PERFORMING THE FEED by Paul Soulellis depicts how static blog posts lost favour to algorithmicly amplified and trending recently posted social media snippets. From Cybernetics 2018.
What is the balance between curation and performative work ? A history of the post, the feed, the never-ending scroll.
Lurking inside every website or app that relies on "user-generated content"--so, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, among others--there is a hidden kind of labor, without which these sites would not be viable businesses. Content moderation was once generally a volunteer activity, something people took on because they were embedded in communities that they wanted to maintain.
But as social media grew up, so did moderation. It became what the University of California, Los Angeles, scholar Sarah T. Roberts calls, "commercial content moderation," a form of paid labor that requires people to review posts--pictures, videos, text--very quickly and at scale.
Roberts has been studying the labor of content moderation for most of a decade, ever since she saw a newspaper clipping about a small company in the Midwest that took on outsourced moderation work.
Continue reading "Content moderation for user-generated content " »
The psychology behind social media platforms -- the dynamics that make them such powerful vectors of misinformation in the first place -- is at least as important, experts say, especially for those who think they're immune to being duped. For all the suspicions about social media companies' motives and ethics, it is the interaction of the technology with our common, often subconscious psychological biases that makes so many of us vulnerable to misinformation, and this has largely escaped notice.
Skepticism of online "news" serves as a decent filter much of the time, but our innate biases allow it to be bypassed, researchers have found -- especially when presented with the right kind of algorithmically selected "meme."
At a time when political misinformation is in ready supply, and in demand, "Facebook, Google, and Twitter function as a distribution mechanism, a platform for circulating false information and helping find receptive audiences," said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College (and occasional contributor to The Times's Upshot column).
Authors Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, Lada A. Adamic (Exposure to ideologically diverse
news and opinion on Facebook)
analyzed the news feeds of some 10 million users in the United States who posted their political views, and concluded that "individuals' choices played a stronger role in limiting exposure" to contrary news and commentary than Facebook's own algorithmic ranking -- which gauges how interesting stories are likely to be to individual users, based on data they have provided.
Jack Baruth handed you the truth, how did you handle it ?
The truth about cars's theres-no-pill-for-contextual-dysfunction.
Much online advertising capitalizes on the lure of the so-called long tail of the internet -- sites that draw relatively small but attractive audiences, like blogs for new parents or forums for truck enthusiasts. Advertising on those sites costs a fraction of what it does on more prominent online destinations, which typically deal directly with advertisers.
Teenagers overseas and entrepreneurs in the United States discovered this year that they could earn thousands of dollars a month by writing wholly fictionalized or wildly exaggerated partisan political news intended to be spread on Facebook. They then reaped money from Google Ads and other networks after credulous readers in the United States clicked through to their sites.
"A lot of ad buying systems are trying to show the right ad to the right person at the right time, and you see that mantra of those three variables across the industry," said Michael Tiffany, the chief executive and a founder of White Ops, an ad fraud detection company. "Note how 'on the right site' doesn't make the list."
Continue reading "Long tail media meeds programatic ad buying" »
Does creating and sharing videos of mindless tedium, not polished delivery of well-produced conclusions, make you an influential thought leader ?
Gary Vee makes the case that is that it can.
Document, don't create !
Continue reading "Gary Vaynerchuk creating content that builds your personal brand" »
"The first blogs were a reaction against the idiocy and pomposity of mass media.
Now social media is dominated by the same stories that would have made the local television news. We're in an era of mass social media. I think smarter readers are seeking refuge in subcultures."
Mr. Nick Denton of Gawker Media, in an interview by Instant Messenger on Tuesday
What would happen if you traveled to a country you'd never been to and relied on suggestions from blogs and online locals instead of those from friends and guidebooks? Would you end up at a Star Trek convention? Trapped in a basement full of cat hair and moody Swedish folk singers? Not according to my visit at the Skeppsholmen.
I asked Emi if she had a theory as to why Stockholm has so many bloggers, and she said: "It might be partly our inferiority complex. We're feeling kind of alone, all the way up here in the north. We want to reach out and tell people that we're alive. We want to show people that we're on top of everything."
This naturally led to a discussion of hipster-riddled Sodermalm, whose cafes I had recently described to a friend as "laptoppy." Emi reported: "The Stockholm hipsters have gotten very nerdy about bread. And coffee is reaching Brooklyn levels." On the bread front: "Sourdough has gotten huge, especially for stay-at-home dads. The bakery of this deli that we're in has a 'sourdough hotel' where you can leave your starter when you go on vacation." (Sourdough starter needs to be "fed" to keep the yeast active. The "hotel" is a shelving unit that holds some 30 jars of customers' dried or live starter; the top shelf is labeled "Penthouse.") Emi said, "When I first heard about it, I thought it was a hipster joke."
Linking is indeed key. You get a story from somewhere else, you link to the original when you post about it. That's the first rule of web attribution.
There are reasons why AllThingsD is far more respected than CNET.
"Enthusiast site" is pejorative. Enthusiast implies that MacStories is produced by zealous hobbyists. Not naming the site at all implied that the site was not worthy of being named. To later attribute it to "macstories.net" rather than "MacStories" implies that it is something less than a fellow peer publication, and not even worth the effort of hitting the shift key to camelcase the M and S. MacStories is the name of the website; macstories.net is MacStories's domain name. This is subtle, yes, but it is a disparagement nonetheless -- the most begrudging form of attribution that could have been added.
I don't see the angle on it. Why not err on the side of magnanimity?
Continue reading "Daringfireball.net on attribution_and_credit" »
Companies that make use of these algorithms must take this curative responsibility far more seriously than they have to date. They need to give us control over what we see -- making it clear when they are personalizing, and allowing us to shape and adjust our own filters. We citizens need to uphold our end, too -- developing the "filter literacy" needed to use these tools well and demanding content that broadens our horizons even when it's uncomfortable.
Then came the Internet, which made it possible to communicate with millions of people at little or no cost. Suddenly anyone with an Internet connection could share ideas with the whole world. A new era of democratized news media dawned.
You may have heard that story before -- maybe from the conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds (blogging is "technology undermining the gatekeepers") or the progressive blogger Markos Moulitsas (his book is called "Crashing the Gate"). It's a beautiful story about the revolutionary power of the medium, and as an early practitioner of online politics, I told it to describe what we did at MoveOn.org. But I'm increasingly convinced that we've got the ending wrong -- perhaps dangerously wrong. There is a new group of gatekeepers in town, and this time, they're not people, they're code.
Today's Internet giants -- Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft -- see the remarkable rise of available information as an opportunity. If they can provide services that sift though the data and supply us with the most personally relevant and appealing results, they'll get the most users and the most ad views. As a result, they're racing to offer personalized filters that show us the Internet that they think we want to see. These filters, in effect, control and limit the information that reaches our screens.
Continue reading "Google and Facebook, the new gatekeepers" »
Business of fashion looks at the-sartorialist for design and recurring revenue.
KnowYourMeme curates memes. Example: hipster-cop
The narrow focus on privacy as a form of control misses what really worries people on the Internet today. What people seem to want is not simply control over their privacy settings; they want control over their online reputations. But the idea that any of us can control our reputations is, of course, an unrealistic fantasy. The truth is we can't possibly control what others say or know or think about us in a world of Facebook and Google, nor can we realistically demand that others give us the deference and respect to which we think we're entitled. On the Internet, it turns out, we're not entitled to demand any particular respect at all, and if others don't have the empathy necessary to forgive our missteps, or the attention spans necessary to judge us in context, there's nothing we can do about it.
Dan Duncan advocated the "don't get mad, get even" strategy for Yves' Naked Capitalism:
While you sort it out, always include several internal internal links to other posts. As long as you have internal links to your other work, then at least the scraped content will get you deep links to your back pages.
Other technological considerations: Instead of a simple HTAccess denial--ie simply denying access from the offending IP address-- do an HTAccess "re-write". By doing this, you don't block access...rather, you send the asshole "false" content of your choice. It could be a HUGE file of jibberish like "hy^&GBHBDFNLG#$&H%" ...or even better send them "The Best of DownSouth"! ["Please Yves of Naked Cap, we won't ever scrape your site again. Please, just-make-it-stop! We're begging you!"] [Of course, you are more than welcome to send them my commentary as well.]
Or, you could send the scraper into an infinite loop with something like this in HTAccess:
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^123.123.123
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.tld/feed
Replace the IP address with that of the scraper and replace the feed URL with the feed from the scraper's site. That would actually be amusing. If you do this, please let us know what happens.
Here are some other good blacklist options from a helpful site:
perishablepress.com/press/2009/02/03/eight-ways-to-blacklist-with-apaches-mod_rewrite/
Also, beyond the Cease and Desist, you need to file DMCA Reports with the Search Engines.
www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/copyright-03.asp
And finally, since they are scraping to game Google go to Google:
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/duplicate-content-due-to-scrapers.html
I have my laptop running TweetDeck. I have two screens for my official Reuters PC running the Reuters terminal, e-mail and messaging services. And then I have two screens connected to my Mac Mini, which is where I do my real work. The right-hand screen is for the feeds coming in on NetNewsWire and Twhirl, and the left-hand one is for e-mail, web browsing, iChat, PDF documents and drafting blog entries.
The other thing I'm doing throughout the day is tweeting. At the office, there are a couple of twitter aggregators I use: Viewsflow and the Twitter Times. Both aggregate the stories that are most linked to from people I do or should follow. @alea_ is good, as is @moorehn, but really the whole point of Twitter is to aggregate hundreds of streams in one place. The whole is much greater than the sum of the parts.
-- Felix Salmon
Econbrowser take a break from shrill polemics and returns to economics,
with James Hamilton's look at the Federal Reserve as bank regulator.
The Fed employs hundreds of extremely bright and very well-informed economists. On my visits to the Federal Reserve, I've been amazed at how well the staff work together to assimilate information and perspectives. In my experience, you can ask any one of them a question about pretty much anything, and although the person you're talking with may not know the answer, he or she will know the name of the person within the Fed who does know. I've interacted with lots of different institutions over the years, and have never seen another one that functions so effectively as a single, cohesive neural processor. Certainly the objective record of Federal Reserve forecasts is pretty impressive; see for example the assessments by Christina and David Romer and Faust and Wright.
Doubtless others will be skeptical, trotting out the Fed's spectacular underestimation of financial problems during 2005-2007. That criticism is of course well taken, and both the Fed and the economics profession as a whole have much more work to do in terms of recognizing exactly what should have been done differently. But let's be practical. What other institution did a better job? Where in Washington today do you see an agency with the intellectual resources to get this right? Simply squawking that we need a change is not constructive leadership; it's political finger-pointing and CYA.
Indeed, it's striking that many of those who were instrumental in relaxing the oversight on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now believe that a regulatory body more directly under their political control could do a better job than the Fed. In the mean time, the FHA continues even today to dig us into a deeper hole.
The expressive limits of a kind of narrative developed from text messages, with less space to digress or explain than this sentence, has significant upsides. The best people on Twitter communicate with economy and precision, with each element -- links, hash tags and comments -- freighted with meaning. Professional acquaintances whom I find insufferable on every other platform suddenly become interesting within the confines of Twitter.
Continue reading "Twitter: more Toastmasters than mosh pit" »
Do Forex trading profits go to traders, brokers, software vendors ?
A review of the Foreign Exchange advertizing economy.
Ted Murphy, the C.E.O. of Izea, now a 30-person business backed by $10 million in venture capital, said the company initially "made a big mistake" by not setting disclosure standards for publishers and advertisers. Today, ad networks promote their standards; Izea's ads on Twitter are typically demarcated with signifiers like "#ad" or "#sponsor."
As Bill Simmons tells it now, all he really needed to know about Internet success he learned as a nearly anonymous blogger -- the term had not gained currency, but it still fits. "The question was, how do you keep people coming back?" he said. His insights were to update his posts frequently and to be provocative, to get a discussion going among and with his readers.
Other companies, like BrightKite, Loopt and Google Latitude, are also offering services aimed at helping friends find each other on the go. But Foursquare has attracted more attention than the others, in part because it incorporates elements of gaming and social competition.
The system awards points and virtual badges to players depending on how often they go out and which places they visit. Users who frequent a particular place enough times are crowned "mayor" of that particular location.
stupidstupidstamps is another tumblr example of blogging one thing and one thing only.
Stamps are educational. Here, millions of Americans are introduced to the inventor of Orange-On-A-Stick, who apparently lived a REALLY long time.
Tweetingtoohard's top, featuring Joshua Baer.
Barry's scolding Bailout Nation is out. Note the used price is three times greater than the new price.
(We blogrolled Barry Ritholtz' Big Picture years ago).
Basic principle of web design: If it's not on the screen, I can't see it.
Here we see Barry Ritholtz' Big Picture. On a T61 laptop in a high resolution mode, more than 60 percent (5 inches) of the screen is used for static branding graphics, and only 3 inches is available for the actual content.
The Big Picture is a timely survey of economic news and views. In its own words, it tries (and I think succeeds)
to give you a unique combination of original content, as well as referencing the best of what I find elsewhere -- MSM, Wall Street, Video, other blogs. Typically, I post a long, original piece in the early morning. Several additional pieces during the day pull information from elsewhere -- charts, news, other resources. The goal is to provide a steady stream of relevant information -- leavened with my perspectives -- all day.
Advice to Abnormal Returns, one of Coruscation's daily reads.
We like the Abnormal the way it is -- an an efficient linkfest. We liked even more the longer posts when we blogrolled it back in 2005.
For moderate advertising done well, see for example, web software makers 37 Signals' Signal vs Noise.
Tanta of Calculated Risk, dead at 47.
A scathing yet joyous nerd.
Best of: On automated underwriting systems (AUS), underwriting cheat sheets, dogs.
First, there's the old "let's retrain a bunch of subprime loan officers to be prime GSE loan officers." You civilians might think this should be fairly easy, but the fact is that training a lot of these people to be prime loan officers basically means training them to be loan officers. If they had any basic depth of understanding of the business they're in, they could move to prime origination by just reading that other rate sheet. The reality is that they've been doing no-doc no-down no-sweat stuff for so long--some of them have never done anything but--that they're sitting around with the PlayStation waiting for someone to tell them how a 30-year fixed rate loan with a down payment and verified income actually works. Which is to say, their bosses are sitting around in the busier conference rooms trying to figure out if it's possibly worth the time and money to turn these people into mortgage experts instead of corner-cutting order-takers.
In fact, for all the intense gloom surrounding the news-paper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism. The blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television's dominance, had seemed on the wane.
-- Essay of the Week by Andrew Sullivan.
The Implode-O-Meter is the brainchild of Aaron Krowne, a former researcher
at Emory University in Atlanta. A computer scientist and mathematician,
Mr. Krowne, 28, started the site in 2007, believing that the troubles in the
housing market, and by extension the mortgage industry, would worsen.
He was right -- and the Implode-O-Meter took off. Traffic on the site soared,
reaching as many as 100,000 regular visitors, and advertising dollars rolled in.
Mr. Krowne quit his day job and hired 10 people for his company, Implode-Explode Heavy Industries.
"The crisis has come in waves," Mr. Krowne said. "It just keeps coming."
Business: Loan Pains Turned Site Into a Hit
By LOUISE STORY
Published: July 8, 2008
The Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter, a Web site, is gleefully tallying the
number of lenders that run into trouble.
Back on line with MT 4.1 .
BuzzFeed shows what is infatuatingly hot.
Calculated Risk is an blog about the US economy, economics
and risk management, and these days it has a focus on
mortgages and underwriting, and the housing market.
Buck in 2005 it posted on pensions and trade and was only 50 %
real estate.
During recent designs to add adverts (CR and Tanta deserve
adsense revenue more than any refinance - your - mortgage splog)
the comment scheme has gone haywire, from haloscan to blogger
and back and down and up and ...
As a result, there are orphaned blogger comments now that their
system is back on Haloscan. Here's how to find the lost blogger
comments.
https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=10004977&postID=
https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=10004977&postID=3036309384656383353
3036309384656383353
Examples:
48 comments about Alt-A
https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=10004977&postID=5680448805107938097
28 comments about UBS vs New Century
https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=10004977&postID=592721765946995730
51 comments about LA office buildings
https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=10004977&postID=7139436704760308787
128 comments about March employment report
https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=10004977&postID=3036309384656383353
19 Comments about AHM while you were out
https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=10004977&postID=3795589692957347935
Tech President covers the race for US President, 2008.
The first—and most common so far—is the accidental tourist:
A lone writer who starts a blog as a mere hobby but then wakes
up one day to realize his audience is now as big as a small city
newspaper. The liberal journalist Joshua Micah Marshall went
this route: He started the Talking Points Memo blog during
the November 2000 election recount “just for fun,” and his
audience grew slowly, reaching 8,000 a day in the first two
years.
A variation on this theme is when a lone blogger teams up
with the mainstream media. Andrew Sullivan is the first example
of an endgame strategy that may become quite common in the
future. In 2000, Sullivan started his blog, The Daily Dish, as a
part-time sideline, funding it via donations and ads for five
years. Then in January, Time magazine agreed to lease his URL
for one year, making it part of its online offerings. Though
Sullivan says “I didn’t get rich,” he figures the deal will earn
him almost half his income this year.
The second basic blogging business model is the
record-label approach: Crank out dozens and
dozens of sites and hope that one or two will become
hits. The pioneer here is the new-media entrepreneur
Jason Calacanis, who founded Weblogs, Inc., in September
2003 and began rapidly shotgunning new blogs into
obscure niches: Tablet PCs, Microsoft Office, “telemedicine,”
and the like. It is not, many note, a recipe for quality writing.
Calacanis scored an enormous hit with Engadget, the second
most-linked-to site on Technorati. “AOL basically paid $25
million for Engadget”.
The third and final model? The boutique approach: a publisher
who crafts individual blogs the way Condé Nast crafts magazines
—each one carefully aimed at some ineffable, deluxe readership.
This is Nick Denton’s modus operandi. Though he set up shop
three and a half years ago, making his the oldest blog empire
around, he has launched a mere fourteen blogs. They are all,
however, in niches that target high-spending, well-educated
readers—such as gossip, sex, and politics. The aim is to hit the
sweet spot: big readerships, but not hoi polloi. Gawker even
claims to turn away advertisers that are too low-rent; the site’s
ad manager boasted to Mediaweek that it takes no Ford or Chevy
ads because “we hate American cars” and no pharmaceutical
ads because “our readers are healthy and beautiful.”
Denton is famous for spending months hunting for writers
with the snark and wit that his audience likes. He’s also equally
famous for being tight with a buck: His bloggers work from home,
get no equity, and make salaries that are by all accounts
unremarkable, even by the paltry standards of journalism.
Bloggingstocks (AOL/Calacanis) is more about
numerology than insight.
Private equity: Going Private gives catty take downs of
Guy Kawasaki and Maverick Mark Cuban.
Update 2009 January: On Barry 0, vs Chicago School of Economics 1.
Confesses to physics on Dealbreaker.
The 37-year-old Brian Pickrell who runs the Iowa Voice blog has written
at least three postings that contain language identical to sentences in
e-mail from Marshall Manson. In one, which Brian Pickrell attributed to
a "reader," he reported that
Wal-Mart was about to announce that a store in Illinois received
25,000 applications for 325 jobs. That's a 1.3 percent acceptance rate.
Consider this: Harvard University (undergraduate) accepts 11 percent
of applicants. The Navy Seals accept 5 percent of applicants.
See also Wal-Mart is a great American institution.
For the moment, to put it nicely, the same thing has happened to the
Liberals in Canada, as has happened to other long-serving single-party
regimes elsewhere in the world. Technology has caught up with their
ability to manage information; and a sheltered population is losing
its fear. The more the ruling party tries to scare them, with
heavy-handed old-media campaigns, the worse things get --
for the ruling party.
Continue reading "Liberal one party Canada 0 vs Blogosphere 1" »
Evan Williams, blogging and podcast (Odeo) pioneer.
MSNBC is using search engine marketing, buying keywords on Google, like
"viral videos." Computer users searching for articles with such words will
see ads alongside their search results with links to MSNBC.com.
"We want to find out something we haven't known before," said Frank
Radice, senior vice president for the East Coast office of the NBC Agency,
the internal unit that works on behalf of networks like MSNBC, NBC and
Sci Fi Channel. "Can we drive traffic from the Internet to the cable channel?"
Example (2010 December): tow truck in Brooklyn snow.
Val Nichols, vice president for the creative services group at MSNBC,
estimated the campaign would get 114 million viewings in total.
Among the 800 blogs that will run the ads are Adrants, Althouse,
Curbed, Daily Kos, Gothamist, IndieWire, Largehearted Boy, Talking
Points Memo and TV Newser. Buying ads on 800 blogs is a major
commitment to that fledgling medium. Budget Rent A Car bought
ads last month on 177 blogs, and Audi bought ads this summer on 286.
A must for high volume social networkers and consumers and producers
of information, and self-promoters. 2006 Feb 10-11, Vancouver.
Friday will be a little more unorthodox for regular conference goers.
In the spirit of Foo Camp and Bar Camp, Northern Voice includes a
whole self-organized day dedicated to Moose Camp.