We started working with the USGS in 2009 to make this historic archive of earth imagery available online. Using Google Earth Engine technology, we sifted through 2,068,467 images—a total of 909 terabytes of data—to find the highest-quality pixels (e.g., those without clouds), for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth. We then compiled these into enormous planetary images, 1.78 terapixels each, one for each year.

The changes on our planet are stunning. A glacier has almost vanished, a new city has been created and the Amazon rainforest has been decimated. Our capability as humans to destroy our planet and re-create it is astonishing. The whole project makes you realize that in order to understand something important and profound, you have to look at it over a period of time.

Check it out on Google’s Timelapse website.

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Amazon presents “Send to Kindle” as an alternative to read-it-later services like Pocket and Instapaper:

“The Send to Kindle Button lets you easily send that content to your Kindle to read later, at your convenience. Just send once and read everywhere on any of your Kindle devices or free Kindle reading apps for iPhone, iPad and Android phones or tablets. No more hunting around for that website or blog that caught your eye — just open your Kindle and all the content you sent is right there. The Send to Kindle Button is also great for those who want to collect content from the web to use in work projects, school assignments, or hobbies.”

The new feature for websites is the most recent in a line of read-it-later services Amazon has launched. Last year, the company announced a “Send to Kindle” button for Google Chrome, and later added support for Firefox. And users can already email files to their Kindles or transmit them using desktop apps. But the browser extensions — and now the web app for publishers — are Amazon’s effort to make the Kindle and Kindle apps an easy way to read all types of content, not just ebooks.

Developers who want to add the button can do so here, and the WordPress plugin is here.

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Rumors of widespread staff reductions at the publishing conglomerate have been floating around in media circles for several days, with some estimates of the cuts running as high as 700 people. According to a number of reports, the layoffs will hit virtually every aspect of the company, including most of its 21 magazine titles such as People, Fortune and Sports Illustrated.

At the eponymous magazine that started the empire, Time editor Rick Stengel said he was looking for half a dozen staffers to take a voluntary buyout, and if that number isn’t reached by Feb. 13, there will be mandatory layoffs. People magazine, one of the company’s top titles in terms of subscribers, said that it was looking for nine people to take voluntary buyouts — three writers and six reporters or researchers — or there will be layoffs.

Lang says Time needs to be more nimble

The bleeding is apparently so bad at the media giant that there was even a report from Reuters that Time may sell its iconic headquarters in New York City. Lang said in her memo that the cuts were required in order to transform Time into a more nimble, multi-platform company:

“With the significant and ongoing changes in our industry, we must continue to transform our company into one that is leaner, more nimble and more innately multi-platform. These reductions are part of this important transformation process.”

The broader story at Time is the same as it is at newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post: print advertising revenue, which has been the company’s bread-and-butter for decades, is in free fall — and digital advertising and online revenue have not even come close to making up the difference. In the nine months ended in September, revenues at Time fell by 6 percent, and operating profit dropped a whopping 38 percent.

Since Lang arrived as CEO a year ago, the former ad agency executive has made a number of moves to try and boost Time’s digital revenues, including a deal with Apple to sell subscriptions through the company’s iOS Newsstand app. But the benefits of such arrangements — whatever they may be — don’t seem to be enough to stem the ongoing damage.

When his main competitor Newsweek announced that it was shutting down its print edition after a merger with Tina Brown’s Daily Beast online venture, Stengel said that Time magazine had “done very well and we’ll continue to do well.” But given what we’ve seen at other media entities, these cuts are unlikely to be the end of the pain for Time Inc.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock / Aperture 51

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Last month, the blog Newsbusters discovered that a large chunk of a piece that Zakaria wrote for Time magazine about gun control was almost identical to sections from a New Yorker piece on the same topic, written by Jill Lepore. Zakaria was subsequently suspended by both Time and CNN (although he has recently been reinstated after both entities said they found no evidence of further plagiarism). Lehrer, meanwhile — a high-profile author — was fired by resigned from the New Yorker after it was discovered that he had duplicated information from a number of sources.

Plagiarism is just inefficient hyperlinking

One of the themes that has been brought up repeatedly in stories about both Zakaria and Lehrer is the idea that they have been overworked as a result of media multi-tasking. Stories about the Lehrer incident, for example, note that he was writing books and had a packed public-speaking schedule while also trying to write a blog for the New Yorker, and Zakaria made the same link by saying he plans to cut down on his responsibilities — implying that this was to blame for him mixing up his notes from the New Yorker piece with his own writing (he also said he recently hired an assistant).

But I think Box.net CEO Aaron Levie put his finger on a big part of the problem in a tweet he posted recently, in which he said plagiarism “is just really inefficient hyperlinking.”

Plagiarism is just really inefficient hyperlinking.

—
Aaron Levie (@levie) August 10, 2012

Although he probably just intended to be witty, I think Levie makes a good point. Plagiarism is defined as the attempt to “steal and pass off the ideas or words of another as one’s own,” and it is the last part of that definition that is the most important one. It isn’t so much that a writer like Lehrer or Zakaria takes information from someone else and uses it in a column — plenty of writers do that, and as the media world has exploded thanks to social tools such as blogs and Twitter, this phenomenon has only become more commonplace. But neither of them gave credit to the source of the content they used, and that was the real crime.

This is exactly the same kind of argument that gets made about news aggregators or blogs that do a poor job of crediting the source of the content they are aggregating. As Jeff Jarvis has argued in a series of recent posts, since copying is rampant on the internet, we should be more focused on ways of giving credit to the source or creator of that content. And what better way to give credit than by linking prominently to its originator? This is just another reason why links are the lifeblood of the internet, as I argued in a recent post about the back-and-forth between bloggers and the traditional media over the latter never giving credit to the former.

Linking also provides a great defence

If either Zakaria or Lehrer had been more devoted to the idea of linking to sources, they might have spent more time making note of where the information they were using came from, so that they could include a link — in the same way that academics routinely cite footnotes to back up their claims. Would they still have tried to pass those sections off as their own? Perhaps. As my paidContent colleague Laura Owen has noted about Lehrer, some of his behavior was likely a result of the pressure to be a public intellectual. But if either one is sincere about how their plagiarism was an honest mistake, paying more attention to linking might help.

And if anyone needs evidence of how a consistent policy of linking to sources can be a positive thing, they should look no further than the Gawker case: the blog network was sued by a company for defamation, based on a piece that the tech blog Gizmodo wrote about its products. In a decision that acquitted the media company of this charge, the court said that part of the rationale for its ruling came from the use of links in the Gizmodo piece, which provided ample evidence of what the post was referring to. As the court decision put it:

“Having ready access to the same facts as the authors, readers were put in a position to draw their own conclusions about Redmond and his ventures and technologies… Statements are generally considered to be nonactionable opinion when the facts supporting the opinion are disclosed.”

David Weinberger, co-author of the seminal book The Cluetrain Manifesto and a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, argued in a post about the journalistic principle of objectivity that “Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links.” In other words, when you have the ability to link to information that supports your conclusions, it’s easier to get away with being subjective, because readers are able to follow the links and decide for themselves whether you are credible.

I think the same principle applies to plagiarism: it is something that occurs when a medium doesn’t allow — or at least doesn’t encourage — links to original sources. The internet may make it more likely that someone copies content from another, but it also makes it easier to fix.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user skedonk

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Users who unlock the Time-Foursquare badge get “access to a curated list of must-attend venues and events,” plus convention tips from Time reporters — like historical facts from past conventions and 2012 campaign tips about the nominees and delegates.

Time already uses Foursquare to tie the covers of back issues to historical sites around the country. Other magazine brands have also experimented with Foursquare — Lucky offers mobile shopping deals, for instance — and magazines like New York and Time (NYSE: TWX) Out allow users to save web content to their Foursquare accounts.

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Everyone agrees that mobile is here and poised for phenomenal growth. Here are some insights:

Apps or Mobile Web — An Ongoing Question

Moderator Tom Krazit of paidContent drolly noted that the question has become a conference fixture. But a lot rides on the answer: will consumers get their future content on apps or on websites optimized for mobile?

Colin Kinsella, President of Digitas North America, was the app skeptic on the panel. He argues that the common consumer app experience often starts and ends at downloading a dozen apps — and then ignoring all but one or two. For people on the go, a simple web browser is a more convenient choice than navigating a cascade of apps and this is still the case even if most companies have yet to create a mobile-optimized website. The tilt towards mobile will gain speed, said Kinsella, when HTML5 arrives — the format is “going to look and feel like an app.”

The other panelists were not so sure. EVP of Time Inc. (NYSE: TWX) Paul Caine, said that his company’s mobile sites have attracted more than 100 million page views but that, all the same, he believes magazine-related apps will remain a big play because of the special type of loyalty they create among consumers. Pandora’s Chief Revenue Officer, Tom Trimble, also noted that tablets are typically used as a home-based second screen — meaning that apps will remain an attractive ongoing concern.

What the Heck is Going on With iAds?

Apple’s premium advertising package arrived with a splash and is pretty as a button. So why does nobody use it? Kinsella said Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) needs to allow third party developers more control but adds there is a bigger problem: it’s too damn expensive. He expects that adaption rates will go up when the price goes down because the product offers a special “emotional connection” and “creative renaissance.”

What Are The Most Promising Forms of Mobile Advertising So Far?

Search, banners and “click to call”, especially on the iPad. Consumers love the “tap to..” feature. Trimble noted that the ads are sometimes too pretty for their own good and offered the blunt assessment that advertisers needed to “cut through the great creative and deliver a clear message.”

By “tablets”, do we mean iPads?

Yes.

Surprise: There are Actually Two Mobile Ad Markets

An astute audience member asked whether recent mobile ad numbers had been parsed to account for spending on smartphones versus tablets. The panel admitted that they weren’t sure how the numbers broke down — or even if the metrics brokers themselves knew — but that conceptually they approached the space as two distinct markets and that they expected it to stay this way.

So What Will be the Year Mobile Ads Break Out?

You guessed it — 2012.

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Take Photos of the Current Time in Safari

First, you’ll need a photo of the current time taken from each camera whose internal clock is out of sync. Be sure to disable the flash to avoid screen glare before you complete these steps:

1. Launch Safari on your Mac and open the URL of an established “time authority” that will display the current time  (http://www.time.gov/ for example).
2. Using each camera, take a photo of Safari as it displays the correct time.
3. Import the photo of the correct time from each camera into your iPhoto Library.

Create Smart Albums for Each Camera Model

Now that you have photos of the correct time imported into your iPhoto Library from each camera you own, you will need to isolate the photos for each camera:

1. From the File menu on iPhoto, create a new Smart Album (one for each camera).
2. Use the drop down list to set the “Camera Model” condition of the Smart Album to match the relevant camera model for each album you create.
3. Keep creating Smart Albums until you have a unique Smart Album for each camera.

More Than One Camera of the Same Model

If you happen to have multiple cameras of the same model, then you must add a second field, “Any Text”  to the conditions of the Smart Album and set the value for this field will be set to the serial number of the camera as follows:

1. Select one of the photos for each camera of the same model.
2. From iPhoto’s File menu, select “Reveal in Finder” to show where the original photo is located in the Finder and open the photo using the Preview application.
3. From Preview’s Tools menu, select the “Show Inspector” menu item and navigate to the EXIF tab to find the value of the serial number.
4. Enter the serial number as the value for the “Any Text” condition of the Smart Album.
5. Again, keep creating Smart Albums until you have one unique Smart Album for each camera.

Determine the Time Adjustment for Each Camera

By comparing the time represented in the photo to the time stamp on the picture itself, you can determine the amount of the adjustment that must be made.  To determine the adjustment for each camera:

1. Select only the photo of the correct time as it was displayed in Safari within each Smart Album.
2. From the Photo menu in iPhoto, select the “Adjust Date and Time…” menu item and copy down the time difference between the time shown in the photo and the time stamp of the image file.
3. Click cancel, and repeat for each camera’s Smart Album.

Adjust the Time for Each Camera

Now that you have a unique Smart Album defined for each camera, and you know the exact time adjustment required for each camera, all that’s left to do is adjusting the time for all photos in the iPhoto Library for each camera.

1. Select one of the Smart Albums you created and select all of the photos in the same Smart Album.
2. ‘From the Photo menu in iPhoto, select the “Adjust Date and Time…” menu item and modify the date/time of all of the photos in these Smart Library, using the interval you discovered when comparing the time displayed in the image to the time stamp of the photo from that camera.
3. Be sure to check “Modify original files.”
4. Click Adjust, and repeat for each camera’s Smart Album.

It may seem like a lot of work, but once you’ve done it once, it should hopefully help keep your iPhoto Events in chronological working order for a long time to come, without requiring you to make manual changes each to the metadata of each photo you add.

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Everywhere you look, newspapers and magazines are trying to figure out how to evolve in an online world. Some have merged with online outlets, like Newsweek did with The Daily Beast, while others — including the New York Times — are busy putting up paywalls to try to retain readers. But The Atlantic took a more radical approach to surviving in the web era: It set out to deliberately disrupt its own business, rather than letting someone else do it, and while the experiment isn’t over yet, it seems to be paying dividends for the magazine’s parent company.

A feature in the New York Times on Sunday details how the magazine, which has been around for over 150 years, hasn’t turned a profit for more than a decade — but is now looking at recording a healthy profit of almost $2 million for 2010. How did it manage to do this? According to Atlantic Media president Justin Smith, who joined the company at a low point three years ago, the magazine imagined itself as a venture-capital backed startup in Silicon Valley “whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic.” As he described it to the New York Times:

In essence, we brainstormed the question, “What would we do if the goal was to aggressively cannibalize ourselves?”

The first thing to do was to remove the walls — both literal and figurative — between the web side and the print side of the publication, both in terms of the business operations and the editorial division. Another wall that came down was the website’s paywall (are you listening, New York Times?). Younger writers with web experience were hired, and advertising staff were given the freedom to sell print or online ads, so long as they hit their targets. The magazine also branched out into conferences and other brand-extension experiments, and it hired superstar blogger Andrew Sullivan.

The result? Revenue at The Atlantic has almost doubled since 2005, hitting $32 million this year, of which half is made up of advertising revenue. Digital advertising accounts for almost 40 percent of that number, compared with less than 15 percent at some other traditional print publications, and the amount of digital ad revenue is up by close to 70 percent over 2009. The addition of traffic draws like Sullivan has undoubtedly helped — he accounts for almost 25 percent of the site’s 4.8 million monthly unique visitors, a number that’s up 50 percent over last year.

As the NYT feature notes, not every traditional publication is going to be able to do what The Atlantic has done — or at least, not as easily. It’s a relatively small business compared with giants such as Newsweek and Time magazine, and has a single motivated owner. But The Atlantic had plenty of one thing that was crucial to its success: desperation. According to owner David Bradley, who bought the magazine in 1999, “Atlantic had so serially failed that it was overwhelmingly likely the next thing we would do was fail, and the next thing we would do was fail.”

That sense of desperation provided just the impetus that the magazine needed to remake itself — and not just a little, but from the top down and from the inside out. There are plenty of traditional media outlets who could use a bit more of that desperation, as they tinker and fidget instead of making the hard changes that need to be made.

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Post and thumbnails courtesy of Flickr user David Daniels

The diagram put the big unknown of one’s social media marketing time commitment into perspective. Kanter’s diagram was by no means discouraging, but led people to say “OK, I will start with listening — that seems manageable.” And that was just what many of us advise people to do when just starting out with social media marketing: Listen.

Two years later, and things have evolved in several ways:

1. There are more tools available to help us take part in social media activities.
2. There are more best practices for newbies to find and follow.
3. There are many tips published online on how to be more efficient in one’s efforts.

I have a new presentation coming up this week to an audience at varying stages of social media adoption, but mostly on the early end of the spectrum. I’m sure I’ll once again get the question “But how long does it take?” So I played around with Kanter’s original diagram to create my own. I wanted to illustrate not only how long each activity should take, but also to identify additional tools that can be useful in each area:

This diagram is by no means perfect, but I’m striving to keep it easy to understand for the layperson. I also wanted to address some of the efficiencies we’ve worked out the more we’ve used these tools. For example, I blogged about how to mine Twitter’s wealth in 15 minutes a day. I wanted to show that you don’t need to spend hours a day on Twitter or Facebook or the like to be effective in your efforts.

I reordered “Participate” and “Generate Buzz” activities from Kanter’s original diagram, and renamed the latter “Promote.”  I reordered them because we now have tools that make promoting something (generating buzz) so much speedier. Participating — even at a cursory level of engagement — really takes more time and consideration even though useful tools are also there. The tools may make it easier for us to monitor and participate in our social media channels, but we are now monitoring and participating in many more channels than before.

What I tried to avoid was listing all of the hundreds of apps that could fit in under each category; instead I referenced the more popular and effective tools to give a sense of what one can use. The main goal of this is to show the person new to all things social media that it doesn’t have to take an unmanageable amount of time to handle your social media activities but as you want to connect more deeply and leverage your social channels more strongly, you will cumulatively rack up the need for a greater time commitment.

I hope this diagram — or a future iteration of it — becomes a useful slide in any Social Media 101 presentation. Eventually, this, too, will become obsolete or irrelevant, but until then, how can it be improved?

What is my diagram missing? Where is it off base? Where is it right on the money?

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