Overview: Online Strategy

Medium is supposed to be a new kind of social network, one that makes it easy to find stuff you want to see as well as stuff you didn’t know you wanted to see. But by the company’s own admission, it hasn’t figured that part out yet... for now Medium is closer to Blogger, Williams’ first company, than Twitter, his second effort. Some of that cou…

While many businesses use Carousel Ads solely to promote products, the ads also provide an excellent opportunity to showcase your brand’s unique narrative. In this article, I’ll share how to use storytelling in carousel ads - How to Tell Stories With Facebook and Instagram Carousel Ads Social Media Examiner

“moments” are mini news digests of tweets across a range of topics... with splashy full-screen photos and videos. Each individual moment is made up of about 10 tweets... allows users to follow stories they’re interested in for a limited period of time... clearly targeted at curious or casual users... a “catch-me-up” type of news digest, using t…

"Why don't we just build our community on Facebook?" Some thoughts after a month playing with Knowledge Hub

We at Motherboard have decided to turn off our comments section, a decision we've debated for a year or more. What finally turned the tide was our belief that killing comments and focusing on other avenues of communication will foster smarter, more valuable discussion and criticism of our work... Sending an email knowing that a human will actua…

A redesign of its blog-like Notes tool, which lets you post longer updates with photos to your friends, is now rolling out... the first time Notes has been updated in years. It now has a design that will look familiar to anyone who has ever read a post on Medium, - Facebook begins rolling out Medium-like redesign of Notes | The Verge

For the purpose of media pluralism, an emerging concern is how to ensure that the activities of these powerful platforms do not lead to a reduction in the quantity and quality of content actually available to consumers, and/or do not undermine democratic communication (e.g. through the suppression or arbitrary selection of information). Their …

the concerns and questions new information intermediaries bring to the table are explored, particularly in regards to the effect they have on media diversity. Additionally, Helberger looks into the regulatory options for safeguarding media pluralism and regulating these new gatekeepers, who are increasingly in control of consumer data. This art…

Google and Twitter to help publishers show “instant articles” to people who use their services on mobile phones... Twitter users or Google search users who click on a link while using their phones will see full articles pop up on their screens almost immediately... an open source project, and hope to convince multiple tech companies to adopt it…

political polarisation creates groupthink creates more polarisation, which prevents ideas from circulating and developing.... Pumping resources into ensuring one side of US politics is overrepresented on Medium is bad for US politics, and bad for Medium - In response to Influencer Outreach: Progressive Politics (job ad on Medium)

Here’s how BuzzFeed, The Economist, The New York Times, Quartz, Vox, and Yahoo News slim down a day’s worth of news into manageable forms. Every day, readers are faced with a firehose of news online. News organizations realize this, and they’re trying a bunch of different ways to make the news more manageable — creating chatty summaries of thei…

Get with the community; The death and rebirth of comments: The death of the open web?

It’s easy to underestimate how much of the media you’ve consumed was shaped by the “like” button... whispers suggest that the company is not, in fact, launching a simple “dislike” button, but something that conveys empathy.... it’s safe to say there will be consequences... When Facebook broadens the scope of the emotional-response buttons, t…

Facebook... have, as I speculated earlier, built their system around RSS. This means there can be interop between all the big companies --Twitter, Google, Apple, Facebook -- now building new news systems... No publishing silos. Let news flow where it wants to. And let competitors arise who may do more interesting and useful things with news tha…

...with iOS 9 and content blockers, what you're seeing is Apple's attempt to fully drive the knife into Google's revenue platform.... So it's Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook, all with their own revenue platforms. Google has the web, Facebook has its app, and Apple has the iPhone. This is the newest and biggest war in tech going today. And the …

Blogging has never been easier but getting read has never been harder... The problem isn't freedom or openness but distribution... you might post it on Facebook or Google Plus. Your friends might see it ... (though this is largely random) and they might share it ... You might post it on LinkedIn and your network might see it ... and LinkedIn migh…

I spoke to seven news organizations - Recode, The Verge, Reuters, Mic, Popular Science, The Week, and USA Today's FTW - about their decision to suspend comments, the results of that change, and how they manage reader engagement now... Here's how they're all using social media to encourage reader discussion. - What happened after 7 news site…

The visuals team ... the product of merging two groups: the news applications team, who served as NPR’s graphics and data desks, and the multimedia team, who made and edited pictures and video... The multimedia crew wanted to make pictures and video that were truly web-native, which required web makers. And our news apps lacked empathy... Pictu…

we built an Interactive News team from scratch... a tight-knit group of editors and newsroom developers ... creates tools and processes ... to disrupt a print-first workflow. Here’s a look at how we got there and what we learned along the way.... A newsroom developer is only a Slack message away...we have three content editors embedded in diffe…

An open app platform will let digital news publishers play with the big guys... Siri was also shown answering basic news and information questions while you watch... imagine uses for breaking news and other journalistic purposes. - Apple announces an app platform for Apple TV, potentially big for news outlets investing in video » Nieman Jour…

Apple TV isn’t the TV-killer ... but it does create a significant opportunity for digital publishers and video companies... a built-in App Store, which for the first time will enable third-party developers to build apps for the platform — an important milestone for Apple and potentially the future of video. - The new Apple TV is great for We…

it’s been recommended over 6,500 times... the problem is this: the article is… crushingly insubstantial... there are dozens of similar pieces churning around Medium at any time: how to listicles, life-hack guides, autodidactic treatises on ‘personal growth’ etc etc... in the spirit of “if you can’t beat them join them”, here is my hastily co…

I am, however, not loving what responses are doing to my profile page. There is value in a response, to be sure, and I don’t want to lose that but when a reader visits my page, it is littered with my responses to other articles — interesting stuff for me and the respondee, not so much for the new reader. - I love responses — I love to respond a…

This software is a clever mix between Sketch, Keynote, Flash and After Effect (plus some bonus features specifically for interactive prototypes)... Easily creating tap transitions from one screen to another is, to me, the core of the software. - Principle : the prototyping tool you’ve got to try — STARTUPS + WANDERLUST + LIFE HACKING — Medium

Wouldn’t it be great if your government had a conversation with you instead of just talking at you? - The White House / Me

Masterclass time. From the Google Blog:  we’ve taken the Google logo and branding, which were originally built for a single desktop browser page, and updated them for a world of seamless computing across an endless number of devices and different kinds of inputs (such as tap, type and talk).

Self-management builds on the foundation of transparency. I don't think self-management works without being transparent ... we're now moving to a model where small teams own specific areas, and people don't need to worry about fixing and contributing to each and every problem in the company... the more self-managed you are as a company the m…

Our interactive graphic offers a real-time snapshot of the race, using media attention to track the fortunes of the presidential hopefuls... explore the graphic and view a running picture of how the candidates are faring on television during the election season, or drill into the numbers by network using the explorer dashboard. - Media Cover…

What does it mean for companies to know everything about us, and for computer algorithms to make life and death decisions? Should we worry more about another terrorist attack in New York, or the ability of journalists and human rights workers around the world to keep working? How much free speech does a free society really need? - The End of th…

The future of the web is "push-based", meaning the web will be coming to us.... the web will disappear into the background much like our electricity or water supply.. content, products and services will find you, rather than you having to find them... What people really want is to tune into information rather than having to work to get informat…