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 »
Many online media outlets continue to rewrite news without providing a link to the original source, but doing this is both rude and short-sighted: Linking is one of the fundamental underpinnings of the internet and a crucial part of the culture of the web. Read more »
According to a couple of European researchers, governments that try to limit access to the Internet or social media during civil unrest can expect to see higher overall levels of violence with fewer calm periods than can governments that keep the web open. Read more »
Twitter has made it clear it plans to crack down on third-party services by tightening the rules on use of the network, but this desire for control — and the drive to monetize its user base — could ruin what made Twitter special to begin with. Read more »
Facebook’s meteoric rise and multibillion-dollar valuation may have created an incentive for thousands of entrepreneurs and investors, but veteran venture capitalist Bill Davidow says its philosophy of customer exploitation has also helped distort the values that Silicon Valley technology companies used to hold dear. Read more »
As more banks flirt with social media, StockTwits rolls out a redesigned website that makes it easier for investors to follow the information and people connected to the companies they care about. Read more »
Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, co-founders of the social media startup Kosmix, have announced that they’re leaving WalmartLabs, where they led the San Bruno innovation and data arm of the massive public company. 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 »
Twitter’s new feature, which shows enhanced content for certain media partners such as the New York Times, is another example of how the service can be both a partner and a competitor for media companies in the ongoing battle for users’ attention. Read more »
Marketers and the media already get instant feedback from the people they communicate with on Twitter and Facebook, but Poptip, a startup opening to the public this week, wants to help them do it at scale. Read more »
If straight-up blogging requires too much of a commitment and Twitter requires too little, CheckThis wants to join Tumblr as a “just right” option in the middle. Read more »
In the latest example of the justice system’s ongoing discomfort with social media, a federal judge has refused a request by Chase Bank to use Facebook to serve legal papers on an identity thief. Read more at paidContent »
Gigya, a startup that provides businesses with a suite of tools to make their sites more social, announced today that it had raised $15.3 million in new funding from Condé Nast’s parent company Advance Publications, Mayfield Fund, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Adobe. Read more »
The deal that Twitter announced on Thursday with NASCAR will see an editor employed by the network curating and highlighting tweets and other content, a deal that takes Twitter even further into the realm of being a media entity. Should traditional media players be concerned? Read more »
How have blogs and Twitter and other forms of social media changed the nature of the political process and the media reporting of that process? At paidContent 2012, I talked with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Vivian Schiller of NBC News about that question. Read more at paidContent »
It’s 2023, and here you are, 13 years old and finally ready for your own Facebook page! I’m sorry if my decision not to digitally document your life up to this point makes it tougher for you to be successful. But I hope you’ll thank me. Read more »
Ray Bradbury’s landmark novel Fahrenheit 451 is usually seen as a protest against government censorship, but the author said it was about how television and other media were making people less interested in ideas. What would Bradbury think of the world we live in now? Read more »
Paul Berry, the former CTO of the Huffington Post, is pulling back the covers today on his stealth social publishing start-up RebelMouse, a publishing tool that lets people pull in and present their Twitter and Facebook content and mix it with stuff from the web. Read more »
As more newspapers confront the same reality as the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and have to stop printing and go digital only to cut costs, what happens to the public role that a newspaper plays in a community? Can a digital-only media entity fulfil the same purpose? Read more »
Journalism professor Tim McGuire, a long-time newspaper editor and Pulitzer Prize judge, says there is much upheaval in the media industry but a lot of potential as well — provided media entities give up their gatekeeper role and learn to serve their readers better. 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 »
Solariat Founder and CEO Jeffrey Davitz has a message for anyone trying to leverage social network data to make money: “The fundamental problem with social is yes, it’s big data, but it’s mostly big, sucky data.” Targeting users means deciphering what they really want. Read more »
Forbes has been reinventing itself ever since it acquired Lewis DVorkin’s media startup in 2010 — and while there have been some stumbles, the magazine has shown how a traditional media entity can take advantage of the social web and the way that content works online. Read more »
There are very few analysts who make the tech industry stop and listen. Mary Meeker is one of those analysts, and on Wednesday she delivered one of her trademark presentations touching on the global economy, the mobile opportunity, and Facebook’s unprecedented IPO. Read more »
Image-sharing site Pinterest has been in negotiations for months with photo service Getty. A breakthrough could dispel some of the copyright questions hanging over the red-hot start-up — but one expert says not to hold your breath. Read more at paidContent »
Salesforce is reportedly close to buying social media marketing platform Buddy Media for $800 million. If true, it shows how Salesforce is adapting to the changing face of customer relationship management, which is increasingly about managing branding, social media interactions and marketing for customers. Read more »
A Cornell professor argues that while Twitter’s “trending topics” algorithm may not be deliberately censoring topics, it is still distorting our view of the world, in the same way that other personalization tools do. But whose fault is that, and what should we do about it? Read more »
What if Facebook is nothing more than a digital drug dealer and we’re all just junkies? As we head toward a future where technology is not just something we do, but a part of our biology, the answer to that question might take on grave importance. Read more »
Consumers are feeling pretty perky about things going into Memorial Day, according to new IBM sentiment analysis. That means stores and hotels might have reason to smile over the holiday weekend, as people seem to want to travel — and shop — over the long weekend. Read more »
With each passing elections season, we’re seeing more how social media is changing the political news coverage business. It’s not just sped up the news cycle, but it’s helped kill it, said Josh Marshall, editor and publisher of TalkingPointsMemo.com, at paidContent2012. Read more at paidContent »
The Windy City is famous for one big giant startup Groupon, but the folks at Chicago’s newest incubator Catapult believe there will be many more, and — for a short while at least — it hopes to play host to the next big Web sensations from the Midwest. Read more »
You could search for business contacts on LinkedIn or high school classmates on Facebook, but San Francisco-based Ark thinks you should be able to search for all kinds of people in one consolidated place. Read more »
In the run-up to Friday’s big IPO, here are 10 startups that owe (at least part of) their success to Facebook. Read more »
By now, we know that our online reputations hold implications for our employment, love lives and even insurance claims. But some emerging companies believe that our online identities – and our social data in particular – are valuable sources for evaluating and even managing credit risk. Read more »
Humor site JibJab doesn’t think White Castle’s animation is very funny, and has filed a lawsuit to stop the fast food chain from using its name to promote “chicken rings” on Facebook. Read more at paidContent »
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 »
Instead of focusing on Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie, investors and analysts should pay more attention to what Facebook flagged in its latest securities filing: that its mobile business is underperforming on the ad-revenue front and it doesn’t really know whether it can fix it. Read more »
Brands may put plenty of time and money behind the content they share on social networks, but only a small percentage of their intended audience may actually ever see it. New York-based startup Adaptly believes it has a solution. Read more »
The recent dramatic declines in users of some Facebook social-reading apps from newspapers like the Washington Post reinforces a lesson that media companies need to keep in mind at all times — namely, that Facebook is the information gatekeeper now, and you are just a provider. Read more »
Sports media was in a lather this week over Sarah Phillips, a 22-year-old ESPN writer who blogged, tweeted and scammed her way to online infamy. Read more at paidContent »
