A new study of the way information flowed during the Arab Spring uprisings earlier this year paints a fascinating picture of how what some call “news as a process” works, and the roles bloggers, mainstream media and others play during a breaking news event. Read more »
Paywalls are all the rage for media companies, but they have the unfortunate effect of penalizing an outlet’s most loyal readers. Why not try to come up with ways to reward those users for their engagement, instead of hitting them with a cash grab? Read more »
New York Times CEO Janet Robinson recently stepped down from her post, and industry sources say she was asked to resign because she didn’t do enough on the digital side. Here are five suggested areas that a new CEO of the newspaper should focus on. Read more »
Prince Alwaleed’s $300-million investment in Twitter has raised fears of undue influence if the “Arab Spring” uprisings spread to Saudi Arabia. While this seems unlikely, that users are concerned at all highlights the pressure Twitter is under as it becomes a major media entity. Read more »
In the wake of an Oregon court ruling that decided a blogger wasn’t a journalist, some have argued it’s more important to define what journalism is — but in many ways, that’s even harder to define than who qualifies to be a journalist. Read more »
By keeping e-book prices high, the Big Six book publishers are not only getting less money from their books in many cases, but they are also fuelling piracy and pushing readers away — all of which is giving Amazon even more ammunition to use against them. Read more »
Forrester CEO George Colony reignited a minor firestorm recently by saying “the web is dead” and the app ecosystem is replacing it. Others, however, argue that the open web has benefits that apps do not have, and that losing these features would have serious consequences. Read more »
Traditional media companies — and independent artists — can learn a lot from the success of comedian Louis CK’s self-produced standup special, which he offered for download at $5 a copy without any digital-rights management protection. The project paid for itself in less than a day. Read more »
Bottlenose, a new web-based service that launched Tuesday and was co-founded by serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack, joins a growing number of apps and services aimed at filtering the noise out of our social-media streams. But does Bottlenose have what it takes to do the job? Read more »
Can BuzzFeed turn itself from a silly meme-generator into a serious media outlet by hiring journalists like Politico writer Ben Smith? If the meteoric rise of the Huffington Post has shown us anything, it’s that new media entities can spring from the most unlikely of sources. Read more »
A bi-partisan group of senators and congressmen is proposing an alternative to the widely-criticized Stop Online Piracy Act. The new bill, known as OPEN, has already won some support from opponents of SOPA, who say OPEN’s approach to piracy is much less damaging to the web. Read more »
The principle behind copyright has been taking a beating from “remix culture,” driven in large part by YouTube and other video sites. Is the rise of the YouTube generation changing the way that we think about copyright — and if so, should we let that happen? Read more »
While Google’s new Currents app for mobile news-reading is seen by some as a competitor to Flipboard and Zite, there are some crucial differences between them that make me wonder whether Google really understands how media is changing and how they can take advantage of that. Read more »
Box.net’s CEO Aaron Levie told the Net:Work conference that the key to making better enterprise software is to learn from consumer software and service companies, and make tools that are easy for users instead of just trying to lock them in to a specific platform. Read more »
The case of “investigative blogger” Crystal Cox reinforces that some governments are lagging behind when it comes to extending freedom-of-the-press protections to non-traditional journalists like bloggers. When anyone can be a journalist, how do we decide who gets protection and who doesn’t? Read more »
Being detained by U.S. Customs on my way to San Francisco for a conference on the future of work got me thinking about way that many people work now has changed in ways that make the job of governments — and border agents — a lot more complicated. Read more »
Amazon has been busy disrupting the traditional publishing market by encouraging self-publishing and signing authors to its own in-house imprint, but author Charles Stross argues that publishers themselves handed Amazon its biggest weapon in this fight: namely, the widespread use of digital-rights management locks for books. Read more »
A new commenting system at the New York Times has drawn fire from readers, but the motivation for the move is sound. If media companies want to behave like communities (which they should), they need to encourage their readers to “level up” and become more engaged. Read more »
The traditional publishing industry has been taking a beating lately from Amazon and the rise of self-publishing, but one writer says working with a publisher has a lot of benefits that self-publishing doesn’t. If publishers have any weapons against Amazon, they are on this list. Read more »
Google, Apple, Twitter and Facebook have all been in the news recently because of their control over our access to certain information, and the ways in which they could potentially restrict it. How much does that affect the way we perceive the world around us? Read more »
The board that administers the Pulitzer prizes for journalism has changed the criteria for the breaking news category to stress the real-time nature of the reporting involved — which suggests that some day a Pulitzer might be awarded for live-tweeting of a news event. Read more »
NewsCred, which started off trying to filter the news for consumers based on credibility, has created what it says is the modern digital version of a traditional newswire and signed up more than 750 sources including mainstream publishers such as Forbes and The Guardian. Read more »
When will we stop talking about the cloud? If history is any guide, eventually the idea of the cloud as something that is separate from the web will disappear as more people get used to it — although when that will happen is anyone’s guess. Read more »
The news that Facebook is planning an initial public offering that could value the company at $100 billion just reinforces how it has become a kind of social utility. How does that change the way we look at the network and what it does? Read more »
The recent GigaOM RoadMap conference in San Francisco featured a number of thought-provoking speakers — Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, venture investor Mike Moritz and former Sun Micrososystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim among them — and their views on technology’s future ranged all over the map. But one ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Whether it’s mobile devices like Square’s payment system or products that monitor our health and wellness, one of the threads running through the recent GigaOM RoadMap conference was the idea that successful technology involves making the computer disappear, even as it becomes more powerful. Read more »
Egyptian-born journalist Mona El Tahawy’s use of Twitter to criticize her country’s government may have made her a target for kidnapping and torture, but it also helped her friends assemble a network of supporters and a Twitter campaign that eventually freed her from her captors. Read more »
Amazon is trying to reinvent the library by offering e-books through public libraries and through its own Netflix-style service, but publishers and authors are digging in their heels. Going electronic should theoretically make books easier to lend, but so far, it hasn’t worked out that way. Read more »
Google says it’s adding +1 recommendations to Google News. But has the web giant lost the social news market to Twitter and Facebook, or could the integration of recommendations with the Google+ network allow it to catch up and become a strong competitor? Read more »
A research study looking at over 60 billion connections between Facebook users found the degrees of separation between any two is closer to four than six. But what do we mean when we friend someone on Facebook, and how does that translate to the “real world”? Read more »
The fact that the news is now a process rather than a finished product that can be printed and shipped to readers makes it even more important that newspapers adopt a “digital first” approach, and think about the news the way bloggers do. Read more »
As is usually the case when Facebook adds new features, the rollout of its “frictionless sharing” has caused controversy because of privacy and oversharing issues. But more than anything, what Facebook’s changes illustrate is that we still need better filters for our growing signal-to-noise problem. Read more »
The authorities in New York are discovering what Egypt also learned — that it’s not as easy to regulate or arrest journalists when everyone is a journalist. But while that may make our lives a little more complicated, it is fundamentally a good thing for society. Read more »
Twitter may be an ever-flowing stream of information, but as it becomes a more mainstream source of news and commentary it also becomes a huge reservoir of data that can be analyzed, and that’s what startups like ThinkUp and DataSift and Gnip are trying to do Read more »
In testimony on new anti-piracy legislation, Google’s policy counsel argued the payment blockade against WikiLeaks was a good example of how copyright infringement could be handled. But that blockade is a disturbing attack on freedom of the press — is that really something Google wants to support? Read more »
In another sign that it doesn’t really understand the evolution of media in the age of Twitter, the Associated Press has admonished its journalists for posting news about their own arrests to Twitter instead of saving that information for its traditional wire service. Read more »
New laws such as the Stop Online Piracy Act threaten to give new powers to Congress and to content companies, and have serious implications for the web — they make it clear that content companies are in many ways fundamentally opposed to the way the internet works. Read more »
A new report from the Pew Research Center on mainstream media outlets and Twitter shows that the vast majority simply broadcast links to their own content. By doing so, unfortunately, they are missing out on many of the things that can make social media so powerful. Read more »
A recent U.S. court decision involving the Twitter accounts of several WikiLeaks supporters shows that when push comes to shove, users of social networks and most online services have no expectation of privacy — at least, not if the one requesting the information is the U.S. government. Read more »
We may not ever get another Steve Jobs, but when it comes to tech visionaries with the potential to disrupt the way we look at the world in significant ways, Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey is as strong a contender for the mantle as any. Read more »
