NY Times: For Founders to Decorators, Facebook Riches.
ReadWriteEnterprise: Blogging Declines Across the Inc. 500.
Not surprised. Companies selling products will have an easier time with shorter form content. Getting niche bloggers to write the long stuff, for free or for sponsorship, is the cheaper route.
Creative Loafing Atlanta: In defense of copyright.
A photo editor comments on SOPA and PIPA.
After experiencing the one-click linking interfaces of Tumblr and Pinterest, I expect this is going to explode again rather soon ... photographers and media companies with libraries of work (libraries they want to monetize) are not going to be pleased. Granted they only have a short time to monetize their images, given the swiftly falling value of a photo [I can hear Jeremiah knocking on my cranium going, “Do I have to mention Napster to you, AGAIN?!"]. Yet historical photos will, I expect, retain a value over and above the endless low-cost digital snowflurries produced today. They can’t be replaced by modern equivalents.
Thinking out loud a bit.
CNN: Study - Multitasking hinders youth social skills.
NY Times: Does Technology Affect Happiness?
“Among the crucial questions that the researchers were not able to answer is whether the heavy use of media was the cause for the relative unhappiness or whether girls who are less happy to begin with are drawn to heavy use of media, in effect retreating to a virtual world.” This article will be the subject of many conversations, I suspect.
RWW: Researchers Use Twitter-Bots To Increase Human-To-Human Interaction By 43%.
Are you tweeting with a person, or a robot? I expect brands will invest heavily in this.
GigaOm: Hacking solutions to the world’s resource problem.
Wrestling big data in interesting ways.
Poynter: False Paterno death reports highlight journalists’ hunger for glory.
“Readers remember the best story, not the first story.” Listening, webloggers and social media mavens?
Pinterest is getting some buzz.
Anyone finding it of use, more than say, Tumblrs?
ReadWriteWeb: Study - Why Do People Use Facebook?
“A 2009 study (Ross et al., 2009, ‘Personality and motivations associated with Facebook use,’ in Computers in Human Behavior, 25, 578-586) found that personality types that ranked high on neuroticism claimed the Facebook Wall as their favorite component. People who were low on neuroticism, however, said photos were their favorite.” Someone has a *favorite* component of Facebook’s UI? Oh. My. God.
ReadWriteWeb: Can We Rely On Social Media In An Emergency?
Not at present. As we found during our forest fires here, the initial tweet gets good coverage if the generating account has enough followers ... but after that, the signal-to-noise ratio goes exponential with everyone wanting to ‘brand’ the information to their own followers. As further studies are done, you’ll hear this again from other sources than myself. Unless Twitter allows a ‘solo’ channel or hashtag for one account (or a pre-approved number of accounts) to use, this will remain a problem.
The Atlantic: What’s Wrong With the Phrase ‘In Real Life’.
“When you’re online, you’re often more real, more authentic, than you would be offline.”
ReadWriteWeb: You Are What You Like (And Not What Your Friends Like) On Facebook [STUDY].
“What the most recent study suggests is that online friendships like those fostered on Facebook are more about strengthening ties between people with similar interests than they are about influencing neighbors.” Entrenching, not broadening. I’ve come across some hard, hard social media folk ... so I suspected as much.
Frontier Justice: Cowboys’ Prayer.
Remember this?
Gizmodo: Worm Infects 45,000 Facebook Users, Then Goes After Their Friends.
FYI, if you’re on FB.
Kred - Measurable Influence.
Another Klout, but with a measure of transparency.
University of Vermont: Study - Happiness Down on Twitter.
“… stretched out over the last three years, these patterns of word use show a drop in average happiness.” *ahem* Well, there are other explanations, too.
10,000 Words: What Do People Look At Most On A Facebook Brand Page?
Portfolio.com: How Much Facebook Knows About You.
“When Austrian law student Max Schrems asked Facebook to send him all the data the company had collected about him, he wasn’t sure what to expect. He got 1,222 pages of PDF files listing every thing he’d liked, every message he’d sent—even the ones he’d since deleted—and every poke he’d poked.”
Fine arts and other creative links …
I’ve decided to vivify my Tumblr, putting creative, design, illustration, fine art and video linkage over there as an experiment. I know I have schools and others looking at DM! here, and I don’t want to disturb their scanning of my text-based ‘cerebral’ postings. I tend to censor my postings here, perhaps unnecessarily, but I don’t want to offend my existing readership who are used to the status quo. God knows, I could probably post a Venus de Milo and *someone* would complain, these days. I want to avoid that situation entirely. There’s so much great stuff going on, especially in video, but one must have an appreciation for this niche. So I’m experimenting with it as an opt-in, you might say.
I tried briefly with Posterous to put my eclectic video interests online, but Posterous is not as connected as Tumblr (esp. in re: iPad). I want to massage a workflow to Tumblr through MarsEdit, as well as browser JS bookmarks, and then figure a way to perhaps feed EE here on the blog.
I’ve been neglecting the creative side of my personality. It’ll take me a bit to get my momentum (and I have to pick a decent theme, I probably won’t get to that until this weekend). I’m intending to curate the creative items I run across in my daily news troll with (hopefully) virtually no impact to my normal available blogging-time.
Plus, I like the energy over on Tumblr. I want to play too. I hate the name I’m using over there. Suggestions are welcome.
10,000 Words: Don’t Miss Twitter’s Great New Way To Embed Tweets.
Cut and paste. I tweet so seldom, this is kind of nice to have for occasional use.
WSJ: Email and Friendship.
“In other words, there’s a surprisingly easy way to figure out how you feel about someone — just count the hours before you hit the ‘reply’ button.” I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t handicap people by speed of their response, unless I need some particular piece of information in a hurry. I suspect this will bleed over to social and become a new metric for social marketers to stress over (’you must answer tweets RIGHT AWAY’). Tyranny of the smartphone.
HuffPo: Google Plus For Businesses - 3 Reasons To Use It.
Hmmm. There’s a whole lot of connecting going on, a great deal of self-promotion (enough to trigger the gag reflex each time I open G+), but not a lot of real business happening. YMMV.
Noone seems to have copped to the irony …
… of my wasting time posting haiku on Facebook. Of all places to put something creatively interesting, FB is just a total waste of space for it. Which is why I do it.
Ah well. I should dump them here too. Feel free to riff [5/7/5, cutting word, season implication].
The seeds fall thickly
as I walk through the garden.
The snow is peppered.
FT.com: Western dreams and Egypt’s reality.
“It is a measure of how much things have changed that Muslim Brotherhood members – once regarded as bogeymen by many liberals – are now being talked up as moderate centrists.” “Arab Spring” may actually be “Arab Winter”.
