or Android app.


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Governments and internet firms are wrestling with the rules for free speech online

The arrest of a senior executive rarely brings helpful headlines. But when Brazilian authorities briefly detained Google’s country boss on September 26th—for refusing to remove videos from its YouTube subsidiary that appeared to breach electoral laws—they helped the firm repair its image as a defender of free speech.

Two weeks earlier those credentials looked tarnished. Google blocked net users in eight countries from viewing a film trailer that had incensed Muslims. In six states, including India and Saudi Arabia, local courts banned the footage. In Egypt and Libya, where protesters attacked American embassies and killed several people, Google took the video down of its own accord.

The row sparked concern about how internet firms manage public debate and how companies based in countries that cherish free speech should respond to states that want to constrain it. (Freedom House, a campaigning think-tank, reckons that restrictions on the internet are increasing in 20 of the 47 states it surveys.)

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France: Twitter erupts in anti-Semitism

“The most nauseating displays of anti-Semitism” have flooded French Twitter feeds in recent weeks, said Alain Granat in Jewpop.com.

Twitter took the posts down after a Jewish group threatened to sue, but Twitter is not really the problem, said Philippe Le Claire in L’Union (Reims). The entire Internet is. Because it’s so easy to hide one’s identity, extremists can “develop and maintain websites, blogs, and Facebook pages with writing so hate-filled it’s chilling.”

That’s because the Internet is conditioning us all to adopt the American attitude toward free speech, said Flavien Hamon in Le Monde. Just as watching U.S. cop shows “alters our understanding of French justice,” our use of Internet platforms developed in the U.S. has warped our understanding of freedom of expression. In the U.S., it is perfectly legal “to belong to a neo-Nazi group or wear a T-shirt with a racist slogan.” Here, it is not. French society believes that freedom of expression does not extend to hate speech.

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The danger of short web addresses

LINK rot afflicts the connective tissue of the internet. If sites rejig their content carelessly, useful web addresses (technically known as URLs) may bring up only an error message. Shortening services turn long web addresses into handy short ones: That is particularly handy for those constrained by Twitter’s 140-character message limit. But short links are useful anywhere on the internet where concision is valued.

Convenience has its cost. Manufactured short links are particularly prone to link rot. They contain no clue about the ultimate destination. If the providers vanish, so do all the vital signposts they have created and stored.

Of around 1,000 link shorteners launched since 2001, 600-odd had folded by May 2012 according to yi.tl (a new service). Many were used as disguise by spammers and scammers. But bona fide services have failed, too.

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Meet the New Boss: Big Data

For more and more companies, the hiring boss is an algorithm. The factors they consider are different than what applicants have come to expect. Jobs that were once filled on the basis of work history and interviews are left to personality tests and data analysis, as employers aim for more than just a hunch that a person will do the job well. Under pressure to cut costs and boost productivity, employers are trying to predict specific outcomes, such as whether a prospective hire will quit too soon, file disability claims or steal.

Personality tests have a long history in hiring. What's new is the scale. Powerful computers and more sophisticated software have made it possible to evaluate more candidates, amass more data and peer more deeply into applicants' personal lives and interests.

The new hiring tools are part of a broader effort to gather and analyze employee data. Globally, spending on so-called talent-management software rose to $3.8 billion in 2011, up 15% from 2010, according to research firm Gartner.

It isn't just big companies that are turning to software for hiring help. Richfield Management LLC, a Flint, Mich., waste-disposal firm that employs 200 garbage collectors, was looking for ways to screen out applicants who were likely to get hurt and abuse workers' compensation.

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Mag Bag: Ad Pages Continue To Fall

2012 is shaping up to be another lousy year for consumer magazines, at least as far as print advertising is concerned. According to the latest quarterly tally from the Publishers Information Bureau, total ad pages fell 8% to 36,059 in the third quarter of this year. That follows similar declines in the first and second quarters of the year; in the first nine months of 2012, ad pages are down 8.6% to 110,843.

Out of 216 titles tracked by PIB, 153 experienced declines in ad pages in the third quarter, including 88 which experienced declines of 10% or more, and 41 which experienced declines of 20% or more.

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Twitter blocks its first account for hate speech

Twitter said on Wednesday that it has blocked the account of a neo-Nazi group at the request of the German government, something that the company announced earlier this year it had the ability to do — although it said at the time that it would try hard to only use this feature in extreme circumstances, and would record its behavior at Chilling Effects so that everyone would know.

Although Twitter has blocked accounts for other reasons — including the controversial blocking of a Financial Times journalist who criticized the network’s corporate partner, NBC, during the Summer Olympics — this is the first time it has done so at the request of a foreign government. Since its inception, Twitter has boasted that it sees itself as the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party." The question is where Twitter will draw the line when free speech conflicts with its desire to either promote its corporate partnerships or make peace with foreign governments.

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Number of Americans Who Read Print Newspapers Continues Decline

While Americans enjoy reading as much as ever – 51% say they enjoy reading a lot, little changed over the past two decades – a declining proportion gets news or reads other material on paper on a typical day. Many readers are now shifting to digital platforms to read the papers.

Only 29% now say they read a newspaper yesterday – with just 23% reading a print newspaper. Over the past decade, the percentage reading a print newspaper the previous day has fallen by 18 points (from 41% to 23%). Somewhat more (38%) say they regularly read a daily newspaper, although this percentage also has declined, from 54% in 2004. Figures for newspaper readership may not include some people who read newspaper content on sites that aggregate news content, such as Google News or Yahoo News.

Over the past decade, there have been smaller declines in the percentages of Americans reading a magazine or book in print (six points and four points, respectively) than for newspapers.

Substantial percentages of the regular readers of leading newspapers now read them digitally. Currently, 55% of regular New York Times readers say they read the paper mostly on a computer or mobile device, as do 48% of regular USA Today and 44% of Wall Street Journal readers. Read more

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In Defense of Pinterest

Therapists often run into a curious problem during treatment: Clients aren’t very good at describing their emotions. How exactly do you express the nature of your depression? So this spring, relationship counselor Crystal Rice hit upon a clever idea. She had her clients use Pinterest, the popular picture-pinning social network, to create arrays of images that map out their feelings. It’s a brilliant epiphany: While emotions can be devilishly difficult to convey in words, they’re often very accessible via pictures. “This way we can really identify what’s going on,” Rice says.

As Rice discovered with her clients, Pinterest’s appeal is that it gives us curiously powerful visual ways to communicate, think, and remember. If you see one picture of a guitar, it’s just a guitar; but when you see 80 of them lined up you start to see guitarness. This additive power is precisely what helps Rice’s clients paint their internal worlds.

Part of the value of Pinterest is that it brings you out of yourself and into the world of things. As the Huffington Post writer Bianca Bosker argued, Facebook and Twitter are inwardly focused (“Look at me!”) while Pinterest is outwardly focused (“Look at this!”). It’s the world as seen through not your eyes but your imagination.

Granted, Pinterest encourages plenty of dubious behavior too. It can be grindingly materialistic; all those pins of stuff to buy! Marketers are predictably adrool, and as they swarm aboard, the whole service might very well end up collapsing into a heap of product shilling.

But I suspect we’ll see increasingly odd and clever ways of using Pinterest. If a picture is worth a thousand words, those collections are worth millions.

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the Copyright Alert System

The nation’s major internet service providers by year’s end will institute a so-called six-strikes plan, the “Copyright Alert System” initiative backed by the Obama administration and pushed by Hollywood and the major record labels to disrupt and possibly terminate internet access for online copyright scofflaws.

The plan, now four years in the making, includes participation by AT&T, Cablevision Systems, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon. After four offenses, the historic plan calls for these residential internet providers to initiate so-called “mitigation measures” (.pdf) that might include reducing internet speeds and redirecting a subscriber’s service to an “educational” landing page about infringement. The internet companies may eliminate service altogether for repeat file-sharing offenders, although the plan does not directly call for such drastic action.

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Trust in Media Survery

Only 8 percent of Americans say they have a "great deal" of trust in the news media, according to a new Gallup poll -- a record low for the 40 years Gallup has been polling the question.

This combined 40 percent who were generally trustful of the media was the lowest percentage ever. Meanwhile, 39 percent said they had “not very much” trust and 21 percent said they had “none at all"—zero confidence in the media and making 60 percent who said they were generally distrustful of the media.

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Inside Brand Journalism

Brand journalism (is) marketers using the tools of digital publishing and social media to speak directly to consumers. The advertising industry commonly refers to it as content marketing, brands disintermediating news professionals by writing and distributing thought leadership content.

Special features, special sections, sponsored content and similar revenue-driving content features involve editorial conflicts that result in professional compromises.

In marketing you’re trained to leave out the bad and the ugly for good reason: you have to protect the company, your customers, your partners and your shareholders. We’re learning that we have to let go a little. Loosen up our collar a bit to reach our audience at their place and in a more conversational style that’s conducive to dialogue and engagement.

Read more at Forbes

What Data says about us

"Big" data is something of a misnomer. It's colossal. From the beginning of recorded time until 2003, we created 5 billion gigabytes of data. In 2011 the same amount was created every two days. By 2013 that time will shrink to 10 minutes. The amount of information we take in in a single day is more than someone living in the 16th century would view in his entire lifetime.

The book from which this excerpt is drawn, The Human Face of Big Data, is created by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt.

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Google, Publishers Resolve Copyright Battle

Google and the Association of American Publishers have resolved a longstanding legal battle about the search giant's book digitization project... The settlement allows publishers to decide whether to exclude their books from Google's Library Project. When publishers allow their books to remain in Google's search index, the company will be able to display up to 20% of the work and sell digital versions through Google Play. Publishers who don't remove their books will also be able to receive a digital copy for their use.

While the deal resolves the publishers' battle with Google, the company is still facing a lawsuit by the Authors Guild. U.S. Circuit Court Judge Denny Chin recently said that case could proceed as a class-action, but Google appealed the ruling to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. That case is now on hold while the appellate court reviews whether class-action status is appropriate.

The legal proceedings date to 2005, when the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers sued Google for infringing copyright by scanning books from public libraries. In addition to digitizing the books, Google made them searchable and displayed snippets through its search engine.

Google has always argued that it has a fair use right to scan in books and display snippets, but the issue hasn't yet been litigated.

In 2008, Google reached a $125 million settlement with authors and publishers, but the deal was scuttled by Chin due to antitrust concerns.

That deal was controversial because it would have allowed Google to digitize orphan works -- books under copyright, but whose owner isn't known -- without fear of copyright infringement lawsuits. Currently, no one can publish orphan works without risking liability -- which can run as high as $150,000 per infringement. For that reason, Amazon and other companies said that the deal would have disadvantaged them.

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Facebook Hits Major Milestone: 1 Billion Active Users

Facebook hit a major milestone today: The biggest social network in the world now has 1 billion active users each month. That means that one in seven people in the world are Facebook users.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

"The next billion will be a lot tougher than the first. One big reason: A third of the world's population can't access Facebook. The Chinese government has blocked access to the website since 2009, although many still scale the "great firewall" to use it.

Along with the announcement, Facebook also released a bunch of statistics (.doc). Among them:

— The median age of the users signing up for Facebook in the week leading up to milestone was 22.

— The top users of Facebook were: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States. Facebook listed them alphabetical order, not by usage.

— The average user had 305 friends.

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More Declines Predicted For Newspapers

All the trend lines for newspaper advertising are pointing down, and the latest forecast from eMarketer does nothing to dispel this gloomy picture. According to the research firm’s most recent report, total ad revenues for newspapers will decline from $22.5 billion in 2012 to $21.5 billion in 2013, $21 billion in 2014, $20.63 billion in 2015, and $20.4 billion in 2016, for a 9.5% drop over the next four years.

Separately, newspapers’ digital ad revenues will continue to experience modest growth, but not enough to offset losses on the print side. Here, eMarketer sees total digital ad revenues edging up from $3.4 billion in 2012 to $4 billion in 2016, for a 17.6% increase in four years.

According to the Newspaper Association of America, total newspaper ad revenues -- including print and digital -- plunged from $49 billion in 2006 to $24 billion in 2011, for a 51.5% decline in just five years.

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Television Top Source of Local News

A Pew study released Wednesday finds television to be the top source of local news in both rural and urban areas. The study is divided into four categories — large cities, suburbs near large cities, small towns or cities and rural areas. Local television tops each category as the most-accessed news source among survey respondents, besting word of mouth, local radio and the print version of a local newspaper.

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TV Remains Decision Driver For Purchases

A study commissioned by the TVB shows that local television is the dominant influencer of decisions throughout the purchase funnel from awareness at the top through purchase at the bottom. Research shows that 64% of respondents say TV is the “primary action driver” of awareness and 39% of purchase. Newspapers came in second with awareness at 10%. The Internet (online behavior save email) was second at 10% for purchase.

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A journalist’s quick guide to Reddit

Sure, Reddit was already the unofficial “front page of the Internet,” the soul of all things meme, the secret sauce behind BuzzFeed’s viral posts, a breaking news curator and a Q&A forum for journalists, celebrities, newsmakers.

But then President Obama did a surprise Q&A appearance Wednesday that nearly crashed servers and drew almost 23,000 comments and questions. Obama didn’t bestow legitimacy upon Reddit — with nearly 40 million visitors and 3.2 billion pageviews a month, it already had that. But the visit from a sitting president certainly says something about its increasingly mainstream relevance.

The structure: Reddit consists of a bunch of “subreddits,” or topic sections. The most popular stuff bubbles up to the front page, but each post starts and lives on a specific subreddit. Every post, and every comment on every post, can be upvoted or downvoted by each user. Votes are how the community determines the best content, which rises to the top.

Definitions: Like many online communities, Reddit has developed its own shorthand. AMA, the type of post Obama did, stands for “Ask Me Anything.” It’s an open Q&A thread where one notable person answers questions from everyone else. TIL is short for “Today I Learned…” TIL usually precedes a specific surprising fact. Both AMAs and TILs could be occasional sources of story ideas for journalists.

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Web Video Still Hasn’t Made a Dent in TV

TV ad spending hasn’t gone anywhere, and it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere. Year in, year out, advertisers have been dumping around $70 billion into TV, and the Web video guys really haven’t captured any of it. The growth they have seen comes mostly from ad dollars moved out of other Web properties.

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Why journalists love Reddit

“Journalists everywhere are using it to get ideas for features,” Benji Lanyado, a freelance writer based in London, told me recently. “Stories appear on Reddit, then half a day later they’re on Buzzfeed and Gawker, then they’re on the Washington Post, The Guardian and the New York Times. It’s a pretty established pattern.”

Much of the “inspiration” is simple: journalists trawling Reddit and simply lifting ideas, photos or quotes: sometimes with credit, oftentimes without. But it’s more than just a source of material for aggregators, copycats and rip-off artists. Look a little deeper and Reddit’s news filter is also influential in other, less visible ways.

The site’s huge traffic (now more than three billion page views a month) means that it pushes through a lot of attention. Stories that rise to the top of the site can suddenly get propelled into the stratosphere — meaning that other media outlets, including TV news, have a greater chance of spotting them. The voracious, skeptical approach of many redditors also acts as a sort of built-in fact checking service for journalists too lazy or time-poor to do the legwork themselves:

And then there’s the site’s original content — things like the AMA sub-section, which has turned into an interview slot and confessional all in one. These real-life stories have helped turn Reddit from a simple link machine into something that creates its own stories, with the result that it’s constantly driving headlines.

The utility of Reddit for journalists is such that Lanyado has decided to build The Reddit Edit, a skinned version of the site. It’s aimed, at least in part, at that diminishing cadre of media workers who still shy away from the site. It looks more presentable than its parent, and puts forward only the hottest stories across a variety of topics: if Reddit calls itself “the front page of the internet”, then The Reddit Edit would be the 60 second news bulletin.

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Taking the E-Book Revolution to Africa

Worldreader is shipping Amazon’s single-purpose Kindle reader to schools and communities in sub-Saharan Africa with a near-term goal of providing 1 million e-books to children in the largely English-speaking countries of Ghana, Uganda, and Kenya in the next year.

(It) persuaded Amazon’s hardware engineers to work on reinforcing the casing of the donated devices so they don’t succumb to the harsh environmental conditions of the region. Worldreader also uses special software so that every few weeks free e-books can be wirelessly delivered over cellular networks to kid’s devices. The U.S. Department of State (announced) in June a pilot program to purchase 2,500 Kindles as part of its own global e-reader program. But the initiative, which had not been opened to other e-reader makers, wilted under criticism that it didn’t take into account the needs of sight-impaired people and the government was playing favorites in the competitive e-reading market.

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Video games dominate Kickstarter’s list of biggest projects.

SINCE its launch three years ago, Kickstarter, a website on which people who want to make things can ask other people to pay for their projects, has offered hope to penniless musicians, artists and designers. But what the world’s modern Medicis really want to bankroll is new video games. Of the ten most-funded Kickstarter projects, five are related to video games

One reason that games get financed is that gamers are tech-savvy. With an average age in America of 37, they also have plenty of disposable income. They expect no return on their money, save a free or cut-price copy of the game itself.

There are structural reasons within the games industry for Kickstarter’s popularity, too. As development budgets for games have risen, says Aubrey Hesselgren, a games-industry programmer, big publishers such as Electronic Arts and Activision have become risk-averse. Like Hollywood studios before them, they have taken the safe option of churning out endless sequels to already-popular titles in big-selling genres, such as military-themed shooting games. That leaves a long tail of disgruntled fans who can’t find new games they enjoy. The three biggest Kickstarter games are all from underserved genres.

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Multiscreen TV-Tablet Viewing Soars

Almost two-thirds of tablet owners, 63%, watch TV while using their tablets, per a study from GfK MRI. The research says this is significantly more than any other activity done concurrent with tablet usage.

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Newspaper that plays audio

A print version of the Lancashire Evening Post has been created with a button to allow readers to press the newspaper and play audio. The "smart" newspaper is the latest prototype from an 18-month research project led by the University of Central Lancashire.

Called Interactive Newsprint, the project aims to find a way of connecting a print newspaper to the internet. The newspaper sends a signal to a server to play the audio and gathers data on how many people have clicked to listen.



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People use TV differently

During the first three months of 2012, the average consumer spent about 2 percent less time watching traditional TV than the previous year, Nielsen said. They more than made up for that by spending more time watching material recorded on DVRs or on the Internet through TVs, computers and mobile devices.

The typical consumer spends 14 minutes a day using gaming consoles, although it's more for owners of Wii, XBox and PlayStation 3, Nielsen said. Many of these devices are also popular sites for accessing video, Turrill said.

"The gaming devices are becoming entertainment hubs," she said.

People over age 65 spend nearly 48 hours, on average, watching television each week, Nielsen said. At the other end of the spectrum are teenagers aged 12 to 17, who spend an average of 22 hours per week watching TV.

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Local News Trumps Cable In Viewer Numbers

Despite all the big brand awareness of the major cable news networks, the TV station community would like you to know that local TV news programs still deliver much bigger numbers in the respective major markets.

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A New Language of Journalism

OLD LANGUAGE OF JOURNALISM
Editors, reporters, stories, readers, anchors, viewers, advertisers, church, state, page one, column inches, rating points, photos, op-ed, sound bite, rewrite, correction, rim, slot, copy, blue line, press run, bull pen, bull dog edition, cover, picas, pages, broadcast, networks, broadsheet, bound, full bleed, register, takeout, ahed, lede story, copydesk, overnight, typeset, plate, inverted pyramid, wire, transmit, press time, stringer, “special to,” foreign correspondent, bureau, phoner, spike, kill, presses, stet, double truck, dateline, notebook, file, night editor, copy boy, jump page, in depth, breaking, paid circ.

NEW LANGUAGE OF JOURNALISM
Content creators, posts, participants, comments, marketers, transparency, RSS feeds, authenticity, context, monetize, platform, CMS, video, engagement, data, brands, accountability, aggregation, self-correcting, search, social, friends, curate, distribution, promotion, product manager, project manager, impressions, screens, pixels, galleries, writer, blogger, blog, voice, update, conversation, dialogue, flow, streams, producer, slideshow, terminal, unique visitors, repeat visitors, time spent, page views, tweets, likes, check in, yield, apps, swipe, delete, scroll, timely, relevant, engaging, pay, free, UI, UX, algorithm, SEO, SMO.

THE OLD AND NEW MEET
Old or new, much of the language talks about journalism’s need to observe, interpret and select, with all the biases that entails, conscious or not. The old language of journalism speaks to a moment in history, one defined by technology and social change that bestowed upon reporters and editors the power (often arrogantly perceived as authority) to be the sole collectors and decision-makers of worthy news. The new language of journalism speaks to new technologies and societal upheavals that democratize the journalistic processes of covering and distributing the news.

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Instagram Gaining Ground On Facebook

A recent study by app analytics firm found Instagram has become the second-most-popular app behind Facebook globally. It was the most downloaded social app in July across the 10 largest markets it tracks. While the report acknowledged a panel of six (five females, one male) is only a tiny sample, it believes more young people are discussing shifting away from Facebook to Instagram. Facebook acquired Instagram in April for $1 billion, partly to neutralize a fast-rising rival.

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More Data Beats Better Algorithms — Or Does It?

If you have to choose, having more data does indeed trump a better algorithm. However, what is better than just having more data on its own is also having an algorithm that annotates the data with new linkages and statistics which alter the underlying data asset. That way, the addition of each new algorithm radically improves the underlying data asset, just like the addition of a sensory input improves the way we experience the world around us.

http://allthingsd.com/20120907/more-data-beats-better-algorithms-or-does-it/

Google Fiber Splits Along Kansas City’s Digital Divide

Google’s effort to bring ultra-high-speed internet to a major American city could end up reinforcing the digital divide.

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‘Hope’ Poster Artist Sentenced to Two Years Probation

Shepard Fairey, the Los Angeles designer who created the famous poster of then-Senator Barack Obama next to the word “hope,” using an Associated Press photo as a base, was sentenced in a New York court earlier today as a result of AP’s litigation against him. He will face two years of probation and a $25,000 fine. Mr. Fairey had admitted that he tampered with evidence in his own legal efforts against the AP.

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Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars

Reddit, a vast social site that is a staple of digital life for the young and connected, but less well known among grown-ups, was founded by two fresh graduates of the University of Virginia in 2005, has just 20 employees, but serves up more than three billion page views a month.

With its basic graphics, endless links and discussions, Reddit can seem like peering into a bowl of spaghetti, but it has surpassed better-known aggregating sites like Digg to become a force on the Web. Occasionally, as in the instance of the Colorado shootings, it takes control of a news story early. Built on open-source software and guided by the ethos of its community, estimated by Quantcast to be 20 million users a month, it is a classic Web start-up in which opportunity seems mixed with barely controlled anarchy.

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New copyright rules for the digital age

Canada passed a law in June that sets a new standard of permissiveness. Britain too plans to introduce internet-friendly legislation this autumn. As with Canada’s law, the recommended new code entails exemptions for non-commercial uses and user-generated content. Another innovation is a copyright exemption for companies engaged in text- and data-mining (known as “big data”). Ireland and Australia are considering an exception that allows content legally obtained on one device to be accessed on another, called “format shifting”. Without such a provision, cloud-computing and digital-storage companies could be accused of abetting infringement. The Netherlands, South Korea and India are reviewing their copyright laws too.The tide is not all one way. EU officials want to maintain rules whereby computer users pay a small tithe on digital products to collection societies. These fees are meant to go to content creators but often end up enriching the middlemen instead.

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Preserving the Internet for posterity

There are not even any screen shots of the world’s first web page—the one that actually launched the World Wide Web in August 1991. Amid the explosive growth of internet services such as e-mail, music downloads and video streaming, along with the growth of the web itself, little thought has been given to recording information for posterity. The rapid turnover of content on the web has made total loss the norm. Lacking cultural artefacts, society has no mechanism to learn from previous mistakes.

Internet Archive (is) a free internet library capable of storing a copy of every web page of every website ever to go online. The Wayback Machine allows users to view the library’s archived web pages as they appeared when published. Today the Internet Archive also includes texts, audio, moving images and software. At the last count, its collection contained more than 150 billion items.

An interesting spin-off from the Internet Archive is the Open Library, which aims to provide a web page for every book in existence. The Open Library is not to be confused with Project Gutenberg, founded by the late Michael Hart, the inventor of the electronic book back in 1971. Project Gutenberg offers some 40,000 e-books that can be downloaded free in any of the popular e-reader formats.

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To what extent can social networking make it easier to find people and solve real-world problems?

IN 1967 Stanley Milgram, an American social scientist, conducted an experiment in which he sent dozens of packages to random people in Omaha, Nebraska. He asked them to pass them on to acquaintances who would, in turn, pass them on to get the packages closer to their intended final recipients. His famous result was that there were, on average, six degrees of separation between any two people. In 2011 Facebook analysed the 721m users of its social-networking site and found that an average of 4.7 hops could link any two of them via mutual friends.

Can this be used to solve real-world problems, by taking advantage of the talents and connections of one’s friends, and their friends? That is the aim of a new field known as social mobilization. It could potentially be used to help locate missing children, find a stolen car or track down a suspect.

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NASA ramps up investment in educational technology

An upcoming $10 million massively multi-player video game would simulate life on Mars and eventually provide 100 hours of playing time on the iPad, Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox. When a beta version of “Starlite” is released later this year, it will be NASA’s biggest foray into gaming, and one that Laughlin hopes will set the stage for future collaborations with commercial game developers.

In the past few years, NASA has released an air traffic control simulator for the iPhone, a trivia game called “Space Race Blastoff” for Facebook and “MoonBase Alpha,” a multi-player game that cost $300,000 to develop and resulted in 20 minutes of playing time.

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Flipboard's app

Flipboard, an app that displays content from Facebook (FB), Twitter, magazines, and newspapers on an elegant interface... faces competition from other newsreading apps, including Google Currents, Yahoo!’s (YHOO) Livestand, and Pulse, which has 15 million users and generates revenue by selling both advertising and digital subscriptions. To set itself apart from the crowded field, Flipboard boasts that more than 1.4 million people use its app daily, and that its users typically read its content for 86 minutes a month on their iPads and smartphones. The company also says advertisers are getting about 3 percent of users to click on their ads. By comparison, Facebook’s click-through rate is just 0.06 percent, according to a May report by Marin Software, an online advertising company.

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Find Out How Many Fake Twitter Followers You Have

StatusPeople is a humbling web application that reveals the percentage of followers that are fake or inactive. Obama has a whopping 31% fake followers (or 6 million of 19 million), Twitter queen, Lady Gaga, has 27%–which makes us feel like a people magnet with a comparatively tiny 20%. Twitter occasionally cleanses its universe of robots with a mass purge, but is clearly struggling to keep up a motivated army of spammers and purchased accounts.

“There’s a tremendous cachet associated with having a large number,” comedian Dan Nainan told The New York Times, after admitting to buying 220,000 fake followers.

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U.S. pay meters nearing 300

The number of U.S. newspapers with metered paywalls or other digital-subscriber initiatives has more than doubled in the past year as publishers race to boost their digital circulation revenues. Some 300 U.S. newspapers are now charging a fee to read their digital content, according to News & Tech research.

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Mobile money

Mobile money would transform even more lives in poor countries if regulators got out of the way. Mobile-money services are especially useful in developing countries. A worker in the city can send money to his family in the village without having to waste a day travelling on a rickety bus. Indeed, he can pay his family’s household bills directly from his phone. It is safer too: nobody wants to carry wads of currency on public transport.

Mobile money also gives its users—many of whom are poor and have no access to banks—a way to save small amounts of money. Mobile transactions are more traceable than cash, making it harder for corrupt officials to embezzle undetected. And lately Kenya has discovered a further benefit: the success of M-PESA has provided the foundation for a group of start-ups in Nairobi that are building new products and services on top of it

However Kenya’s success has yet to be replicated much elsewhere. More than half of all the world’s mobile-money transactions are handled by Safaricom. Mobile money is popular in one or two chaotic countries, such as Sudan and Somalia, but barely used in most places where it could do immense good, including India and China.

Not all countries need mobile money, of course. Rich countries, with cash machines, credit cards and internet banking, have little use for it.

In Kenya the government took the enlightened approach of allowing M-PESA to go ahead, rather than tying Safaricom in red tape. Many of the poor countries that would most benefit from mobile money seem intent on keeping its suppliers out—mainly by insisting they should be regulated like banks. This is often a mixture of laziness and turf protection: if the president’s cousin owns the country’s main bank, he may not rush to let cheap mobile-money systems into his country.

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Minority employment up in TV and radio, widening gap with print

Television and radio employed more minority journalists last year than the year before, according to the latest release from RTDNA’s annual survey. Minorities now account for 21.5 percent of the television workforce, up from 20.5 percent the year before, and 11.7 percent of the radio workforce, up from 7.1 percent in 2011.

TV continues to clobber newspapers in most measurements of diversity. Earlier this year ASNE figures showed the percentage of minority employees continued to decline in print newsrooms.

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Agencies Don't Pin Pinterest

Pinterest may be the darling of the social media world, but it has not been widely embraced by agencies. A new survey by the Creative Group finds that only 7% of advertising and marketing executives said their firms are using the visual social network for business purposes and 44% have no interest in adopting Pinterest.

Another 18% had never heard of the site, and 17% said it caught their eye but they were hesitant about using it for work. Just 10% said they planned to start using Pinterest as a business-related tool.

Pinterest enjoyed meteoric growth earlier this year, becoming the fastest stand-alone site to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark, according to comScore. As of July, it had 23 million monthly visitors.

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A new boss for an old paper

The New York Times Company (has) appointed Mark Thompson, the departing director-general of the BBC, a British public broadcaster, as its new boss. But Mr Thompson is an odd choice to lead a big, struggling private company. One analyst uncharitably compares his appointment to hiring the boss of a big charity to do a corporate turnaround. Mr Thompson has spent most of his career in public-service broadcasting at the BBC, save for a few years as boss of Britain’s Channel 4 television, a commercial broadcaster. The BBC is state-backed, and owes its survival to a tax on every household in Britain with a television set.

Last year it adjusted its pay wall and by June had boosted the number of digital subscribers to 509,000 between the New York Times and its stablemate, the International Herald Tribune, up by 12% in three months. However, the company still relies on advertisers for over 40% of its revenues, and online advertising rates are lower than those in print. Mr Thompson will have to devise a more radical business plan than trying to catch print papers’ fleeing subscribers.

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the impact of digital technology on the Islamic World

A recent survey by Ipsos, a market-research firm, found that rich Muslim-majority countries boast some of world’s highest rates of smartphone penetration, with the United Arab Emirates ahead at 61%. But even in poorer Muslim lands adoption is respectable: 26% in Egypt, not much below Germany’s 29%. More than a third of people in the Middle East now use the internet, slightly above the world average.

Muslims use their gadgets in much the same way as everyone else: they text, they use social networks, they buy online. But the adoption—and Islamification—of the technology has a deeper meaning, says Bart Barendregt of Leiden University, who has studied South-East Asia’s growing digital culture. “Muslim youngsters are adopting technology to distance themselves from older, traditional practices while also challenging Western models,” he argues.

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They All Want to Know Your Face

Next time you’re looking up at a billboard, there’s a chance it may be looking back down at you. Immersive Labs has developed software for digital billboards that can measure the age range, gender, and attention-level of a passerby and quantify the effectiveness of an outdoor marketing campaign. Beyond just bringing metrics to outdoor advertisements, facial detection technology can tailor ads to people based on their features.

Vending machines have been making a high-tech resurgence, selling everything from iPods to high-end cupcakes – some now include cameras that are analyzing your face. Facial detection technology can enable a machine to present a customer with items they would typically purchase based on their physical characteristics.

With today’s Internet-connected TVs and attached devices, companies have a chance to peek into the living room to see who’s around. Microsoft Kinect, the popular motion-sensing gaming device, has advanced abilities to identify its users and has built an entire advertising platform around “audience engagement” – being able to tell who is in the room, how old they are and whether they are paying attention to what is on the screen.

Today, these types of sensors may be part of the television when you purchase it already; in the last year alone, Sony, Samsung, Lenovo, and Toshiba have each introduced “Smart TVs” with facial recognition technology built in.

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