Overview: Social Web

"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…

"Google announced a new partnership with several publishers on Tuesday. ...The Digital News Initiative.... I’m a huge fan of this idea. Contributoria (an open journalism network) and Swarmize (a data journalism platform) wouldn’t exist today without it.

Google promised a €150 million fund to promote platform and product digital news innovation, working with eight top European publishers... Europe is the squeaky wheel that Google decided to grease, with a sum that sounds large to cash-starved news publishers but is a pittance to Mountain View. It's 0.001% of Google's $14.4 billion profit in 201…

"the most crucial element of Facebook’s new power: the right to chose between the free expression of ideas or to instead impose censorship when it deems content unworthy... How will its algorithms handle stories posted directly to Facebook that question Facebook’s monopoly status? ... If the Washington Post posted its PRISM story about collusion …

"Skeptics are howling that this is a Faustian bargain—that the media are mortgaging their long-term futures for short-term gain... Facebook has presented the news media with a collective-action problem. News sites aren’t blind.... if they could all get together and decide, as a group, what to do about Facebook, no doubt they’d think long and hard…

"The problem is that Facebook controls what you see and when. If it becomes the primary way to consume news and watch videos, what happens when a news story is controversial about the company itself? Or isn’t within its content guidelines (like pornography)? You’ll be receiving a filtered version of the internet that’s controlled by one company."

"The New York Times is preparing to plant a taproot right inside the highly walled garden that is Facebook." - Memo To Publishers: Watch Where You Put That Taproot… — Medium

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…

"...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".

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…

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

"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