First Reddit and now Twitter have had to confront issues related to freedom of speech recently, and decide which way they are going to go when it comes to protecting it. As social media becomes more mainstream, such battles will likely become more frequent. Read more »
The cloud is a great thing when it comes to storing large quantities of data, but getting it into and out of cloud-storage services can be difficult. Technologies that speed that process up can allow for new uses of that data, says Aspera CEO Michelle Munson. Read more »
Many cloud providers say they are open, or based on open-source technology, but in order to be truly open a service has to be backed by a community of users who contribute to making the technology better, says the founder of OpenNebula Read more »
Traditionally databases have either focused on real-time transactions or longer-term analytics of data, but newer technologies like Hadoop and a related open-source system called Hbase can combine those two things, according to a panel at GigaOM’s Structure Europe conference in Amsterdam Read more »
Data centers are like a virtual version of the traditional shipping industry, says Joyent founder and chief technology officer Jason Hoffman — they are becoming commoditized, but at the same time they are also disrupting digital businesses just as shipping disrupted traditional manufacturing. Read more »
A new app called Circa, from Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh, wants to make reading news on mobile devices easier by breaking down the traditional story format into its component parts. Co-founder Matt Galligan says the company is trying to rethink how we consume news. Read more »
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says the most powerful feature of Twitter is the way it can show us what others watching the same event are thinking, and that the best use of this feature is as a companion to a televised event like the Olympics. Read more »
Media companies and publishers of all kinds spend a lot of time measuring their online traffic patterns using analytics that track where readers come from — but Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic argues that they are overlooking a huge contributing factor that he calls “Dark Social” traffic. Read more »
In addition to occasional acts of journalism, Reddit is also known for its less savory content, including a page featuring creepy photos of women taken without their permission — and the controversy over that kind of content says a lot about the nature of the community. Read more »
A federal court has found that scanning books for search — which Google was doing for a university project called the Hathi Trust — is clearly covered by the “fair use” principle in copyright law, which could help Google in its own lawsuit with the Authors Guild. Read more »
In an effort to reveal the extent of political ad spending that occurs in key television markets, ProPublica has put together one of the most ambitious crowdsourcing projects in recent memory, and learned a thing or two about how to encourage crowd participation. Read more »
A Columbia Journalism Review columnist argues that a free or advertising-supported news model inevitably leads to lower-quality journalism. But there is no reason why ads can’t co-exist with high-quality reporting just as easily as they can subsidize pageview-driven clickbait, despite the CJR’s claims to the contrary. Read more »
The way that social-media tools like Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram have changed our lives is often taken for granted, but the way that they can inject some much-needed serendipity into our lives is often overlooked — even by those who use them a lot. Read more »
As the traditional media industry continues to struggle with the disruption caused by the web, some sceptics argue that a “digital first” approach isn’t the answer — but the reality is that focusing on digital is the only hope the industry has. Read more »
Critics say user-generated networks like Bleacher Report are just SEO-driven content farms that generate “clickbait” posts designed to drive low-quality traffic — but they also provide the opportunity for writers to show their abilities without having to work their way through the traditional media ecosystem. Read more »
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was brought back into the company last year to be its chief product visionary, but his role appears to have been dramatically reduced. So who is Twitter’s product visionary now, and what does that mean for the future of the service? Read more »
After seven years of legal battles, Google has finally reached an agreement with American book publishers that will let it scan and digitize books. The deal stands to make things better for readers and publishers — although Amazon is probably not happy about it. Read more »
The debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney was the most tweeted-about event in U.S. political history — but is the kind of real-time commentary and instant analysis that Twitter provides a good thing or a bad thing for the political process or society as a whole? Read more »
Many newspapers and media outlets are implementing paywalls in a desperate attempt to generate revenue, but some players — including the political blog network Talking Points Memo — are offering their readers a membership-with-benefits experience instead. It’s an approach that more media players should probably consider. Read more »
Prismatic founder Bradford Cross doesn’t come from a traditional media background — he is a data scientist who specializes in machine learning — but what he is doing with content recommendations says a lot about how the media business is evolving and what the future might look like. Read more »
Open-source principles have helped create a host of useful software, including the Linux operating system and the crowd-powered resource that is Wikipedia — but could the same approach be used to open up the process of producing government legislation? Clay Shirky argues that it could. Read more »
New research from the Pew Center into news consumption habits shows that the impact of mobile and social continues to grow. Almost twice as many users got news from a mobile device compared with 2010, and almost three times as many got news from a social network. Read more »
While it has gotten attention recently for the launch of its new online business offering, Atlantic Media has been making a lot of innovative and interesting moves in transforming its business from print to digital — moves that other media companies would do well to emulate. Read more »
In the latest episode of journalistic plagiarism, a Canadian newspaper columnist has been accused of taking content from others without credit. The response from the newspaper and the editors involved speaks volumes about how much traditional media outlets have to learn about how the web operates. Read more »
An editor at the Guardian argues that newspapers should be funded by a tax on internet service providers, because public journalism needs to be supported. But there are a host of flaws with the idea, including the fact that large newspapers are not synonymous with journalism. Read more »
I was an AirBnB sceptic for a long time, but trying the service made me realize just how disruptive it could be — and how it also shares a lot of the same characteristics of other disruptive businesses that are powered by the social web. Read more »
As consumers take more and more of their health-care needs into their own hands, developers can profit by helping them take control of their health and wellness through apps and mobile services, Rock Health’s CEO told GigaOM’s Mobilize conference. Read more »
Many new technologies are based on what companies and designers seem to think their users might want to do, or what they envision them wanting to do, but not as many are based on what people actually do, Ellen Isaacs told attendees at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference […] Read more »
The ability to distribute real-time information through social networks like Twitter is a powerful thing, but a new study points out that one of the downsides of this phenomenon is the fact that much of the content that gets linked to eventually disappears. Read more »
News-filtering service Prismatic has just launched a new “friend following” feature. Although this may look like a social-networking copycat move, founder Brad Cross says it is all about increasing the amount of data the service has about its users so that it can make relevant recommendations. Read more »
Twitter has argued that it doesn’t own a user’s tweets, but at the same time the company wants to control what users do with their content so that it can monetize the network. There’s an inherent conflict there that is becoming increasingly difficult for Twitter to avoid. Read more »
Some proponents of newspaper paywalls — including a columnist in the Columbia Journalism Review — argue that charging readers for content results in better journalism than the free and advertising-supported model used by many digital publishers. But the evidence for this assertion is dubious at best. Read more »
Despite all the gloom in the newspaper business, which he says will likely still have to suffer more pain and possible bankruptcies, New York Times media writer David Carr says he believes that thanks to the internet we are living in a “golden age for journalism.” Read more »
Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams has launched a news-filtering service called Nuzzel that is powered by social-networking activity. But while his previous ventures have been early to the market, his new offering suffers from the opposite problem — the market is already saturated with similar services. Read more »
Google says it blocked viewers in Egypt and Libya from seeing a controversial video clip on YouTube, after the video was allegedly linked to violence in both of those countries. But should Google be censoring content without even a request from a government or court? Read more »
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the social network is already handling a billion search queries per day, and that it is interested in launching a social search engine powered by the activity of its users — something that could turn out to be Google’s worst nightmare. Read more »
The new “public editor” for the New York Times has been getting good reviews for the way she is handling the job of being a go-between for readers and editors. But wouldn’t it be better if every NYT writer and editor did that for themselves? Read more »
One developer who has been creating custom Twitter applications for corporate clients says the network’s crackdown on use of its API makes him afraid for his livelihood, but could also damage the company’s long-term prospects if enough people like him start looking for alternatives. Read more »
Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter and the company’s former CEO during the beginning of its evolution from a side project into a major social-media entity, says that the influence of the network’s ecosystem has been overstated. But is that true? Read more »
The Journal Register newspaper chain has filed for bankruptcy for a second time, which some say means its “digital first” vision is flawed. But all it really means is that the kind of transformation required for the newspaper business will be measured in decades. Read more »
