In this week’s edition, two new social media products in one week; a few good longreads for the weekend; and more stuff for your online toolbox.

"Why don't we just build our community on Facebook?" Some thoughts after a month playing with Knowledge Hub

Yes, I’m now curating news about news curation

How do you extract maximum value from a conference presentation or workshop, both for you, and your audience?

political polarisation creates groupthink creates more polarisation, which prevents ideas from circulating and developing.... Pumping resources into ensuring one side of US politics is overrepresented on Medium is bad for US politics, and bad for Medium - In response to Influencer Outreach: Progressive Politics (job ad on Medium)

Get with the community; The death and rebirth of comments: The death of the open web?

Apart from the Online Hangout(24 September, 16h30 CET), a new online community just opened for public sector communicators across Europe.

My first subscribers, surveyed last week, were equally split between the diverse formats and styles of my first four editions, so here’s a 5th.

I'm launching a enewsletter to ensure I absorb something from the social media firehose.

Any decent Communication Strategy will integrate offline, online, internal and external communications. But what about your organisation's Innovation Strategy?

In this edition I highlight only one post, and mention a few others. Topics: truth, authenticity & trust, but also productivity and digital transformation.

A tl;dr version of “From One Spokesperson To Millions” the brilliant 45-minute longread by @jessedee on taking one of the most successful campaigns of all time - Paul Hogan’s 1980s Tourism Australia campaign - and updating it for the age of user-generated content. Some key quotes:

In response to In Search of Authentic People in The Age of Automation: "Authenticity was supposed to be what social media was about — it was social, it was supposed to be about us. And... your authenticity was the best coin you had."

In response to Am I on the Right Path? Are you? …"perhaps the best path is not the high-speed one leading most efficiently to the destination we thought we wanted, but the path that will take us to the most interesting encounters… "

This morning I read How Europe turned its back on humanity, a damning opinion piece in Aljazeera on Europe’s hypocritical response to the refugee crisis:Of the 10 links chosen by Primal, all bar one (the last) are directly related to the original article. Pretty good performance.The same technology is also available for your browser’s toolbar: if …

In this week’s newsletter I return to the “3 Topics, 12+ links” template of week 1, but present things a little differently…

Let’s hope [Beme] catches on ... and make social media about real people again -  not their carefully edited versions, and certainly not companies, Institutions and all the others choking up my feed with their marketing as they desperately try to appear human.

Last week’s edition included 13 links across 3 topics. This week I go the ‘Special Edition’ route and focus on one topic: Medium. 

IN RESPONSE TO: Thanks for sharing this.  “While this makes sense it would make more sense if Medium existed in a vacuum… most authors are prepared to put up with a second-class authoring tool in return for a shot at a first-class audience. ”

"The EU Commission and Parliament probably spend hundreds of millions of euros on comms projects every year, but almost nothing on stimulating the emergence of the European Online Public Sphere..." - Posted to Story-Europe's Medium publication to give Catalyst project some content to kick DebateHub’s tyres with.

My EuropCom 2015 workshop on online communities is taking shape. (Update: view all slideshows and key takeways from the session) According to the EuropCom2015 site it'll be held after lunch on Day 1, and will cover:Convening and managing an online community is an extremely effective way of achieving communications goals, but will probably fai…

The last couple of years has seen a revival of the Art of the eNewsletter. I have found myself paying much more attention to enewsletters in my Inbox... than to the marketing junk gushing from social media

The inexhaustible flood of information flowing into your PC, phone and brain is not going away... and neither are your ToDos... A recent article in HBR presents two techniques to cope — either undertake behavioural change or use technology... But why not use technology to create space for behavioural change?

I need three speakers for a EuropCom2015 workshop to share their thoughts on convening and managing communities in the context of public communications and policymaking. The following throwaway remark on Linkedin landed me with the task of setting up a workshop at EuropCom 2015:"I'd suggest combining "Setting-up and managing online …

I quite enjoyed the experience of reposting to Medium, and really like how Medium is evolving as a platform, particularly how they are… … re-imagining comments with Highlight, Comment & Respond… these three interactive features echo the ‘nibble, bite, meal’ content model, but in the other direction, from you back to the …

Finally kicked Medium’s tyres. Result: an unfair comparison between my post originally on BlogActiv with a new version on Medium. Unfair because Medium is all about the content [and] I reduced the historical blah-blah... Medium’s editor is as good as they say, import post function worked like a dream.

The impact autonomous cars will have on personal mobility and cities will dwarf the disruption Uber and AirBnB have wrought on their respective industries. Joined-up European policies seem in short supply

An array of sophisticated language technologies could help ideas flow across EU borders, link national conversations together and support the EU Online Public Sphere - the demos the EU needs. But BloggingPortal is unlikely to feature them. [update (17/5/15): I finally decided to kick Medium's tyres by reposting this there, with less history. …

I freely admit: I've been a fanboy of the UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) since studying their design principles. Those principles are still good. Everything else, it turns out, was not.

Before you obsess over your next analytics report, read the recent article by Ev Williams (Twitter and Medium cofounder) on measuring what matters.