Overview: Communications Strategy

Another example of topic-based aggregation being better at avoiding the toxic effects of a socially-based newsfeed (cf Reddit).Flipboard's new feature lets them quickly specify the subjects they care most about from among its 30,000-plus topics... "Flipboard uses AI to classify the articles and videos it’s aggregating and weave them into…

The Syllabus collects the best articles, podcasts and videos about the political, economic and social consequences of the coronavirus pandemic on a daily basis...world’s foremost technology critic... scans 100 pages per minute, 12 books in an hour, 100 in one day... can determine the relevance of every book in the world... all information and know…

the best skill to teach children is reinvention... the author of Sapiens reveals what 2050 has in store for humankind...once technology enables us to engineer bodies, brains and minds... We don’t know what people will do for a living, we don’t know how armies or bureaucracies will function...too many schools focus on cramming information. In the p…

reddit community called Change My View ... a ready-made natural experiment ... feed it into programs ... to understand the back-and-forth between human beings ... discovered two things: what kind of arguments are most likely to change people’s minds, and what kinds of minds are most likely to be changed. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ : po…

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 …

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…

News Quality Scoring Project ... humans and algorithm to separate “commodity news” from “value-added news” ... based on quantifiable and qualitative signals — like word count, freshness versus evergreen material, quote density, contextualization, and the presence of a byline... human/machine, subjective/objective hybrid as the still-under-constru…

I have an obvious incentive to get claps: pretty decent money. ... I can write more polarized headlines... on polarizing topics. I can piggy back on the hot news of the day... write things I don’t actually believe using incendiary language ... Medium has safeguards ... a team of curators ... a policy against abuse that it actually enforces... a t…

the best gift the publishing industry could hope for... digital advertising technology that will be most frozen by limitations - and that is good news for content makers... collection and processing of the kind of data essential to ad targeting must now be explicitly consented to by readers. Furthermore, consumers will have the right to erase data…

There’s large-scale, statistically significant research into the impact of search results on political views... Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better... people are finally saying, ‘Gee, Facebook and Google really have a lot of power’ like it’s this big revelation. And it’s like, ‘D’oh.’”…

quality filter setting ... can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior... filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience. It does not filter content from people you follo…

There is no such thing as neutrality when it comes to media. That has long been a fiction... It’s also dangerous to assume that the “solution” is to make sure that “both” sides of an argument are heard equally... It is even more dangerous, however, to think that relying more on algorithms will remove this bias.Recognizing bias and enabling process…

Civil Comments, a commenting platform ... aims to produce respectful dialogue in comment sections through a system that crowdsources comment moderation... Commenters are shown two random comments from elsewhere on the site, and must rate the comments’ quality and civility and determine whether they include harassment, abuse, or personal attacks. T…

if all content is ranked together and swift approval is the primary metric (whether that be views, reads, or recommends), the platform will become dominated by generic bullshit. Aspirational pap is just Medium’s version of the cat meme... Publications aren’t communities. Tags aren’t communities. They are content ownership vehicles and search tools…

"It tears conversations apart, and it's really confusing when some people have been live-tweeting an event and those things get scattered all across my timeline."

Here’s how BuzzFeed, The Economist, The New York Times, Quartz, Vox, and Yahoo News slim down a day’s worth of news into manageable forms. Every day, readers are faced with a firehose of news online. News organizations realize this, and they’re trying a bunch of different ways to make the news more manageable — creating chatty summaries of thei…

Apple isn't the only one developing an exclusive news service for its mobile customers. Samsung has announced a partnership with Axel Springer... to develop a news platform exclusive to Samsung Galaxy... UPDAY is being pitched as an "aggregated news content platform," with stories selected both algorithmically and by a local team of news editor…

Got some time to kill and want to read a meandering essay by an algorithm with a short attention span? Tell us how many minutes you want to spend reading and a starting topic, and we'll whip something up.

"Trove wants to get to the holy grail of content by combining the power of algorithmic filtering and the abilities of human curators. So Trove allows you to follow curators and their news-feeds, but also recommends articles and topics based on what it knows about you " - Slashdot founder Rob Malda on Trove and fixing the problem with Twitter — Te…

"I honestly doubt that there is an algorithm in the world that can reliably surface such unexpected content, so well. An algorithm ... cannot surface unexpected, diverse and sometimes weird content exactly because of how algorithms work: they know what they already know.... Twitter brims with human judgment, and the problem with algorithmic filte…

"That's about 100,000 business opportunities we provide publishers every minute." - good article on how slow the newsindustry was. Interesting thoughts too on balancing algorithmic approach with human concerns. Google News at 10 - The Atlantic http://t.co/Fupf11B6