Tag Archives: media

Social Media and the Devolution of Friendship: Part II » Cyborgology

By s_m_i Posted in percolated Tagged , , , , , , , 1 Reply

Add this theme to the list of blog-posts-in-my-brain.

In short, “sharing” has become a lot easier and a lot more efficient, but “being shared with” has become much more time-consuming, demanding, and inefficient (especially if we don’t ignore most of our friends most of the time). Given this, expecting our friends to keep up with our social media content isn’t expecting them to meet us halfway; it’s asking them to take on the lion’s share of staying in touch with us. Our jobs (in this role) have gotten easier; our friends’ jobs have gotten harder.

Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong

By s_m_i Posted in percolated Tagged , , , , Leave a reply

Just look at that graph. On the one hand, you have all the social networks that you know. They’re about 43.5 percent of our social traffic. On the other, you have this previously unmeasured darknet that’s delivering 56.5 percent of people to individual stories. This is not a niche phenomenon! It’s more than 2.5x Facebook’s impact on the site.
Day after day, this continues to be true, though the individual numbers vary a lot, say, during a Reddit spike or if one of our stories gets sent out on a very big email list or what have you. Day after day, though, dark social is nearly always our top referral source.

This post. It is brilliant.

 

“it might be worth more — particularly in the long term — to spend the time trying to confirm the…”

By s_m_i Posted in galavant, secondbrain Tagged , , , , , , Leave a reply
“it might be worth more — particularly in the long term — to spend the time trying to confirm the reports that emerge through social media (was that tweet really from the niece of Whitney Houston’s hairstylist?) or to push the story beyond the simple report that something has happened and figure out what it means or why it matters. That kind of analysis and context has always been the most long-lasting aspect of journalism, but mainstream media outlets continually get distracted by the need for another scoop or another “exclusive,” something very few non-journalists care about.”

- Twitter and the incredible shrinking news cycle — Tech News and Analysis

“another VC recently told me his firm recently had passed on opportunities to invest in some new tech…”

By s_m_i Posted in galavant, secondbrain Tagged , , , , , Leave a reply
“another VC recently told me his firm recently had passed on opportunities to invest in some new tech blogs that were proposing a business model he described as “hush money.” Potential investors were being offered “most favored nation” status for themselves and their portfolio companies if they put money into the site.
This is what now passes for “journalism” in Silicon Valley: hired guns and reformed click-whores who have found a way to grab some of the loot for themselves. This is perhaps not surprising. Silicon Valley once was home to scientists and engineers — people who wanted to build things. Then it became a casino. Now it is being turned into a silicon cesspool, an upside-down world filled with spammers, liars, flippers, privacy invaders, information stealers — and their grubby cadre of paid apologists and pygmy hangers-on.”

-

Real Dan Lyons Web Site » Blog Archive » Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool » Real Dan Lyons Web Site

Zing.

Content Everywhere, But Not A Drop To Drink

By s_m_i Posted in galavant, secondbrain Tagged , , , , Leave a reply

parislemon:

Most of what is written about the tech world — both in blog form and old school media form — is bullshit. I won’t try to put some arbitrary label on it like 80%, but it’s a lot. There’s more bullshit than there is 100% pure, legitimate information.

The problem is systemic. Print circulation is dying and pageviews are all that matter in keeping advertisers happy. This means, whether writers like it or not, there’s an underlying drive for both sensationalism and more — more — more.

Read More

[Replace tech with finance. Still applies]

Or, if you’re not paying, you’re the product

By s_m_i Posted in galavant, secondbrain Tagged , , ,
“If you are a user of a service on the internet that involves you sharing, friending, following, pinning, writing, networking, book-marking, checking-in or dozens of other versions of expressing yourself, managing your identity or building connections with people, you are not only adding value to that service, you are that service. And when I say you are “adding value to that service,” I mean just that, even when I describe it in positive terms (editing an open-sourced encyclopedia of knowledge) or when I describe it in negative terms (hampters in a cage or share-cropping).” - Just because you can make money from something doesn’t mean you should, and other rules of the web | Rex Hammock’s RexBlog.com

‘The popular social blogging site Tumblr is hiring writers and editors to cover the world of Tumblr’

By s_m_i Posted in galavant Tagged , , , , , , , , , , Leave a reply

So meta my head imploded:

Chris Mohney, a senior vice president for content at BlackBook Media, will be the site’s editor in chief. Jessica Bennett, a senior writer and editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, will be the executive editor and, she said, a kind of Tumblr correspondent.

“Basically, if Tumblr were a city of 42 million,” Ms. Bennett said, referring to the number of Tumblr blogs that exist, “I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.”

Their work — both documenting the Tumblr service and marketing it to users — will appear on the Web site’s staff blog and on a separate part of tumblr.com that has not been set up yet, a Tumblr spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Source: Blogging Site Tumblr Makes Itself the News – NY Times

As if more examples were needed that the lines between so-called “content creators” (curators?) and “platforms” are blurrier than ever.