Overview: Communications Strategy

A fairly simple, free routine that’s enabled me to market myself on LinkedIn with surprisingly good results. It worked for me, it might work for you.

Technology has altered the foundations of news and media, and as trust in media continues to decline, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms have come to play a critical role not only as threats to the integrity and quality of media, but also as a source of potential solutions. The core threats to information quality associated …

If Facebook is to thrive ... it’ll need to evolve. Here’s where we think it’s heading… developers and platforms ... will be unable to post content on behalf of personal Facebook profiles... can only post to business profiles and pages on both Facebook and Instagram... Facebook might be hoping that more unique content shared by users, reaching mor…

We’ve spent 18 months training an AI editor... shadow the curation performed by professional journalists on a gigantic range of topics... it now works independently.... your own personal journalist on hand at all times, ready to explain what’s going on in the world... real-time updates on important headlines, explained in the most succinct way po…

The endless search for rewards of the tribe, and the variability that often comes with it, are key components of ... Stack Overflow... over 5,000 questions are posted and answered daily... Many of these answers take hours to complete and require a high degree of technical expertise.... the site’s creators ... put usage limitations ... fear of crea…

undoing radicalization is not as simple as filling people’s heads with “accurate” facts. A radicalized person will not — cannot — accept them... you need to first make the radicalized person... capable of not feeling threatened, unsafe, and wounded ... It’s very, very hard. It takes social bonds to be restored somehow — oft through therapy, educat…

Managing a Medium Publication to share our the journey as we build Knowledge4Policy: "share our experiences … as transparently as possible, and invite ideas and perspectives from experts in evidence-based policymaking around the world"

there’s an appetite for ... the Smarticle ... story format designed for mobile ... meet readers where they are in their knowledge of a developing story by only presenting them with the elements that are most useful to them

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 …

What if “persuadability” isn’t the right metric to look at? ... Information warfare expert Molly McKew, who specializes in U.S.–Russia relations... "There aren’t good tools to evaluate the impact of shadow campaigns... Information and psychological operations ... are not just about information, but about changing behavior... of more than 36,000 …

most forms of political persuasion seem to have little effect at all... Field experiments testing the effects of online ads on political candidates and issues have also found null effects... Here’s what you should look for in evaluating claims about vast persuasion effects from dubious online content: How many people actually saw the questionable…

Which did the ad industry choose?... It tried to ignore technology and automation... when that didn’t work, it bought the machines.... It didn’t invest in research, development, innovation... develop new services, new ways, new formats, new ideas, whole new ways of helping institutions and people relate, connect, and bond... So the broken relatio…

the solution to both crises facing journalism may come from the same technological root: blockchain... An ecosystem of micropayments... as the holy grail for online journalism... Blockchain technology can create both chains of authenticity and a level of security... Sludge is one of the “first fleet” of around 20 newsrooms ... on a new blockchai…

The “forgetting curve,” ... is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something... unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain ... leaving you with a fraction of what you took in... those who binge-watched TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than people who watched one episode a week... most common…

The vote marked the culmination of a targeted, 11-day information operation that was amplified by computational propaganda techniques and aimed to change both public perceptions and the behavior of American lawmakers...Computational propaganda... the use of [ICTs] to manipulate perceptions, affect cognition, and influence behavior”... #releaset…

time to deliberately focus on design for interconnectedness and relationships ... customer (user) centric design created a narrative of isolation: the customer is ... someone that is provided with a solution ... to get the job done... [but] research ... explained that customers (users) may often look to engage more deeply with products... relat…

One of the applications of The News Quality Scoring platform I’m currently working at the John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford is to foster curation processes, using a feature I call “Smart Curation.”... relies on current machine learning techniques... like Word2vec or, GloVe ... used in the development of the News Quality Scoring Project

Fake News is suddenly on the boil in the Brussels Bubble. Here are some ideas I brainstormed earlier this week. Comments welcome.

Wales wants to bring the power of the Wiki community and the wisdom of crowds to bear on the media business by creating a hybrid model... local community members can help direct the work of WikiTribune journalists when such events occur, suggesting avenues to explore and co-creating a more permanent news resource that will serve a longer-term comm…

How do we convert users playing the game into users who would complete the survey?... take our readers on a visual journey around the world so they could explore where a news story happened. As a payoff, for every correct answer, the user would collect a stamp in their virtual passport... opted to follow an interesting take on the minimal viable p…

Artificial intelligence has been hailed as the last invention human beings will ever create. Universal basic income... is now being discussed openly .... Design thinking has entered mainstream business lexicon ... These three unique concepts will have a powerful impact on work in the coming decades... If some people do not have to work to surviv…

Meta-Learning can be understood as algorithms the search and select different DL architectures. Hyper-parameter optimization is an instance of this, however there are another more elaborate algorithms

Aggregation Theory describes how platforms (i.e. aggregators) come to dominate the industries in which they compete in a systematic and predictable way.... how value has shifted away from companies that control the distribution of scarce resources to those that control demand for abundant ones; the purpose of this article is to catalog exactly wha…

Third of several posts written in reaction to Luc van den Brande’s Reaching out to EU Citizens: A New Opportunity. Sets out the public policy participation model first presented at EWRC 2017, and sets up the fourth.

I’ve recently published five posts on three interrelated ideas, two projects one report and a workshop. That happened because the competition brought a Brussels Bubble Outsider to Brussels. Which happens to be one principle of the participation model I presented at the EWRC workshop. Full circle.

a report published with the Council of Europe... offers better categorizations for the tangle of bad information ... more specific than “fake news” ... [for] The U.S. midterms ... build out a hub ... monitoring disinformation, connecting with newsrooms around the country... we can start scaling it globally in 2019... The benefit of having centrali…

The EU Lobbyist's quick guide to "influencers"

Engaging Europeans with the EU requires a new Brussels Bubble culture - fourth of several posts written in reaction to Luc van den Brand’s Reaching out to EU Citizens: A New Opportunity.

Could hybrid crowdfunding allow public Institutions to support citizen-driven projects without killing them in the cradle?- 2nd post in reaction to Luc van den Brande’s Reaching out to EU Citizens: A New Opportunity

Every day the web is becoming more personal... ... brands ... need to understand more than theoretical profiles or carefully honed audience segments.... master the fundamentals of identity...  In this report you’ll learn:  - What it takes to create a persistent individualized identity that crosses platforms and screens  - How brands and agencie…