"he and his Stanford colleagues have been focusing on phrases and sentences, and aside from sentiment analysis, he says their models are pushing the state of the art in areas such as machine translation, grammatical analysis and logical reasoning." Bloggingportal with automated sentiment analysis - what's not to like?

“We now know that there’s sleight of hand, and special effects, behind what we read in the newspaper.”... You didn’t know before?? What’s the % of newspaper stories with PR behind them in some way? 40%? 50%? More?

"A majority of digital marketers haven’t received any formal training in digital marketing: 82% report learning on the job."

"many marketers still feel in the dark when it comes to digital know-how, according to new research from Adobe. More than 80% of professionals are still receiving their digital training informally on the job and only 9% feel fully confident their digital efforts work, the poll of 1,000 U.S. marketers found."

All true and a v. nice metaphor. But it is also quite a good social network, with more intelligent conversations and a higher S/N ratio than average: "The reason why it doesn't seem like much of a social network is that the "friending" and "following" are just an accidental outgrowth of what it really does - being an invisible overlay between you…

"too many journalism students and journalists are native users rather than actual natives. The difference is enormous, and has real implications. Actual natives can build in addition to use digital tools, giving themselves many more opportunities to make better journalism. Users can only work within the constraints that other people set." Amen fr…

"That’s why today we’re excited to announce Analytics Academy -- a new hub for you and your colleagues to participate in free, online, community-based video courses about digital analytics and Google Analytics. With Analytics Academy, we aim to provide you with a guided learning experience to become an analytics expert in no time. Our first cours…

"“The level of discourse — the difference — was pretty stunning,” Orr said. The people posting through Facebook Comments displayed anger, but it didn’t have to be heavily moderated. “On the articles, it immediately plunged into the lowest common denominator — racism, threats, vulgarity. It was night-and-day.”"

"the new feature ... gives both Gawker authors and readers the ability to filter comments based on the writers and commenters they follow, or whose content they have “liked” or given a star to. So readers can click on Denton’s name and see not only the posts he has written, but also a specific selection of comments that he has chosen to show, from…

"The following is a visual model of all the core tenets I espouse so fiercely here at The Sales Lion and with all our clients as well (To view each, just use the scrolling buttons on the site). I know each of these 12 tenets, if followed, get results– specifically by building your brand, increasing traffic and leads, and finally by generating a lo…

With BlogActiv feeling a bit creaky, I spent the summer taking a hard look at Google+ and Tumblr, and integrated my GTD (Getting Things Done) system with my online presence.

"without giving up their traditional skills, journalists are becoming more and more information "managers". They are behaving like human filters which ... verify and add context to what user-generated content they think to be relevant, and feed it onto Web pages or mobile applications. Thanks to the rise of new social media curation platforms, t…

As I've mentioned now and then (e.g., BloggingPortal's 3rd birthday, 2012), a desultory conversation amongst Bloggingportal editors dragged on for several years, before dying after it became clear that the lack of decision-making process made it impossible to move forward.

"I want to post 4 images in a particular order, and there doesn't seem to be anyway of doing it!"

A useful matrix of the pros and cons of 6 different approaches to meeting the single biggest challenge in content marketing - feeding the beast consistently

Andy Carling brought in George Parker “one of the original Madison Avenue advertising legends, immortalised in … Mad Men … and some other ad and brand experts from the commercial world” to take a look at the  ‘Act. React. Impact.’ video, and assorted publicity material.The results are it’s pretty damning. Some choice cuts:”this travesty is suppose…

"Content Marketing is about devising, producing, and using content to market your products or services. You don't start Content Marketing from the content. You devise the content strategy, from scratch, around what you are marketing, and what form or forms of content will most effectively do that." A refreshing view from a fellow grumpy old …

"But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benef…

" Popular Science has officially shut off its comment section, pointing to research showing that disagreeable comments hurt the reading experience. Or, at least, the reading comprehension. One study out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that mean comments under an article about nanotechnology "polarized readers," taking attention away f…

"a new kind of reblogging functionality so that readers can top the articles they share with their own headlines and introductions.... “Publishing should be a collaboration between authors and their smartest readers. And at some point the distinction should become meaningless."

"Scholars have worried that proliferation of personalization technologies will degrade public opinion by isolating people from challenging perspectives... study examines personalized news recommender system designs using a communication mediation model.... Results indicate increased selective exposure when using personalized news systems... portal…

"News in general doesn’t matter most of the time, and most people would be far better off if they spent their time consuming less news and more ideas that have more lasting import"

"Google+ is much more about learning and educating than Facebook. People tend to be more serious and want deeper and more insightful content than pictures of puppies and cats." Hooray for that!

"As content strategists, writers, and editors, we ask a lot of questions every day. It's part of our job. We ask practical questions about websites, words, and sentence structure. We ask hypothetical questions to get people thinking. We ask uncomfortable questions, and we ask questions we don't really want to know the answers to. But there's one q…

"The rtule native ad: Content that users can readily identify as sponsored (as with tourist ads), but that is easy for them to engage with. " But I wonder how many people actually realise the Facebook story example is sponsored?

"Persona research is a science in itself, where the basic idea is identifying your audience. It is unavoidable to have a clean understanding of the audience's requirement, the discovery process, their knowledge and their interests in order to deliver appealing content, ultimately helping in your conversion process. This post focuses on how to c…

What it says on the tin - 4 basic SEO strategies.

"The entwined rise of Big Data and predictive analytics virtually guarantees that — just as structured and semi-structured data are being fused — informal gossip and formal ratings systems will be collected, correlated, and converted into business rules designed to make badly-behaved customers pay more or go away." Interesting insight into an upc…

"Now that content marketing is the hot marketing buzzword, what are the critical elements your content needs to rise above the noise to drive measurable business results? To help you, we surveyed 19 top content marketing experts to get their advice and here's what they say." Good stuff here. PS. Point 1: "Stop being amazing, and start being…

"The League of Young Voters in Europe is a politically neutral initiative that aims to amplify young people's concerns and expectations in the run-up to European elections. It's a movement across Europe designed by young people, for young people."