Overview: Social Web

The rich, diverse, free web that I loved - and spent years in an Iranian jail for - is dying.Why is nobody stopping it?... The hyperlink was my currency six years ago... represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web ... a way to abandon centralization ... and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes an…

How do you get recommendations? Well, you need to get your writing into a publication. Doing that is not easy - Is Medium Balkanized? — The Coffeelicious — Medium

There’s been a very interesting meta-conversation on Medium going on recently. Roughly it falls into one of these two categories:... responses seem to receive more attention (recs & follows) than my “regular” posts... It feels like contribution, not just a comment. - Medium is a Network. Let’s Network Then! — The Unlisted — Medium

Medium is the hottest writing platform right now, and you need to tap into it. Whether you're a marketer, entrepreneur, or startup founder, this book will show you how to maximize the reach and results of your stories. - The Ultimate Guide To Medium - Tell Stories That Millions May Read

Publishers may be able to get more value out of their tweets thanks to a new design change on Twitter... on the platform’s iOS or Android apps... stories will get some extra room, complete with lead art and the first few words of a story... part of the company’s plans for bringing more media into your home feed. - Twitter’s new article prev…

"@NASA is the 104th most popular Twitter account in the world... and 3.5 million on Instagram. The Department of the Interior, whose stunning wildlife and nature pictures make it the only government agency with cool visual content to rival NASA’s, has just 654,000 ... John Yembrick and Jason Townsend are veterans of other government agencies...…

The last couple of years has seen a revival of the Art of the eNewsletter. I have found myself paying much more attention to enewsletters in my Inbox... than to the marketing junk gushing from social media

"AOL's online dominance was such that building sites for the traditional web became secondary ... Companies fought over who had the best relationship with AOL, thereby allowing them access to audiences that their competitors didn't have.... If you're starting to think that 1995 AOL sounds a lot like 2015 Facebook, you'd be right. 20 years late…

"Our Analysis APIs analyze text or web pages, extracting metadata and classifying with topics (Functional Programming, Celebrity Gossip, or Hotels) and aspects (review, news, product, video). Analysis APIs can be used to label and organize content, recommend similar content or to build rich user profiles that enable personalization."

Great example of how to cover a social media trending topic via video: "A video featuring a beauty blogger with adult acne has been watched almost seven million times.... shows some of the comments that Em Ford received online after posting images of her face with and without make-up... she wanted to point out the "unrealistic expectations" soc…

The reasons are simple but powerful: you can’t control the communication. Despite it being a communication channel/social network (emphasis on network)/community (very debatable), it points into the other direction: filtering information, needing to pay for content to be seen, very distracting by other things like games, Ads (which used to be cont…

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…