Comment trolls are often used as an example of why blog comments are a waste of time, but a recent series by the Climate Desk showed how they can quickly be turned into human beings. Read more at paidContent »
Popular politics blog The Dish, which went independent and added a metered paywall at the beginning of this year, is probably not going to reach its $900,000 goal, founder Andrew Sullivan says. Read more at paidContent »
Maria Popova, who writes and curates content at the Brain Pickings blog, will be speaking at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17 about alternative monetization models and the future of self-published content. Read more at paidContent »
Although many traditional media outlets and journalists see reader comments as having little or no value, publishers like Gawker and The Verge see them as a potential source of revenue — and even potential hires. Read more at paidContent »
Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow, has launched a new platform that he hopes will improve the nature of online comments by adding trust metrics — but there are no shortcuts to healthy online communtiies. Read more at paidContent »
Are new blogging platforms like Medium, Quora, Svbtle and LinkedIn’s Influencers program an attempt to recreate the bad old days of “content farms?” Not really — their focus is much more on quality content than on direct monetization. Read more at paidContent »
Journalism professor C.W. Anderson argues in a new book about the decline of traditional media outlets in Philadelphia that one of the main stumbling blocks in adapting to a digital future has been traditional journalistic culture. Read more at paidContent »
Henry Blodget of Business Insider has opened up about his site’s growth and other metrics, but for someone who is promoting transparency, he hasn’t told us the most important things we need to know in order to tell whether BI is successful or not. Read more at paidContent »
In the past, information flow during a military campaign was mostly controlled by the armies involved, but now that everyone has the ability to publish and distribute data including photos and videos, it changes the nature of attacks like the latest Israeli campaign against Hamas. Read more »
An article at Jezebel identifies high-school students who posted racist tweets in the wake of the election, raising a number of questions about what we consider to be an appropriate response to that kind of behavior, and when the cure is worse than the disease. Read more »
There has been a rush of fact-checking of recent comments made by Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, but does this mean the traditional media’s obsession with objectivity and the “view from nowhere” has changed? Not really — which is why more alternative sources are necessary. Read more »
A memo written by the managing editor of the Washington Post in 1992 says a lot about how much of the future of media was obvious even then, but it also misses the most disruptive force the industry has seen — namely, the rise of social media. Read more »
When Gawker Media launched its new commenting system earlier this year, founder Nick Denton said that he wanted to reinvent the way readers and writers interact around a story and turn the discussion into the most important feature of a post. Has he succeeded? Read more »
Put pictures in context, be good to read drunk, and other news blogging lessons I’ve learned from my favorite non-news blogs. Read more at paidContent »
New data released by Google shows that US government requests to remove search results, YouTube videos and other content has increased by 103 percent. Information from around the world show countries targeting everything from social network profiles to a citizen peeing on a passport. Read more »
After weeks of trying to find out why Orange mobile censored GigaOM for millions of mobile users in Britain, we finally have an answer: it’s because the company’s crude child protection blocks anything that looks like a blog by default. Read more »
New York-based Internet company Betaworks is announcing today that, along with Glam CFO Bruce Jaffe, it is making a “significant” investment in Stockholm-based, visual RSS reader Bloglovin. Read more »
Is Amazon seriously launching a tech blog to compete with gadget blogs like the Verge and Gizmodo? According to a new report, yes. The funny thing is that Amazon already has a gadget blog, plus seven other blogs on topics like food and music. Read more »
Gawker Media CEO Nick Denton says he is making the network’s revamped discussion platform the centerpiece of a new advertising effort — hoping to convince brands that they should come and talk about their products and services in Gawker’s comment section instead of on Facebook. Read more »
Gawker Media founder Nick Denton says that he wants to fix the way that online comments work, but in order to do that he is having to reinvent Gawker itself — by trying to flip on its head the way that online content works. Read more »
The Pulitzer Prize win by the Huffington Post has been hailed by some as the first win by a “blog,” but the reality is such terms have become increasingly meaningless. All we have now is media, some of which is journalism and some of which isn’t. Read more »
Tumblr CEO David Karp said the company is looking to make its mark by enabling creators to express themselves. It’s also in a bid to start monetizing the service. But Karp believes these two goals can converge, with Tumblr making money by empowering creators. Read more »
Critics of reader comments often argue that they are worthless because they are filled with trolls, and not that many people read them. But despite these flaws, building community through comments and other social features is more important than it has ever been for online media. Read more »
Members of social sites can get prickly when it comes to advertising. But even the most buzz-worthy social media startups need revenue to survive. Whether you use sponsorships, ads, or affiliate marketing, SkimLinks’ CEO Alicia Navarro has tips to help you monetize your social site. Read more »
Branch has gotten some attention for its new service, which offers a web-based platform for invitation-only discussions, as well as the fact that it is financed in part by two co-founders of Twitter. But is being less open a benefit for Branch or a disadvantage? Read more »
Attempts to impose a “code of conduct” for curators and aggregators or promote the use of special symbols for giving credit may be well-intentioned, but they are also misguided and likely doomed, just as every other attempt to control the Internet or the blogosphere has been. Read more »
The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
As the Cheezburger network joins Reddit and sites such as Wikipedia are considering a blackout on Jan. 18 in protest of Congress’ attempts to pass legislation to stop piracy, it’s becoming clear site owners believe an end to their chatter might matter. Read more »
Writer-turned-venture-capitalist MG Siegler recently reignited a long-standing debate over whether blogs should have comments or not. Critics argue that comments are mostly noise and are a waste of time, but blogs that don’t have them risk being seen as just a soap-box for their authors. Read more »
Edward Aten of Swift.fm noticed a shift in priorities this year. Visual experiences are starting to become the gold standard of web success; the successful web companies of 2011 and beyond are just simply better looking. Read more »
Google has already disrupted plenty of markets — search and online advertising being just two of them — and is trying hard to disrupt many others, including mobile. So why is the company so backward when it comes to the way it treats the online news business? Read more »
At Google’s recent Zeitgeist symposium, legendary TV newsman Ted Koppel suggested that it is somehow Google’s duty to “fix” the news, and CEO Larry Page seemed to agree. But relying on Google to choose what news we should read is a very slippery slope. Read more »
Social discovery platform StumbleUpon says it’s cutting back on the ability of users to blog and customize their profiles on the site. That includes shutting down groups, photo blogging, and the ability to select themes, which are all going away as of Oct. 24. Read more »
Police across the country have been arresting people for taping them with cellphones, but a recent decision by the First Circuit Court of Appeals makes it clear that such behavior is protected by the First Amendment, and that people doing this are effectively acting as journalists. Read more »
While plenty of newspapers and other media entities are happy to use social tools like Twitter and Facebook to promote their content, few are really engaging with their readers on a regular basis, says Reynolds Journalism fellow Joy Mayer — but that is the future of media. Read more »
Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Entrepreneurs like Steve Blank have spent a lot of time thinking (and writing) about how ineffective old-fashioned board meetings are for startups. LeanLaunchLab is a startup building software that could finally do away with the boardroom, or at least bring it into the 21st century. Read more »
Steve Rubel, a VP of digital strategy at Edelman, recently moved his blog to Tumblr and deleted all of his old posts. He says Google is paying more attention to social signals now, and so a social platform is more important than just having a blog. Read more »
Google added some features to Google News, including the ability to choose to see less news from blogs. But how does the search giant define the term “blog?” There’s no easy answer to that, which reinforces why the distinction doesn’t really make any sense any more. Read more »
Forbes media writer Jeff Bercovici says Journalism 2.0 is somehow to blame for the deaths of 24 people in Afghanistan in the wake of a Quran burning in Florida. But the story he refers to says more about Journalism 1.0 than it does about new media. Read more »
