When it comes to reading long form, the web can be an ugly, distracting place. It’s the reason why services like Instapaper and Pocket (née Read It Later) exist: to strip content of its context — noisy site designs, advertisements, and other unnecessary elements. But perhaps we’re moving into a new era where more of the web is clean and readable. Maybe the future of web publications will be beautiful enough that the reading experience is more enjoyable in its natural habitat.

via The future of the feature: Breaking out of templates to build customized reading experiences » Nieman Journalism Lab.

Social media now accounts for 18% of time spent online, according to a new infographic.

Since 2006, the amount of time that the average person spent on social-networking sites has more than doubled, from 2.7 hours to 6.9 hours per month. More people are using social media, as well. While only 24% of Americans had a single social-media profile in 2008, 56% of Americans do now.

Between the different social media sites, Facebook is, unsurprisingly, king. The average Facebook user spends almost seven hours each month on the site — that’s well ahead of Tumblr and Pinterest, which tie for second place for most time spent. The average visitor to Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ spends less than half an hour on the site per month.

via This Is How Much Time You Spend on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr.

Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, has just published her latest huge deck of amazingly useful data, the “2012 Internet Trends Year-End Update.”

Meeker is delivering her report to a group of Students at Stanford University, and Kleiner Perkins is live-tweeting the presentation on Twitter at @kpcb.

This is an update to a report Meeker delivered in May 2012, and it’s got a ton of new information.

via Mary Meeker releases stunning data on the state of the Internet | VentureBeat.

Yet few products these days can succeed without their online community, and the insight you can gain from interacting with that community is unparalleled, despite the pain. But to take advantage of that learning, you have to avoid the absolutely one and only cardinal sin of community management: not listening.

via Cardinal Sin of Community Management | LinkedIn.

2012 saw more social effort and engagement than ever by non-profits, and the following infographic from MDG Advertising provides a handy overview. Based on statistics from a number of non-profit advocacy groups, it reflects a world of newfound potential for rallying people online for social good.

via How Non-Profits Relied on Social Media in 2012 [INFOGRAPHIC].

http://www.ted.com TEDTalks shares the best ideas from the TED Conference with the world, for free: trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses, all giving the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. We post a fresh TEDTalk eve…

via Secrets of Social Media – YouTube.

Social media isn’t all community, collaboration, and cohesion. It has a dark side too. It’s a perfect tool for tracking people and conducting surveillance as well as spreading propaganda, and it’s wide open to all comers, no matter what their purposes.

via Call It Antisocial Media: Even Twitter Has a Dark Side – Robert Plant – Harvard Business Review.

Specifically, the service counsels companies on landing-page optimization, site search (see video above) and online checkout, by re-imagining these tools as situations in a grocery-store setting. Poor search, for example, is illustrated by customer Oli’s difficulty in finding semi-skimmed milk due to inaccurate and restrictive search definitions.

via Google Analytics Shows You What Bad Web Practices Look Like in Real Life.

I am about to commit an act of meta-journalism. I’m sorry. I hate meta-journalism. I unfollowed GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram a fine writer on Twitter some time ago because I could not muster any more interest in articles about articles and blog posts about blogging. I believe that journalists like people in most professions vastly overestimate their own importance, significance, and interestingness.But I suppose if I’m going to go meta, an end-of-the-year post seems an appropriate venue; and for once I have something both meta and relevant to talk about.

via All Journalism Is Tech Journalism Now | TechCrunch.

I suspect that, at least among my demographic of college students and recent graduates, private Facebook groups account for much of the discrepancy. In particular, groups with privacy set to “secret”, so that even their existence is private knowledge. Because of the secrecy, I think onlookers miss how big a thing this is.

via Facebook’s dark matter: “secret” groups | Toph Tucker.