1,759 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2020
    1. Instagram, despite not having any official reshare option, allows near unlimited hashtag spamming, and that allows for more deterministic, self-generated distribution. Twitter also isn't as great for spreading visual memes because of its stubborn attachment to cropping photos to maintain a certain level of tweet density per phone screen.

      Some interesting UI clues here that either help or hamper social networks

    2. Almost every social network of note had an early signature proof of work hurdle. For Facebook it was posting some witty text-based status update. For Instagram, it was posting an interesting square photo. For Vine, an entertaining 6-second video. For Twitter, it was writing an amusing bit of text of 140 characters or fewer. Pinterest? Pinning a compelling photo. You can likely derive the proof of work for other networks like Quora and Reddit and Twitch and so on. Successful social networks don't pose trick questions at the start, it’s usually clear what they want from you.

      And this is likely the reason that the longer form blogs never went out of style in areas of higher education where people are still posting long form content. This "proof of work" is something they ultimately end up using in other areas.

      Jessifer example of three part post written for a journal that was later put back into long form for publication.

    1. Regular readers of Gillmor's eJournal will recognize his commitment to user participation. "One of the things I'm sure about in journalism right now is that my readers know more than I do," he says. "To the extent that I can take advantage of that in a way that does something for everyone involved ó that strikes me as pretty cool." One fascinating aspect of Gillmor's Weblog is how he lifts the veil from the workings of the journalism profession. "There have been occasions where I put up a note saying, 'I'm working on the following and here's what I think I know,' and the invitation is for the reader to either tell me I'm on the right track, I'm wrong, or at the very least help me find the missing pieces," he says. "That's a pretty interesting thing. Many thousands more people read my column in the newspaper than online, but I do hear back from a fair number of people from the Weblog."

      Awesomely, this sounds almost exactly like something that David Fahrenthold would tell Jay Rosen about Twitter nearly 16 years later in an interview in The Correspondent.

      https://boffosocko.com/2017/11/27/pull-up-a-chair-1-jay-rosen-david-fahrenthold-the-correspondent/

    2. While many blogs get dozens or hundreds of visitors, Searls' site attracts thousands. "I partly don't want to care what the number is," he says. "I used to work in broadcasting, where everyone was obsessed by that. I don't want an audience. I feel I'm writing stuff that's part of a conversation. Conversations don't have audiences."

      Social media has completely ignored this sort of sentiment and gamified and psychoanalyzed it's way into the polar opposite direction all for the sake of "engagement", clicks, data gathering, and advertising.

    1. Gradually, we begin to conflate visibility with value. If something is being talked about and seen, we assume that it must be important in some way. – An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’

      And in an over-saturated media space, this is exactly the sort of thing that lands us a narcissistic and incompetent president.

    1. Mastodon deliberately does not support arbitrary search. If someone wants their message to be discovered, they can use a hashtag, which can be browsed. What does arbitrary search accomplish? People and brands search for their own name to self-insert into conversations they were not invited to. What you can do, however, is search messages you posted, received or favourited. That way you can find that one message on the tip of your tongue.
    2. Another feature that has been requested almost since the start, and which I keep rejecting is quoting messages.
    1. As an American and a staunch defender of the First Amendment, I’m allergic to the notion of forbidden speech. But if government is going to forbid it, it damned well better clearly define what is forbidden or else the penumbra of prohibition will cast a shadow and chill on much more speech.

      Perhaps it's not what people are saying so much as platforms are accelerating it algorithmically? It's one thing for someone to foment sedition, praise Hitler, or yell their religious screed on the public street corner. The problem comes when powerful interests in the form of governments, corporations, or others provide them with megaphones and tacitly force audiences to listen to it.

      When Facebook or Youtube optimize for clicks keyed on social and psychological constructs using fringe content, we're essentially saying that machines, bots, and extreme fringe elements are not only people, but that they've got free speech rights, and they can be prioritized with the reach and exposure of major national newspapers and national television in the media model of the 80's.

      I highly suspect that if real people's social media reach were linear and unaccelerated by algorithms we wouldn't be in the morass we're generally seeing on many platforms.

    2. Many of the book’s essayists defend freedom of expression over freedom from obscenity. Says Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld (father of Joseph, who would become executive editor of The New York Times): “Freedom of expression, if it is to be meaningful at all, must include freedom for ‘that which we loathe,’ for it is obvious that it is no great virtue and presents no great difficulty for one to accord freedom to what we approve or to that to which we are indifferent.” I hear too few voices today defending speech of which they disapprove.

      I might take issue with this statement and possibly a piece of Jarvis' argument here. I agree that it's moral panic that there could be such a thing as "too much speech" because humans have a hard limit for how much they can individually consume.

      The issue I see is that while anyone can say almost anything, the problem becomes when a handful of monopolistic players like Facebook or YouTube can use algorithms to programattically entice people to click on and consume fringe content in mass quantities and that subtly, but assuredly nudges the populace and electorate in an unnatural direction. Most of the history of human society and interaction has long tended toward a centralizing consensus in which we can manage to cohere. The large scale effects of algorithmic-based companies putting a heavy hand on the scales are sure to create unintended consequences and they're able to do it at scales that the Johnson and Nixon administrations only wish they had access to.

      If we look at as an analogy to the evolution of weaponry, I might suggest we've just passed the border of single shot handguns and into the era of machine guns. What is society to do when the next evolution occurs into the era of social media atomic weapons?

    1. Science and Complexity (Weaver 1948); explained the three eras that according to him defined the history of science. These were the era of simplicity, disorganized complexity, and organized complexity. In the eyes of Weaver what separated these three eras was the development of mathematical tools allowing scholars to describe systems of increasing complexity.
    1. A key difference between inclusive access and buying print textbooks is that students effectively lease the content for the duration of their course, rather than owning the material. If students want to download the content to access it beyond the duration of their course, there is often an additional fee.

      So now we need to revisit the calculation above and put this new piece of data into the model.

      Seriously?! It's now a "rental price"?

    1. Conservatives have fought for schools to promote patriotism, highlight the influence of Christianity and celebrate the founding fathers. In a September speech, President Trump warned against a “radical left” that wants to “erase American history, crush religious liberty, indoctrinate our students with left-wing ideology.”

      I can't help but think here about a recent "On The Media" episode A Civilization As Great As Ours which highlighted changes in how history is taught in India. This issue obviously isn't just relegated to populist India.

    1. As Gamergate unfolded, Wetherell noticed its participants were using the retweet to “brigade,” or coordinate their attacks against their targets, disseminating misinformation and outrage at a pace that made it difficult to fight back. The retweet button propelled Gamergate, according to an analysis by the technologist and blogger Andy Baio. In his study of 316,669 Gamergate tweets sent over 72 hours, 217,384 were retweets, or about 69%.

      brigade

    1. Microcelebrity refers to the affective capital engendered and commodified by various social and new media platforms where identity and brand are merged and measured in likes, shares, follows, comments and so on.
    2. But, whereas engaged scholarship has a political imperative, academic microcelebrity has a market imperative. Academic microcelebrity is ostentatiously apolitical, albeit falsely so because markets are always political. Academic microcelebrity encourages brand building as opposed to consciousness-raising; brand awareness as opposed to co-creation of knowledge. It creates perverse incentives for impact as opposed to valuing social change. Microcelebrity is the economics of attention in which academics are being encouraged, mostly through normative pressure, to brand their academic knowledge for mass consumption. However, the risks and rewards of presenting oneself “to others over the Web using tools typically associated with celebrity promotion” (Barone 2009) are not the same for all academics in the neo-liberal “public” square of private media.

      I'm reminded here of the huge number of academics who write/wrote for The Huffington Post for their "reach" despite the fact that they were generally writing for free. Non-academics were doing the same thing, but for the branding that doing so gave them.

      In my opinion, both of these groups were cheated in that they were really building THP's brand over their own.

    3. Digital texts embody the intersections between history and biography that Mills (1959) thought inherent to understanding social relations. Content from my blog is a ready example. I have access to the entire data set. I can track its macro discursive moments to action, space, and place. And I can consider it as a reflexive sociological practice. In this way, I have used my digital texts as methodologists use autoethnographies: reflexive, critical practices of social relationship.

      I wonder a bit about applying behavioral economics or areas like System 1/System 2 of D. Kahneman and A. Tversky to social media as well. Some (a majority?) use Twitter as an immediate knee-jerk reaction to content they're reading and interacting with in a very System 1 sense while others use longer form writing and analysis seen in the blogosphere to create System 2 sort of social thinking.

      This naturally needs to be cross referenced in peoples' time and abilities to consume these things and the reactions and dopamine responses they provoke. Most people are apt to read the shorter form writing because it's easier and takes less time and effort compared with longer form writing which requires far more cognitive load and time expenditure.

    1. In total, Facebook managed to string together 67 unchallenged acquisitions, which seems impressive, unless you consider that Amazon undertook 91 and Google got away with 214 (a few of which were conditioned). In this way, the tech industry became essentially composed of just a few giant trusts: Google for search and related industries, Facebook for social media, Amazon for online commerce. While competitors remained in the wings, their positions became marginalized with every passing day.
    2. When a dominant firm buys its a nascent challenger, alarm bells are supposed to ring. Yet both American and European regulators found themselves unable to find anything wrong with the takeover.
    1. That said, I personally can’t imagine handing over all of my labor to a centralized platform where it’s chopped up and shuffled together with content from countless other sources, only to be exploited at the current whims of the platform owners’ volatile business models. I know a lot of creators are successful in that context, but I also see a lot of stuff that gets rendered essentially indistinguishable from everything else, lost in the blizzard of “content.”
    1. I’m absolutely positioning the Kindle to be a replacement habit for Facebook and Twitter. How much smarter would you be if you replaced half of your social media usage with reading?
    1. But on the Web, stories of all kinds can show up anywhere and information and news are all mixed together. Light features rotate through prominent spots on the "page" with the same weight as breaking news, sports coverage, and investigative pieces, even on mainstream news sites. Advertorial "features" and opinion pieces are not always clearly identified in digitalspaces.

      This difference is one of the things I miss about reading a particular newspaper and experiencing the outlet's particular curation of their own stories.Perhaps I should spend more time looking at the "front page" of various news sites.

    1. Among the many phenomena we’d tentatively attribute, in large part, to the trend: the rise of sharebait (nee clickbait) and the general BuzzFeedification of traditional media; the Internet hoax-industrial complex, which only seems to be growing stronger; and the utter lack of intelligent online discourse around any remotely complicated, controversial topic.

      sharebait BuzzFeedification Internet hoax-industrial complex

      Priceless!

    1. We have to recognize that prior to Web 2.0 and social media, “the media” often connoted “mass media,” broadcast from the few to the many.

      One of the issues we're seeing is that mass media still exists within platforms like Facebook and Google, the problem is that the "gatekeepers" now have vastly different structure and motivation. The ostensible gatekeeper now is an algorithm that puts all it' emphasis on velocity, stickiness, shareability, and the power of anger (which pushes clicks, likes, and shares). Thus the edge content is distributed far and wide rather than the "richest" and most valuable content that a democracy relies on for survival. Mass media is still with us, we've just lost the value of the helmsperson controlling the direction of the rudder.

    2. Facebook allows users to sign in, authenticate, and identify themselves on a range of Web sites, feeding our data to Facebook as we move across the Web.

      If second and third tier services that are mono-tasking tools in the social space would allow for some of the IndieWeb building blocks, then this would not only help them significantly, but also help to break up the monopoly.

      Here I'm thinking about things like SoundCloud, Flickr, et al that do one piece really well, but which don't have the market clout. Instagram might have been included in the collection prior to it's buyout by Facebook. Huffduffer is an audio service that does a bit of this IndieWeb sort of model.

    3. Refusing advertising is refusing to privilege moneyed speech. The increasing equation of money with speech—that is, those with the most money can be the loudest and most persistent voices in contemporary media—is denied when advertising is refused.
    4. Carol Nichols of the Twitter alternative rstat.us makes this explicit: Twitter is “actively ignoring the needs of their users in order to serve the needs of their advertisers and shareholders.” In contrast, she argues that rstat.us is more concerned with user expression.
    1. Publishers of all sizes are trying to figure out how to leverage these new platforms as user behavior on each platform evolves. On top of all this, the platforms themselves are rapidly changing. It can often feel like no one is on steady ground.
    2. It could mean working closely with a platform itself to beta test new products and features. Companies like CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post have signed on as Facebook media partners and have collectively produced hundreds of Facebook Live broadcasts, for instance. Other brands such as The Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, ESPN and more have teamed up with Snapchat to produce content for Snapchat Discover, Snapchat’s media portal.

      It's been almost 2 1/2 years since this was published. I'm curious if the group has revisited this white paper to evaluate how these methods have worked over time.

      Prima fascia evidence would indicate that most major publications that have gone all-in on some of these experiments have only lost out on them following the pivots that social silos have made since. A good example is the large number of publishers that went in on Facebook video related products only to have Facebook completely abandon them. It's not a partnership if the publication has no recourse when the social platform abandons them.

      I seem to recall that several online pubflishers were essentially forced to completely shutter following social platforms pivoting unexpectedly.

    1. Chris Hayes, who anchors MSNBC’s 8 pm newscast and is among the most thoughtful, civic-minded journalists in the industry, referenced a Will Ferrell joke from Anchorman 2 on his podcast, saying, “What if instead of telling people the things they need to know, we tell them what they want to know?” That is, he says, “the creation story of cable news.”
    1. Why can't there be more sites with solid commentary like this anymore? Do the existence of Twitter and Facebook mean whe can't have nice things anymore?

    1. Many will tease the possibility of going private, posting announcements in their page bios like, “Going private in the next 24 hours,” to entice people to follow while they can.

      This is painfully sad as it's not like the page doesn't want more followers and isn't going to approve each and every one of them...

    1. Another good time to slow people down is when they’re about to post something nasty online. Friction-positive design can help here, too. Civil Comments was an app you could apply to your comments section that forced commenters to rate three other comments before posting their own.
    1. Some of it is visual. Yes, it is true that all my posts on Twitter and Facebook look something similar to a personal blog: They are collected in reverse-chronological order, on a specific webpage, with direct web addresses to each post. But I have very little control over how it looks like; I can’t personalize it much. My page must follow a uniform look which the designers of the social network decide for me.
    2. But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.
    1. Yet even before Clubhouse launches, it has encountered issues that larger social media companies struggle with. On Sunday, the entrepreneur Sriram Krishnan changed his name on the app to Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, as a prank. More than 100 people immediately joined the room.Hours later, someone impersonated Mr. Musk, the Tesla chief. That led MC Hammer, a Clubhouse user, to publicly call on the company to institute a real name policy. “Real identity !!! Be accountable for your words and opinions,” he tweeted.
    1. There’s also a robust ecosystem of tools to follow users, monitor site annotations etc.

      Wait? What!? I've been wanting to be able to follow users annotations and I'd love the ability to monitor site annotations!! (I've even suggested that they added Webmention before to do direct notifications for site annotations.)

      Where have you seen these things hiding Tom?

    1. As I began to get a feel for the passions and frustrations of teens and to speak to broader audiences, I recognized that teens’ voices rarely shaped the public discourse surrounding their networked lives.

      Again, putting this into historical context, is this sentence different for any prior period if we remove the word "networked"?

      It's been a while, but the old saw "A child should be seen and not heard" comes quickly to mind for me.

    1. History doesn’t ask you if you want to be born in a time of upheaval, it just tells you when you are.
    2. If you look long enough you can find my early terrible writing. You can find blog posts in which I am an idiot. I’ve had a lot of uninformed and passionate opinions on geopolitical issues from Ireland to Israel. You can find tweets I thought were witty, but think are stupid now. You can find opinions I still hold that you disagree with. I’m going to leave most of that stuff up. In doing so, I’m telling you that you have to look for context if you are seeking to understand me. You don’t have to try, I’m not particularly important, but I am complicated. When I die, I’m going to instruct my executors to burn nothing. Leave the crap there, because it’s part of my journey, and that journey has a value. People who came from where I did, and who were given the thoughts I was given, should know that the future can be different from the past.
    1. our brains have been trained to believe that we want, that we need, a single place where all of “our people” can gather, where it is “easy” to keep up with all of them: a massive network service, just without all the “bad stuff” of the existing ones.
    1. A friend of mine asked if I’d thought through the contradiction of criticizing Blair publicly like this, when she’s another not-quite public figure too.

      Did this really happen? Or is the author inventing it to diffuse potential criticism as she's writing about the same story herself and only helping to propagate it?

      There's definitely a need to write about this issue, so kudos for that. Ella also deftly leaves out the name of the mystery woman, I'm sure on purpose. But she does include enough breadcrumbs to make the rest of the story discover-able so that one could jump from here to participate in the piling on. I do appreciate that it doesn't appear that she's given Blair any links in the process, which for a story like this is some subtle internet shade.

    2. the woman on the plane has deleted her own Instagram account after receiving violent abuse from the army Blair created.

      Feature request: the ability to make one's social media account "disappear" temporarily while a public "attack" like this is happening.

      We need a great name for this. Publicity ghosting? Fame cloaking?

    1. But I actually think stock and flow is a useful metaphor for media in the 21st century. Here’s what I mean: Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
    1. There’s no doubt that the web would not be where it is today without companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, and even AOL. Corporations have driven growth, investment, and innovation on the web, and social media networks have made the web a part of everyone’s lives.

      Yes, they've done some of these things, but I'd argue they didn't do much of the actual innovation. Most of what they had done was being done in other areas of the web before them and they just paved the cow paths.

      Potentially worse, their only innovation was to silo all the value for themselves and then externalize all the costs and issues back into society so they don't have to pay for them themselves.

    1. Join my Discord here (Note access is now closed - DM me for an invite)

      I'm curious how this experiment turned out since it's been a while. Invite please (if you feel it's worked).

  2. Sep 2020
    1. Nutrient Agar is a general purpose, nutrient medium used for the cultivation of microbes supporting growth of a wide range of non-fastidious organisms.
    1. Different nutrient media were used for selective cultivation of bacteria: kanamycin esculin azide (KAA, Merck Eurolab, Darmstadt, Germany) for enterococci, and Chromocult® agar (Merck) as a selective agent for Enterobacteriaceae. For the heterotrophic plate count the bacterial dilutions were plated on R2A agar
    1. R-2A Agar is formulated as per Reasoner and Geldreich (5). Stressed or injured organismsduring water treatment are unable to grow on high nutrient media, since the faster growing organisms outgrow the former(2). Therefore the use of a low nutrient medium like R-2A Agar incubated for longer incubation periods allows these stressedorganisms to grow well.
    1. MacConkey agar is selective for Gram-negative organisms and helps to differentiate lactose fermenting gram-negative rods from non-lactose fermenting gram-negative rods. It is primarily used for the detection and isolation of members of family enterobacteriaceae and Pseudomonas spp.
    1. Figures like Kenneth Hagin, his protégé Kenneth Copeland, Oral Roberts, and, of course, Osteen himself built up individual followings: followings that often grew as a result of cross-promotion (something religious historian Kate Bowler points out in her excellent Blessed, a history of the prosperity gospel movement). One preacher might, for example, feature another at his conference, or hawk his cassette tapes.

      Some of this is the leveraging of individual platforms for cross-promotion here, which helped in a pre-social media space and which now happens regularly online, particularly in the "funnel" sales space.

  3. Aug 2020
    1. First, what would it look like for a social media platform to re-establish perspective?

      This was the exact design question I asked recently!

    2. Browsing Twitter the other day, I once again found myself sucked into a far-off event that truly does not matter, and it occurred to me that social media is an orthographic camera.

      How does this relate to Nicholas Carr's article and ideas about category errors in From context collapse to content collapse?

    1. The ad feels so fresh and uncannily cool—it even samples the Nine Inch Nails song used in “Old Town Road”—that some people could barely believe it represents a politician. Slate called it the most “incomprehensibly thrilling ad” of 2020. “Political ad goes viral for actually being inspiring,” Mashable’s headline read. One man tweeted that it made him want to “march into hell to defend ed markey from dynastic usurpers.” Another gushed that the ad makes him so fired up that “it makes me want to run through a brick wall.”

      But they're ADs! Why do people today see authenticity in something so obviously inauthentic? Is it the natural result of "social media"?

    1. Beschreibt, wie die Trump-Administration versucht, die internationalen Medien der US-Regierung (wie Voice of America) unter Kontrolle zu bringen und propagandistisch umzufunktionieren. Manches erinnert an Orwells 1984. Es ist auch deutlich, dass hier Steve Bannon eine große Rolle spielt. Eine Schlüsselrolle hat dessen Gefolgsmann Michael Pack.

    1. “The idea of a ‘blog’ needs to get over itself,” wrote Joel Hooks in a post titled Stop Giving af and Start Writing More. “Everybody is treating writing as a ‘content marketing strategy’ and using it to ‘build a personal brand’ which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed.” It is almost as if he had reached down into my soul and figured out why I no longer had the vigor I once had for sharing on my personal blog. For far too long, I was trying to brand myself. Posts became few and far between. I still shared a short note, aside, once in a while, but much of what I shared was for others rather than myself.

      For many, social media took over their "streams" of thoughts and ideas to the point that they forgot to sit, reflect, and write something longer (polished or not).

      Personal websites used for yourself first is a powerful idea for collecting, thinking, and creating.

      Getting away from "branding" is a great idea. Too many personal sites are used for this dreadful thing. I'd much rather see the edge ideas and what they flower into.

    1. Maybe I’m getting older, or just more patient I’m aware of what I’m doing at every step in the process, rather than having it be fully automated. It’s harder to shitpost if you’re thinking everything through, just like it’s harder to make bad pizza if you know you can’t get instant gratification. I still occasionally make bad posts as well as bad pizza, but I am certainly more aware of the cases where I’m setting myself up for it.
    1. Obviously not every group chat counts as a “conspiracy”. But it makes the question of how society coheres, who is associated with whom, into a matter of speculation – something that involves a trace of conspiracy theory. In that sense, WhatsApp is not just a channel for the circulation of conspiracy theories, but offers content for them as well. The medium is the message.
    2. This means that while groups can generate high levels of solidarity, which can in principle be put to powerful political effect, it also becomes harder to express disagreement within the group. If, for example, an outspoken and popular member of a neighbourhood WhatsApp group begins to circulate misinformation about health risks, the general urge to maintain solidarity means that their messages are likely to be met with approval and thanks. When a claim or piece of content shows up in a group, there may be many members who view it as dubious; the question is whether they have the confidence to say as much. Meanwhile, the less sceptical can simply forward it on. It’s not hard, then, to understand why WhatsApp is a powerful distributor of “fake news” and conspiracy theories.

      Instead of positive feedback like this, is there a way to create negative feedback loops in these social media apps?

    3. Groups are great for brief bursts of humour or frustration, but, by their very nature, far less useful for supporting the circulation of public information. To understand why this is the case, we have to think about the way in which individuals can become swayed and influenced once they belong to a group.
  4. Jul 2020
    1. Expanding diversity and building capacity

      What about youth in reduced economic circumstances? What if they do not have access to this new media? Is this bridging a gap, or just creating a new one?

    1. Bex, F., Lawrence. J., Snaith. M., Reed. C., (2013) implementing the Argument Web. Communications of the ACM. (56). (10). Retrieved from chrome-extension://bjfhmglciegochdpefhhlphglcehbmek/pdfjs/web/viewer.html?file=http%3A%2F%2Farg-tech.org%2Fpeople%2Fchris%2Fpublications%2F2013%2FbexCACM.pdf

    1. Evaluate

      I believe this is an important skill to have and to teach nowadays. Especially with the readily shareable content on social media people could post things with out critically evaluating what content is saying/where it comes from/if it is credible or not.

  5. Jun 2020
    1. News can no longer be (only) about the mass update. Stories need to be targeted to those who might be able to improve the situation. And journalism’s products — which are more than its stories — must be designed to facilitate this. News needs to be built to engage curiosity about the world and the problems in it — and their solutions. People need to get lost in the news like they now get lost in Wikipedia and Facebook. There must be comprehensive stories that get the interested but uninformed up to speed quickly. Search and navigation must be improved to the point where satisfaction of curiosity is so easy it becomes a reflex. Destination news sites need to be more extensively hyperlinked than almost anything else (and not just insincere internal links for SEO, but links that are actually useful for the user.) The news experience needs to become intensely personal. It must be easy for users to find and follow exactly their interests, no matter how arcane. Journalists need to get proficient at finding and engaging the audience for each story. And all of this has to work across all modes of delivery, so it’s always with us. Marketers understand this; it’s amazing to me that the news industry has been so slow to catch on to multi-modal engagement.

      everything would work perfectly if we had all of these and people are actually rational and diligent with infinite resource.

    2. I don’t want the product with the best content overall, I want the product that is going to serve me up the best content every single time, regardless of whether or not it was created in-house.

      discovery, aggregation, curation. narrator

    3. People spend hours roaming Wikipedia; they don’t spend hours on bbc.co.uk or cnn.com or nytimes.com or news.yahoo.com (which actualy has a far bigger audience than any traditional news outlet.) Wikipedia also tends to take the top spot in Google results, which means that more people link to it than they do to any news site.

      or google just ups the ranking of Wikipedia in their algo

    1. The web also rewards news providers who provide context. People are far more likely to re-visit the wikipedia page or the topics overview a year after a news event. Thompson’s “The Money Meltdown” site pulled together the best links to explain the financial crisis. Matt posted it on his blog and in one month, 50,000 unique visitors came along and looked at it 75,000 times. It speaks to a desire. It’s all about pulling together links, in some cases. What’s difficult right now is automating it. Link barns as topic pages aren’t working.

      basically: there's a demand for evergreen essays. but there's also demand / place for soundbites and torrent of throwaway patchy breaking news

    1. We’re presently living through what feels like a remarkably turbulent time. In fact, we might be tempted to think that ours is a uniquely chaotic moment. Of course, most of us know that human beings have lived through more chaotic, violent, and calamitous times than ours. What is novel in our experience isn’t the depth of the health crisis or the scale of the protests, the economic volatility, or the political instability. What is novel is the information ecosystem in which all of this and more is unfolding. Most of us now have far greater access to information about the world, and we are—arguably, I grant—exposed to a far wider array of competing narratives attempting, without notable success, to make sense of it all. In short, it would appear that our basic sense-making technology, the narrative, is a bit glitchy, both failing to operate as we might expect and causing some issues of its own. You won’t be surprised to learn that I think Marshall McLuhan can be helpful here. While many have found McLuhan’s aphorism “the medium is the message” confounding, McLuhan actually offered a rather straightforward explanation. “The ‘message’ of any medium or technology,” McLuhan wrote, “is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts,” McLuhan added, “but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”Digital media introduced a new scale, pace, and pattern to human communication, and, in this way, altered how the world is perceived. With regards to scale, we encounter an unprecedented amount of information about the world at large through digital media. With regards to pace, we encounter this information with previously unknown and unrelenting immediacy. And, with regards to pattern, we encounter it both in novel social contexts and in a form that bears greater resemblance to a database than a story.

      L. M. Sacasas providing a very brief summary of McLuhan's "medium is the message" quote applied to the Coronavirus pandemic in June 2020.