While much of the attention during and after the Boston bombings focused on how one Reddit thread got things wrong, there were other important parts of the community that were doing good — and even doing something approaching journalism. Read more at paidContent »
While both Twitter and Reddit have come under fire for distributing incorrect information about the Boston bombings, mainstream outlets have done so as well. In a real-time news environment, having more sources is ultimately better. Read more at paidContent »
The media elite increasingly belongs to digital only entities. Look under the hood of some of these new power brokers, and you’ll see an unprecedented amount of ordinary people shaping the news. Read more at paidContent »
The woman who raised questions about gender and discrimination in Silicon Valley with her lawsuit against VC firm Kleiner Perkins is now moving on to work at Reddit. Read more »
Publishers’ lack of strategic focus on licensing and syndication today is matched by nearly equal indifference from software developers, entrepreneurs, and investors. To change this, they must structure their repositories of content so it can be searched, sorted, customized, repackaged, and accessed in real time via standardized APIs. Read more »
When news shows rely on “viral” videos for their programming, without bothering to even try and verify whether they are real or not, all they do is push their viewers towards the original source of that content. Read more at paidContent »
The Huffington Post’s new Conversations feature rounds up individual discussions taking place within comment sections and gives them a webpage of their own. It’s an attempt to fix comment chaos and could be an ad goldmine for AOL. Read more at paidContent »
BuzzFeed has been criticized for taking images from other sites such as Reddit without giving credit to the original creator — something that the web’s “remix culture” is making more and more difficult. But BuzzFeed’s desire to create sponsored content makes it more important than ever. Read more at paidContent »
Reddit, the online community that gained fame last year for a Q&A with President Obama, is said to be raising venture funding that could value the company at $400 million — and would give it ammunition to compete with other new-media players such as BuzzFeed and Tumblr. Read more at paidContent »
A string of offensive hashtag memes in France has spurred the government to announce a consultation on hate speech with Twitter. It could mark a watershed for the country’s approach to social media — but it’s not just Paris that has a problem. We all do. Read more »
In a recent “Ask Me Anything” interview with Reddit users, the Washington bureau chief for the New York Times had some refreshingly reasonable things to say about how the web has helped improve journalism, and how the practice of journalism will survive even if newspapers don’t. Read more »
As costs continue to rise along with pageviews, Reddit is looking to its community of users for help by promoting a membership model called Reddit Gold — an approach that other media entities might want to consider instead of just putting up a paywall. Read more »
Steven Huffman, who co-founded Reddit and then Hipmunk, used Google App Engine to teach novice programmers web development on Udacity. He is impressed with it as a real-life development platform. And Google really, really wants you to know that. Read more »
Why is it that Heroku, Foursquare, Pinterest, Reddit, Instagram et al are still so heavily dependent on Amazon’s aging and problematic US-East region? Very good question. Here are some potential answers. Read more »
Once again Amazon has experienced significant problems at its big US East data center. The snafu has taken down Foursquare, Reddit, Heroku and other popular websites. Read more »
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 »
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 »
Career site Dice acquired tech media icon Slashdot in the hopes that its energetic commentators will provide a new well of content and insight useful to job seekers. Will it work? Read more »
For years Reddit has been used by journalists as a source of stories and ideas — but most outlets have preferred to keep their addiction quiet. Now, thanks in large part to President Obama, it doesn’t have to be their dirty little secret any more. Read more »
Reddit has grown to become one of the most high-profile online communities, one that has even played a journalistic role in some recent cases. Among the things that newspapers and other media entities could learn from Reddit are the benefits of a strong and engaged community. 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 »
Reddit landed a personal appearance by the President of the United States on Wednesday when Barack Obama stopped by for one of the site’s “Ask Me Anything” interviews — an event that further adds to the web community’s reputation as an alternative source of journalism. Read more »
Critics of a Newsweek cover story by historian Niall Ferguson say the piece should never have been published because of the errors and flawed logic it contains. But isn’t it better if those kinds of mistakes are corrected in public view instead of behind closed doors? Read more »
As newspapers continue to lay off staff, one question is what will help to fill the gap that is left — where will that journalism come from? We’ve seen signs this week of one partial answer: amateur journalists making use of social media. Read more »
The way that communities like Reddit can come together to produce real-time reporting on incidents like the mass shooting in a Colorado movie theater shows how a new form of journalism — one that blends traditional reporting and crowdsourced reports — is starting to take shape. Read more »
Comparing a traditional news story about a recent shooting with a news report from a Reddit user — who pulled together Twitter messages from the perpetrators and victims — provides a glimpse of what a real-time, crowdsourced newsroom of the future might look like. Read more »
Not that long ago, Digg was seen as one of the kingpins of the social web — BusinessWeek put founder Kevin Rose on the cover and said he was worth $60 million. Now, what’s left of Digg has been acquired by Betaworks for a reported $500,000. Read more »
It was a rough weekend for the internet. While Friday’s problems with Amazon Web Services and other sites could be chalked up to some wicked thunderstorms, several sites went down Saturday for periods of time thanks to problems with the “leap second.” Read more »
Greplin is getting a facelift and a new name, Cue, a moniker reflecting its new shift away from personal data search toward personal data organization. Rather than merely searching your linked accounts, Cue is now proactively organizing that data into an intelligent snapshot of your day. Read more »
The launch of a think tank to educate Congress about disruptive technologies is just one of several new efforts proposed by the Internet and startup community. Conversations between Silicon Valley and D.C. will no longer rely on big tech firms. The Internet can disrupt politics too, Read more »
Many media outlets still think of the story or the article as the atomic unit of journalism — but with so many competing sources of information and the real-time nature of the social web, is that still the case? And if not, what replaces it? Read more »
New research about how news is verified through Twitter and a crowdsourced debunking of some fake Wikipedia entries reinforce the point that social networks and online communities can be powerful tools for the real-time verification of events, something that used to take place behind closed doors. Read more »
Is the web run by large corporations, or is it powered primarily by peer-to-peer networks? That’s the question behind one of the longest-running wagers of the modern web era — a six-year-old bet between author and web sceptic Nick Carr and Harvard professor Yochai Benkler. Read more »
The viral video of a nine-year-old boy who built a magical arcade out of cardboard at his father’s auto-parts business in Los Angeles has a lot to say about the spirit of entrepreneurship and creativity that fuels much of what we write about at GigaOM. Read more »
In an attempt to come up with better laws on copyright, Reddit is crowdsourcing the creation of a Free Internet Act, while Public Knowledge is trying to introduce its own alternatives. But will crowdsourcing work, or will it just add to the chaos and confusion? Read more »
Iran is tightening its grip on the Internet before Friday’s parliamentary elections, but activists from Tor and related projects vow to keep up the free flow of information. That’s the best thing the world can do for the country, says the founder of Iran’s Reddit. Read more »
It’s clear that Pinterest is really hot, but a new study shows just how powerful the virtual pinboard company has become. Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn combined, according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 Referral Traffic Report. Read more »
Members of New York’s tech community, a couple thousand strong, braved the winter chill and gathered outside the offices of New York senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand to protest the PIPA and SOPA legislation Wednesday, calling it a potentially crippling set of bills. Read more »
The anti-SOPA and PIPA demonstrations don’t stop with site-wide blackouts planned for Wednesday by a number of web giants. People also have plans to meet up in real life and take the protest to the streets in cities such as San Francisco, New York and Seattle. Read more »
