Overview: Social Web

The real story might have been that data played a more important role than social media... reports that smart campaigns used data intelligently to target the right voters with the right messages... This combination of data and social media, with more traditional campaigning techniques will surely develop still further in the next few years. …

I’ve been extremely impressed with the false humility of a number of recent career transition stories on Medium. - Career Transitions: Crafting Your Medium Humble-Brag — The Coffeelicious — Medium

"the rise of suggested content tools has shifted the balance between conversation and link-sharing, and in so doing has diminished the value of the links that get shared... a tweeted link no longer reflects any curation or judgment on their part; it may well be something that was found for them rather than by them. Nor is it a sign that they’ve…

Why does one “experiment” (i.e., introducing a new product) fail to raise ethical concerns, whereas a true scientific experiment (i.e., introducing a variation of the product to determine the comparative safety or efficacy of the original) sets off ethical alarms? - Please, Corporations, Experiment on Us - The New York Times

Twitter’s editorial team (made of real, live humans) will define the big stories of the day, and will package tweets, images, and video to explain what’s going on. Those packages will be the primary unit of Twitter, and will be embeddable all over the Internet.... With this change, Twitter doesn’t have to look like an endlessly flowing, context…

I've broken down all of the major algorithm changes that have occurred over the past 2 years... - The Ultimate Guide to Facebook News Feed Changes... and How They Impact YOU!

Twitter enables connections between accounts. What exists today as a social network between people who follow and reply to each other could tomorrow expand to be an information network between devices that could follow and reply to each other. - The Internet of Tweets — The Message — Medium

“not necessarily long-form, but definitely thoughtful, important, interesting, why not funny, content PLUS an interactive discussion” - Medium is a Network. Let’s Network Then! — Medium

So, it’s a network, I guess, built around longish form writing.... the company’s investment in its own publications is reportedly being trimmed, and structural changes are being made... War Is Boring – arguably one of the best investigative journalism site on war – is leaving Medium. Re:form – Medium’s design publication – has been closed ... T…

"Networks are pretty good for collisions. Bureaucracies are pretty bad for collisions." - Why I Write on Medium — The Message — Medium

While it most obviously appears to carry on in the tradition of blogs, it always seemed to me as something more nostalgic ...  an attempt to modernize early internet communities ... It is trickier to form a community like that on Medium now. Interface elements do not encourage discovery... We will know Medium is on to something when there ar…

Discover Publishing... was to serve two distinct purposes: - Help grow the Medium community. - Begin publishing e-books through Medium for those we represent. ... Think of Writing On as the community within the community of Medium.... Publishing On achieves our second of providing a platform to begin publishing talented authors who believe in…

"We’re very excited to announce the launch of a new feature for Publications. We’re calling it Letters. ... It’s a way of connecting with your followers and starting a conversation. It’s delivered to the inboxes of all your followers. It’s also a post, so it can be recommended, highlighted, built upon, and have a life of its own." - Introd…

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.

Some really advanced techniques in handling trolls here - The Internet’s Most Trolled Cartoonist — The Nib — Medium

"The Influencer Identification Worksheet is a blogger outreach brainstorming tool [to] build a list of bloggers." - A 4-Step Blogger Outreach Tool for Identifying Influencers | Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy

From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.

“In fact, the very point was to get them, and these comments, off my pages,” - After deciding to charge for comments, Tablet’s conversation moves…to Facebook » Nieman Journalism Lab

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…

I quite enjoyed the experience of reposting to Medium, and really like how Medium is evolving as a platform, particularly how they are… … re-imagining comments with Highlight, Comment & Respond… these three interactive features echo the ‘nibble, bite, meal’ content model, but in the other direction, from you back to the …

"...after this Spring’s most recent NewsFeed algorithm updates is that Facebook Pages—the ones used by businesses—are generating appalling user engagement rates... work-arounds ... mostly involve investing even more resources into Facebook ... more money devoted to advertising to fans brands have already paid to acquire in the first place." …

"Now we in journalism get to stand back and see technology titans jump over each other to bring benefits to news. But we’d best not stand back too far. We journalists and publishers must collaborate with the platforms as we demand that they collaborate with us. And as they teach us about technology, we must teach them about journalism." - Playi…

Finally kicked Medium’s tyres. Result: an unfair comparison between my post originally on BlogActiv with a new version on Medium. Unfair because Medium is all about the content [and] I reduced the historical blah-blah... Medium’s editor is as good as they say, import post function worked like a dream.

A thoughtful addition to the neverending "is blogging dead?" debate: "According to the definition, blogging is "regularly adding or updating a blog". But that definition was created in 1997 and no one has bothered to change it. I propose the following: "Blogging is the act of sharing ones ideas, likes, opinions, and/or experiences, via pro…

LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rates compared to Facebook and Twitter, where leads were almost three times higher to convert than Facebook or Twitter. To perform this analysis, we collected one of the largest datasets of top performing long-form content across the LinkedIn Pulse network. This is what we found.... .…

the social network will share analytics, and Instant Articles is compatible with audience measurement and attribution tools... won't receive preferential treatment from Facebook's News Feed sorting algorithm... Facebook will parse HTML and RSS to display articles with fonts, layouts, and formats ... also providing vivid media options like embe…

I’ve broken down all of the major algorithm changes that have occurred over the past 2 years... Read on for your ultimate guide to Facebook news feed changes... - The Ultimate Guide to Facebook News Feed Changes... and How They Impact YOU!

"usually, researchers are at a pains to highlight their findings. This one buries them as deep as it could, using a mix of convoluted language and irrelevant comparisons... this study is not about all of Facebook users, despite language ... that’s quite misleading: “Finally, we conclusively establish that on average in the context of Facebook…”…

Great takedown of the flaws and bad framing of the Facebook filter bubble study in Science: "Alarm bells are ringing for me. The tobacco industry might once have funded a study that says that smoking is less dangerous than coal mining, but here we have a study about coal miners smoking... the article’s strange comparison between “individual…

FiltreBubble author on Facebook's study in Science: "Facebook’s data science team has put part of the “filter bubble” theory to the test ... Upshot: here is a real and scientifically significant “filter bubble effect” — the Facebook news feed algorithm in particular will tend to amplify news that your political compadres favor... For self-de…