"Canadian researchers have confirmed what most people suspected all along: that internet trolls are archetypal Machiavellian sadists.... via Heather-Anne MacLean's post: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140730175026-5723090-don-t-feed-the-trolls-research-reveals-psychopathy - Online trolls are psychopaths and sadists, psychologists …

Brown Moses made his name crowdsourcing information in conflict zones, such as analysing weapons in Syria ... from his front room in Leicester, England... using social media, open source tools, and public information to verify details that news organizations can miss. Today, he's launching a site to pool his and others knowledge together in one…

'Innovation' threaded its way through a lot of the resources added to my TumblrHub last week: from innovation-friendly management through to innovative Content Management Systems for tomorrow's newsmedia business models and personal productivity tools.

"The only kind of moderation that scales with the community is the community. ... Through the trust system, Discourse communities develop a natural immune system that repels the trolls, spam, and hate that eventually tear apart communities on other forum software. - Stack Overflow Founder's Next Big Thing: Reinventing Online Communities – ReadWri…

"The experience of talking about race, ethnicity and culture on the Internet is nearly always deeply disenchanting. People don't even talk past each other; they talk right through each other. Prejudices harden. We find ourselves confirming our worst stereotypes of one another. And that's before the slurs fly." Some great lessons for making it wor…

As Michael Silverman puts it, "a brilliant online community has more potential than your current social networking strategy", and he isn't even talking about EU communications. The only downside, not mentioned, is that convening a community requires: - web publishing technologies which do not date from the previous millennium - real online commu…

" If we wanted more email subscribers, we’d have to make it easier for people to subscribe." Quartz's new approach to enewslettre subscription, which has seen daily subscriber rates double since February, is like the 'Quick Subscribe' feature I always propose for online community sites: - some users may create an account to subscribe, but most wo…

There are more good recommendations in here than can be summarised, but if I had to choose one, it's: "Integrate the developers and editors, from where they sit to whom they report to. If you’re going to do social journalism well, you’re becoming a technology platform company... Almost all the important breakthroughs in social media have come fro…

“Comments from readers are probably one of the thorniest problems for online publishers of all kinds… and the methods for dealing with them are all over the map... We spoke to online editors and community managers at 104 news organisations from 63 countries across the globe, plus a selection of experts from the corporate and academic worlds to id…

Interesting survey of HuffPo, Techcrunch & other experiences with changing commenting systems and policies. - HuffPost policy banishes trolls — and drives away some frequent commenters | Poynter.

Some key points from "The Benefits of Quality Content and Genuine Social Engagement ... to create great, sharable, engaging content and become an active participant on social platforms: - Quality content is what your clients want to read, not what you want to tell them.... - Content that gets highly shared is content with heart. Real stories, re…

Exactly 11 years (give or take a month) after we figured out how thematic architectures on EUROPA could support online conversations with what we called the 'interested general public', the EC rediscovers it all over again: "This would give us the opportunity to reach interested audiences, and create a space for real engagement. It also means shi…

"Knowing who is in your community is key to success for any and all Facebook marketers. Often times who you think is in your community is far different than who really is or who you wish was in your community. As part of Tabsite’s “Get a Grip” Series on Facebook Marketing where we help marketers look at key aspects of their Facebook strategy, thi…

" social marketers mistakenly equate the strength of their community with the size of their following. They establish fans on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks as key performance indicators and then blast them with brand messages. The truth is that the strength of your community has much less to do with how consumers are connected to y…

"“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…

"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."

Airbnb presents “Hollywood & Vines.” A first-of-its-kind short film made entirely out of six-second Vines submitted from all over the world. (via Airbnb - Hollywood & Vines)

"what is a Community Manager? Because the term takes on such a broad role, we are going to break down the best practices of Team Hüify Community Managers!"

"The Beginner's Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is an in-depth tutorial designed to help you convert more passive website visitors into active users that engage with your content or purchase your products."

I won the epale online community of practice project and steered its inception phase. Years later, it is still one of the EC's most successful online communities, notably by its ambitious multilingualism strategy and high userbase, despite lacking any financial rewards for participation.

Some of the drupal websites my team and I launched for the EC's energy research programmes.

Migrating and relaunching the ACP Courier magazine website using semantic analysis and launching two community-oriented Programme websites for the ACP Secretariat.

If I recall correctly, a lot of us in the euroblogosphere reacted to the announcement of the European Public Communication Conference and Network (EuropCom) with a mixture of scepticism, hope and amusement, particularly with the original launch video, which was so badly done I for one was actually charmed.

That's right - curation. Now officially Web2.0-buzzword-of-the-month (not quite sure which one).

So the debate about the Euroblogosphere, or the Eurosphere, or the European Public Sphere, or web2eu, or the European online public space, of whatever-we-call-it-next-week, has sparked again into life, like a Frankensteinian monster with dodgy spark plugs screwed into the base of its neck.

A Twitter conversation betweentwo much-followed EU-oriented bloggers over the weekend caught my eye. I won't identify them as you need to follow them on Twitter to see their tweets.It started when one asked whether anyone out there"still thinks that blogging is in any way likely to have an impact ... why should anyone listen to us? We st…

Constructive discussions generally require good discussion documents. One of the Commission's major contributions to any European online space should therefore be a EUROPA that supports the conversations