Overview: Social Web

"Facebook say that the more time users spend at its site, the more likely there will be a robust exchange of diverse viewpoints and ideas shared online. Others fear that users will create their own echo chambers, and filter out coverage they do not agree with. ... [that] “is when you get conspiracy theories.” - How Facebook Is Changing the Way It…

"publishers [could] simply send pages to Facebook ... hosted by its servers ... with ads that Facebook sells. The revenue would be shared. That kind of wholesale transfer of content sends a cold, dark chill down the collective spine of publishers... Media companies would essentially be serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns." - Facebook Offers Li…

After the standard survey of Facebook's impact on news & democracy, an interesting analysis of the way Facebook's: "trending topics has had a deeply pernicious effect on the way news is produced... encourages publications to look for what's trending and pump out something on that subject as quickly as possible... lots of quickly aggregated p…

If you care about EU democracy you need to care about European media, particularly as the upcoming US media invasion gets underway. They'll be pushing on an open door when they get to Brussels.

"...another link in a chain of legal rulings that help establish the idea that bloggers - and other members of ... "the networked fourth estate," ... can be seen as performing acts of journalism... we need to protect acts of journalism, not just specific actors who engage in them. the First Amendment protects acts of journalism or publishing — …

As I mentioned in my previous post, the past couple of years have seen a lot of innovation in online content strategy, coupled with growing disenchantment with "Big Internet".

"Since it launched in March 2012, I F*cking Love Science has attracted more than 17.9 million Facebook followers—more than Popular Science (2.7 million), Discover (2.7 million), Scientific American (1.9 million), and The New York Times (8 million) combined. ... Her empire has since expanded to include a website, IFLscience.com, which has a staff a…

@baekdal explores "a complete and total blind spot in the newspaper industry ... based on a business model that used to work in the old days of media, but was as a result of scarcity." Newspapers, he argues, are "the supermarket of news ... [but] upermarkets only work when visiting the individual brands is too hard to do... But on the internet, e…

Reflecting Shirky's (pre-Twitter) observations about reciprocity, social media and traditional media, Slate reframes how to view Twitter. Worth a read: "Twitter is not a social network. Not primarily, anyway. It’s better described as a social media platform, with the emphasis on “media platform... Social networks connect people with one another…

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…

Looks like one kind of newspaper has a long future - the worst kind: "Supermarket tabloids have long been an icon of unreliability, largely because of their outrageous claims and sensational, melodramatic design. But when individual pieces are shared via social media, these visual and context clues are typically stripped out... Without this conte…

Original linkTonight I'll be toddling along to Grilling Kippers, a UKIP-focused anti-Eurosceptic campaign from deep within the Brussels Bubble.

Les Echos looks to be doing what I have long dreamed to do for the bloggingportal reboot - deploy semantic analysis to aid content discovery and to underpin a new wave of media and comment. But do we have to call it an 'aggrefilter'? "Les Echos launches its business news aggrefilter ... to gain critical working knowledge of the semantic web." …

Interesting points emerging from the first two articles I’ve seen about Jason Calacanis’ his new venture, Inside.com.

"We've never had this much access to information ... Making it meaningful, discoverable & accessible is simultaneously the media’s toughest challenge and greatest opportunity... In 2014, we can do a better job of connecting with each other, sharing the tools that are out there and working on the problems yet to be solved in ways that make the mo…

" The euro|topics press review shows you which topics are moving Europeans and reflects the great variety of opinions, ideas and emotions on those issues. Whether the topic is politics, the economy, society or culture, euro|topics takes a daily look at the European press and cites the most important voices. Because the question that interests us i…

“There is a huge audience of readers out there craving this kind of storytelling ... With phones and tablets, they now always have a reading device available on them to dig into something.”

"News in general doesn’t matter most of the time, and most people would be far better off if they spent their time consuming less news and more ideas that have more lasting import"

"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

"The NewsCred announcement coincides with a shifting perspective on automated news. While some feared that the arrival of robot story writers and editors would phase out journalists, the human touch now appears to be back in fashion..." - Human touch back in fashion for news #curation? http://t.co/uQqLSTw5 via @NiemanLab cc @bloggingportal

Have you read a great investigative story lately? Anyone can pitch a story, video, graphic or other news link by Tweeting us with #MuckReads

Apparently tomorrow - apart from being Australia Day - is BloggingPortal's 3rd birthday. What does it's state tell us about the EU Online Public Space? How many more friends can I lose anyway?

At last, an opportunity to blog about gardening and EU comms in the same post.

On November 8, MEPs will discuss '10 concrete political proposals' for creating the European public sphere via digital media, developed by IHECS (Institut des Hautes Etudes des Communications Sociales) and their partners via Socialeuropeanjournalism.com.

Next week will see yet another physical meeting in Brussels dedicated to exploring the European public space, an irony which appears permanently lost to the organisers of the neverending stream of conferences, seminars and workshops which can be only attended by Brussels Bubble Insiders, and have neither webstreaming nor any online community (Euro…

I lead the team that created Blogactiv.eu, the first blogging platform focused on EU policies