Overview: Social Web

media outlets are using different strategies when it comes to Instagram Stories versus Snapchat... I talked with The New York Times, National Geographic, and Sports Illustrated ... to understand how they are trying to make use of Instagram Stories for a new kind of visual narrative.

Facebook found itself in the middle of another media controversy last week... like watching an old couple fight: they are nominally talking about the same episode, but in reality both are so wrapped up in their own issues and grievances that they are talking past each other... Facebook screwed this up. But that doesn’t change the fact that Facebo…

Had a great time setting up and running a blogging competition for the EU Commission’s Regional Policy department. It’s not over yet, though: the three winners announced today are coming to Brussels this October as fully accredited journalists to European Week of Regions and Cities. 

This new tool shows users what Facebook determines are their interests... has provided a glance into the deep flaws of Facebook’s interest targeting. Advertisers should be concerned about where their dollars are going... Here are the main flaws I came across:... I would just recommend approaching targeting differently:

The start of every day for me was Medium, I would import a story from the Buffer blog and edit it before publishing and then spending some time updating all of the tracking spreadsheets with the latest numbers, hoping for an indicator of what was working and what content should be posted tomorrow. Our top three Medium strategies were: Repost o…

as news outlets tailor their content to addictive platforms to pump up traffic, the distinction between consuming journalism and being wedded to “emails, constant notifications, and social media” is increasingly meaningless... if we are what and how we read, then our thinking will mirror the scattered and shallow tendencies of Web browsing.... …

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…

IT’S been just over four months since The New York Times started producing live video for Facebook... a lot should never have made the team... many that are either plagued by technical malfunctions, feel contrived, drone on too long, ignore audience questions or are simply boring... For The Times the goal is twofold... to develop video that appea…

a lot of media sources you don’t recognize ... a new and distinctive sort of operation ... political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook... engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the news feed... Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle... together make up 2016’s most disruptive, and least understood, force in med…

a research paper ... found depressing proof that the web is fuelling segregation.... matched the attitudes of those who did and did not have broadband with data on partisan hostility... Greater use of the web ensured that an admirer of Jon Stewart would think that conservatives were not just mistaken but stupid, or a viewer of Fox News would wor…

image... apparently shows the spread of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear accident... being shared widely ... despite the fact that it... shows the wave height of the tsunami... you might want to doublecheck before hitting Share... here’s how

three days after Instagram debuted Stories... publishers of every stripe have pounced on the opportunity to show off some more off-beat storytelling sensibilities.

the online disinhibition effec... anonymity, invisibility, a lack of authority and not communicating in real time strip away the mores ... seeping from our smartphones into every aspect of our lives.... the approximately 5% of Internet users who self-identified as trolls scored extremely high in the dark tetrad of personality traits: narcissism, …

While our experience with political Facebook posts suggests, anecdotally, that the thrust of the story is correct, we cannot confirm the authenticity of the study... Our efforts to reach Rantic before publication were unsuccessful, and Wired has since retracted its story.

The feature enables Medium users to volunteer to translate Medium stories into the language of their choice. Approved translators see a “Translate” button on Medium stories and clicking that button clones the post and seeds the clone with a Google translate version of the story in the language that they select. They then go in and make the Google …

A couple of months ago I included augmented and virtual reality in Top3ics, my occasional newsletter, adding “Consider these as first notes towards a future post.” I then forgot about it. Thanks, Newt Gingrich!

Algorithms are ubiquitous in our lives... But they are also being employed to inform fundamental decisions about our lives.“If you are given a score that jeopardizes your ability to get a job, housing or education, you should have the right to see that data, know how it was generated, and be able to correct errors and contest the decision.”

You may not care about social media now, but if you read a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch TV, then it’s shaping your world already... The real game is hardening your own support in ways dramatic enough to be picked up by the mass media ... the easiest way of doing that is to pick a rollicking fight... Lacking an established political mac…

How can you stand out among the other 95 million photos posted each day? How can non-designers and amateur photographers create beautiful content for Instagram?These are all questions we’d love to help you answer in this guide.

The permanent banning of uber-troll Milo Yiannopoulos from Twitter was probably long overdue. It's time for non-trolls to stop complaining and start defending civility in our social spaces, or simply decamp to build better ones.

Facebook is a weird beast that a lot of journalists still don't understand. That is because it has taken the definition of "news" back to the era before mass media even existed. Yet, as a business, it looks exactly like a mass-media company and competes aggressively for the same advertising budgets... Facebook's flirtation with journalism wasn't d…

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

Facebook Live videos will appear on many more News Feeds — regardless of whether users Like, Wow or Haha the content. Posts linking out of Facebook will need a lot more user interaction to get the extra eyeballs.

News Feed Changes Mean Brands Should Invest in Facebook People More Than Pages... The News Feed algorithm is a lagging indicator, not a leading one. It now properly reflects what study after study shows the public truly values: relationships... No organization will ever be on the same footing as peers... Invest in Facebook people, more so than p…

Gawker built a tool that pulls in the top 10 comment threads from its network of sites and displays them at the end of its Facebook Instant Articles... [and] Accelerated Mobile Pages... It’s not possible to comment straight on the Instant Article; people who want to add to the discussion have to log in on Gawker’s own sites. Disqus supports Googl…

Today, we’re announcing an update to News Feed that helps you see more posts from your friends and family.

“I am actively searching through Facebook for people celebrating the Brexit leave victory,” ... to no avail. He called on his friends in the technology industry to act on this ‘echo-chamber problem’.... Why are they making the demand of social media companies — and not news organisations?...how we see technology now: both as something separate fro…

In April, Medium rolled out a suite of new tools for publishers, and began giving a beta group the option to make revenue from the platform as well. I spoke with five of these publishers ...

it's fair to question whether the average Brexit supporter is grounded in reality.... This mass separation from reality also represents a parallel to what is going on with our strange, sad election in the United States... Trump... has ridden a wave of distaste for the more buttoned-up masters of the universe... the leave campaign has painted the…

The Clinton-Sanders race wasn’t just about two candidates; instead, it underscored a series of deep and growing fissures among Democrats, along a wide range of complex fault lines—from age and race to gender and ideology. And these disagreements won’t fade... we turned to 23 leading historians, political scientists, pollsters, artists, and activis…