Summarises a recent Meta paper on Llama 2, "a continuation of the LLaMA... Big picture, this is a big step for the LLM ecosystem when research sharing is at an all-time low and regulatory capture at an all-time high" - so Meta continues its improbable position as good guy in the OS movement (at least when it comes to AI, but also possibl…

"A framework for building enduring products"Level 1 is to focus on growing uses completing the core action, which forms the product's foundation, usually correlates with retention. So design features which optimise for people completing the core action. Level 2 - retain users by creating accruing benefits: customer usage improves t…

"the most efficient way to operate during the earliest phases of a startup lies in between a formal business plan and unstructured iteration... documenting your initial product/market fit hypotheses, systematically validating each of the most uncertain hypotheses, and continually iterating on and updating [them] ... through customer validatio…

How to measure & optimise for product/market fit? Use this leading indicator: "just ask users “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” and measure the percent who answer “very disappointed.” " You need at least 40%.Article goes through the process step by step, and comes with an interactive tool:A) Ask people who&…

How a decades-long election delegitimisation campaign, amplified by social media disinformation, intersects with the death of a Chief Justice in a GoT-worthy season finale of “US democracy: Endgame”.

A simple comparative model for measuring disinformation and influence operations

Most current definitions of engagement are bimodal – someone is either engaged or they ‘re not...a limited view that hampers our ability to manage engagement in meaningful ways...Community management is the discipline of building technical and social environments in such a way that individuals can easily organize and collaborate to achieve an obje…

Watching Silicon Valley exercise news judgment has been like watching Walter Cronkite try to write code in Python... Four companies have created trustworthiness indicators for news websites: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and NewsGuard. Publishers have no way of learning their secret trust score from the Silicon Valley companies. NewsGuard’s journalis…

we need to lock on our analytics to the people who willfully return to our work... There’s no one single metric that tells you how loyal... your audience is.... The Center for Cooperative Media ... audience explorer dashboard... plugs into Google Analytics... splits audiences into “Brand Lovers,” “Prospective Loyalists” and “Casual,”... free and e…

On one hand, consumers have short attention spans, and on the other, studies have shown that longer video can perform better... first consider the goal of the campaign.... Determining performance on marketing-based goals can be a bit complicated to pin down... If site perusal is your goal, short video is best... Why produce a long video when you…

The metric our intuition tells us we should maximize is known in statistics as recall... number of true positives divided by the number of true positives plus the number of false negatives. ... true positives are correctly identified terrorists, and false negatives ... labels as not terrorists that actually were terrorists... a model’s ability to …

Every time you open your phone or your computer, your brain is walking onto a battleground... Your captive attention is worth billions ... This has actually changed how you see the world... walls of code have turned you into a predictable asset — a user that can be mined for attention... by focusing on one over-simplified metric, one that suppor…

We need to strike a healthy balance between striving to reach more readers across platforms over which we have zero control, with bringing them back to... our apps and website... here’s how we’ve changed our approach over the past year:... an over-reliance on social media can leave us particularly vulnerable to sudden changes by platforms. Ultim…

someone that saw a Facebook native video had a higher likelihood of clicking on a link post in the near future ... we look at top performing articles and then see if we can turn them into short form videos for Facebook... we strive to be original storytellers... We understand what the mission is. It’s not just to get views... it’s always to be tel…

Major enterprise stories — stories that take deep dives and attempt to inform readers in substantive ways or to elicit impact... require considerable resources... the potential audience is limited... how can journalists get readers to complete these long pieces?use multiple elements and platforms to tell the story... the parts that pull your reade…

Seven years ago I started working full time at the Guardian in the glamorous role of SEO editorial executive. ... very like being in the Matrix but with less kung fu and more Polly Toynbee and Nigel Farage... here are a few of the things I’ve learned…

To try and focus on all our energy to bring new readers to site as opposed to serving loyal readers began to feel like the wrong way to look at it… identified a set of metrics that stand for loyalty ... created content people wanted to come back for on the regular. So far, it’s delivering: site traffic is up 31 percent... People who come 25 times…

The Guardian joins the Financial Times and the Economist in billing ads by time.... have found, unsurprisingly, that ads perform better when people spend more engaged time with them.... click-through rate as an industry benchmark for performance;. However a metric of 0.0 something percent should not be seen as a succes

some advice on how to best approach analytics in the newsroom, helping journalists improve the quality of their content, and a build larger, more engaged readership. Here are five key takeaways

Should we give the audience what they want?ORShould we give the audience what they need?...two flawed assumptions: 1. that newsrooms already know what audiences want and 2. that newsrooms can and should determine what their audience needs. The framing of these questions doesn’t leave room for members of the audience to actually speak for themselve…

Just putting this up there for all those who think:a) a ‘view’ on a LinkedIn post is like a pageview on your blog or site. It’s not: it’s a ‘stream view’, a la Facebook, and does not tell you how many people actually clicked and readb) LinkedIn are consistent and care about their bloggers. They aren’t and they don’tMore: see LinkedIn Community for…

everything one needs to know about ... the Google Analytics add-on for Google Sheets.... value-add to a reporting workflow is that it’s extremely flexible, reliable, and a real time-saver... allows you to: Pull any data that you’d be able to access in the Analytics API (i.e analytics.google.com) directly into a spreadsheet...

News organisations are increasingly embracing the use of analytics and metrics as part of editorial decision making, but what constitutes a sophisticated analytics strategy?... A new report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism looks at which organisations are building a competitive advantage over less advanced competitors through a…

Ultimately, what publishers and advertisers care about most, however, is how much quality time a person spends with a story. To judge that, publishers are developing newer metrics like “time spent” reading, “scroll depth,” “engagement,” “recirculation,” “shares,” and “percentage of article completed.”

Great use of a TV show to explore how bad metrics can kill you: "In the police organization as it is set up, politics are king and results can be gamed. Everyone is looking for the next promotion, and no one is focused on improving lives for the citizens in the city they serve.... People figure out ways to game shitty metrics."

For 20 years, the media and marketing world has been beholden to the pageview, a deeply flawed metric that only captures the most superficial impression of how people behave on the Web.... proxy metrics such as shares and likes have proved inadequate as well...

Below are some basic marketing test ideas across all nineteen traction channels. These tests are designed for businesses trying to get to product/market fit, either preparing for a successful launch or post-launch, but may be useful for any business... middle ring tests and should cost less than a thousand dollars and take less than one month o…

readers finished 94% of the longform pieces they started... with much faster download speeds and the advent of the tablet’s “lean back” reading experience, journalism has seen a rise in “longform” ventures... analytics offer an incomplete picture of reader behavior, and little real insight into how readers engage. Page views, entrances, ti…

Daily I now see posts published authors on LinkedIn that praise the value of finding out your "SSI". . .. while at the same time gently but not so quietly promoting what their score is... I believe the "one percenters" tag is entirely relative since each of have a completely different network from anyone else in the world. - Did LinkedIn go …

I’ve had the amazing pleasure of meeting with over a dozen of the largest companies on the planet over the last six months... [who] have hired journalists, producers, broadcasters, and editors to refine and tell their story on a consistent basis... but not one ... focused on subscriber growth... While larger enterprises are fighting silo battle…