Monthly Archives: April 2012

Facebook

More companies quit blogging, go with Facebook instead – USATODAY.com

A survey released earlier this year by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth says the percentage of companies that maintain blogs fell to 37% in 2011 from 50% in 2010, based on its survey of 500 fast-growing companies listed by Inc. magazine. Only 23% of Fortune 500 companies maintained a blog in 2011, flat from a year ago after rising for several years.

The trend in business is consistent with the broader loss of interest in blogging among all consumers. In late 2010, the Pew Research Center said blogging among adults ages 18 to 33 fell 2 percentage points in 2010 from 2008. “Blogging requires more investment. You need content regularly. And you need to think about the risk of blogging, accepting comments, liability issues, defamation,” says Nora Ganim Barnes, a professor at the university who wrote the report. One benefit of a blog: “It’s a tool and content you own.”

via More companies quit blogging, go with Facebook instead – USATODAY.com.

Reading

Google-sponsored research identifies groups of bogus product reviewers | The Verge

Crowdsourced product and service reviews are a great way to gauge how good something is before you buy, but how do you know you aren’t being had? The proliferation of for-pay opinion spamming in recent years has made it difficult to know if a five-star review is actually genuine. Luckily, spammer groups may have gotten a lot easier to spot, thanks to a new study by University of Illinois researchers and partially supported by a Google Faculty Research Award. The study, entitled Spotting Fake Reviewer Groups in Consumer Reviews, aims to uncover opinion spam using a new relation-based algorithm called GSRank Group Spam Rank.

via Google-sponsored research identifies groups of bogus product reviewers | The Verge.

Reading

Content Curators Are The New Superheros Of The Web | Fast Company

The volume of information being created is growing faster than your software is able to sort it out. As a result, you’re often unable to determine the difference between a fake LinkedIn friend request, and a picture from your best friend in college of his new baby. Even with good metadata, it’s still all “data”–whether raw unfiltered, or tagged and sourced, it’s all treated like another input to your digital inbox.What’s happened is the web has gotten better at making data. Way better, as it turns out. And while algorithms have gotten better at detecting spam, they aren’t keeping up with the massive tide of real-time data.While devices struggle to separate spam from friends, critical information from nonsense, and signal from noise, the amount of data coming at us is increasingly mind-boggling.

via Content Curators Are The New Superheros Of The Web | Fast Company.

journalism

How Social Media Is Taking Over the News Industry [INFOGRAPHIC]

More than ever, people are using Twitter, Facebook and other social media sources to learn about what’s happening in the world as traditional news outlets become increasingly less relevant to the digital generation.American forces’ raid on Osama Bin Laden, Whitney Houston‘s death, the Hudson River plane landing — these are just a few of many major news stories ordinary citizens broke on Twitter first. Professional journalists, meanwhile, use Twitter all the time to break news quickly before writing up full articles.And the business side is going digital too. Online news now generates more revenue than print newspapers.

via How Social Media Is Taking Over the News Industry [INFOGRAPHIC].

Reading

Millennial Consumers: Engaged, Optimistic, Charitable [STUDY]

A study comparing Millennials with non-Millennials sheds light on some of the key behaviors and attitudes of the generation.

Currently numbered at 79 million — and growing in influence — Millennials are expected to outnumber the Baby Boomer population 78 million to 56 million by 2030.

The Boston Consulting Group recently surveyed 4,000 Millennials aged 16 to 34, as well as 1,000 non-Millennials aged 35 to 40. The report’s complete findings are available online.

via Millennial Consumers: Engaged, Optimistic, Charitable [STUDY].

SEO

How Authorship and Google+ Will Change Linkbuilding | SEOmoz

Google’s relationship with links has changed over the last 15 years – it started out as a love affair but nowadays the Facebook status would probably read: “It’s Complicated”. I think Google are beginning to suffer from trust issues, brought about by well over a decade of the SEO community manipulating the link graph. In this post I’m going to lay out how I think Authorship, and Google+ are one of the ways that Google are trying to remedy this situation.I’ll move on to what that means we should be thinking about doing differently in the future, and am sharing a free link-building tool you can all try out to experiment with these ideas. The tool will allow you to see who is linking to you rather than where is linking to you, and will provide you with social profiles for these authors, as well as details of where else they write.

via How Authorship and Google+ Will Change Linkbuilding | SEOmoz.

journalism

Are comments ‘bad business’ for online media? | The Verge

A lack of overall substance and the fact that comments offer web publications basically no help in reaching profitability are cited as reasons for his stance. Most damning, though, is that Johnson — after conferring with industry colleagues — concludes that so few people actually take time to read the discussion threads that they’re not even worth implementing in the first place. Yet even after having said all this, Johnson resigns himself to keeping comments around at ANIMAL — at least for now.

via Are comments ‘bad business’ for online media? | The Verge.

Social networking

Facebook: a tool for interaction that breeds loneliness? | The Verge

Do the seemingly limitless interaction opportunities provided by social networks like Facebook make us lonelier? It seems contradictory at first, but as Facebook has grown to over 800,000,000 active monthly users, it’s a question that has certainly been floated more than once. The Atlantic has just published an in-depth report on the subject that starts with explaining how loneliness has become an epidemic, with more Americans than ever living alone (27 percent) and a staggering 25 percent of Americans in 2010 saying they have no one to confide in — an increase from 10 percent in 1985.

via Facebook: a tool for interaction that breeds loneliness? | The Verge.

video

YouTube opens Partner program to all: every creator in 20 countries can now monetize video | The Verge

YouTube’s long been a good friend to video producers who create popular content. They become Partners, gain exclusive privileges, and can choose to run advertising on their videos for a cut of the resulting profit. Only now, YouTube has dropped that “popular” requirement, as detailed on the YouTube Creators blog. If you’ve got a single piece of qualifying content and are in one of 20 countries now enrolled in the program, you can choose to monetize it immediately and become a Partner on the spot.

via YouTube opens Partner program to all: every creator in 20 countries can now monetize video | The Verge.

journalism

Woodward and Bernstein: Could the Web generation uncover a Watergate-type scandal? – The Washington Post

The gabby, gray-haired grand pooh-bahs of journalism sprang from the back flaps of their book jackets onto a real-life panel Tuesday afternoon in the air-conditioned guts of the Marriott Wardman Park, where the American Society of News Editors was holding its annual conference. The pooh-bahs oraculated, with both good humor and grandfatherly concern, that the Internet — while a purveyor and archivist of Truth — is not the mother of Truth.

via Woodward and Bernstein: Could the Web generation uncover a Watergate-type scandal? – The Washington Post.