The Berkman Center for Internet & Society here at Harvard has hosted a spree of folks this month talking about the kinds of subjects we’re interested: how information gets made, how it gets shared, and how it gets consumed. First was James Gleick, talking about the ideas contained in his terrific book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Then came metaLAB’s Matthew Battles, who brought in his knowledge of the history of knowledge to talk about what it might mean to “go feral” on the Internet. And finally, earlier this week, Mike Ananny of Microsoft and Berkman spoke about the public’s right to hear and how APIs are changing media infrastructure and affecting free speech.

via Must-see TV for the weekend: Three takes on how we create, spread, and take in information » Nieman Journalism Lab.

To get people to move from one social system to another you need:

Something dramatically better to move to. AOL beat Prodigy because it had a better UI. Compuserve beat AOL because it was faster and had more intelligent conversation. Usenet beat Compuserve because it had more choice. The Internet beat Usenet because it had even more choice, but also was better integrated into other things, was easier to develop for, and eventually had far better spam and noise control. Etc etc.

You’ve gotta get influencers to move AND stay in the new place. Google+ got some, but most of the influencers are still available in Twitter and Facebook. I have never seen an online community get popular with non-influential users first and then the influencers follow. It ALWAYS happens the other way. Which is why I watch what influencers are doing so much. (Modern equivilent, what are people with Klout scores of more than 50 doing).

Provide infrastructure for future platform that others can’t react to. The Internet eventually beat AOL, despite AOL making billions, because communities on the Internet supported the web browser, which got very popular starting in 1994 and more popular every year since. AOL could never react to this new platform, so users left, eventually. Imagine that Google+ works with those new Google Glasses better than Facebook does and that the Google Glasses get very popular. Will Facebook be able to react? (Today’s shifts are happening because of mobile — look at why Twitter’s tweet volume doubled last year).

via Social Media: Google+ and Microsoft’s SO.CL are well-funded but it appears they are not able to engage users and create traction. What are they missing? – Quora.

Technology advancements have changed the way business gets done for all kinds of companies, including media agencies. Established agencies are competing with newer, more nimble firms founded by digital natives, and leaders in the field are innovating best practices and inventing new ways to deploy messages, activate consumers and measure outcomes.

Clearly, digital has forced us to adapt. But what are some of the biggest changes? We spoke with a few agency leaders to learn how the digital revolution has impacted their companies.

via 5 Ways Digital Has Forced Agencies to Adapt.

There is a wonderful essay in The Hedgehog Review about the promise and perils of information overload. Titled Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart, this essay written by Chad Wellmon explores the history of information overload and explores its implications. But Wellmon also spends some time demonstrating that information overload is far from a new problem:

These complaints have their biblical antecedents: Ecclesiastes 12:12, “Of making books there is no end”; their classical ones: Seneca, “the abundance of books is a distraction”; and their early modern ones: Leibniz, the “horrible mass of books keeps growing.” After the invention of the printing press around 1450 and the attendant drop in book prices, according to some estimates by as much as 80 percent, these complaints took on new meaning. As the German philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried Herder put it in the late eighteenth century, the printing press “gave wings” to paper.

Complaints about too many books gained particular urgency over the course of the eighteenth century when the book market exploded, especially in England, France, and Germany. Whereas today we imagine ourselves to be engulfed by a flood of digital data, late eighteenth-century German readers, for example, imagined themselves to have been infested by a plague of books [Bücherseuche]. Books circulated like contagions through the reading public. These anxieties corresponded to a rapid increase in new print titles in the last third of the eighteenth century, an increase of about 150 percent from 1770 to 1800 alone.

via Information Overload Is Not a New Problem | Wired Science | Wired.com.

I love charts, I love data – and Mary Meeker’s incredible D10 presentation is full of some really awesome stuff. Here are my picks for the best charts, but you owe it to yourself to go to the whole thing.

via The Best Slides from Mary Meeker’s D10 Presentation « State of the Fourth Estate.

Full presentation: http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/95259089?access_key=key-mv1qbwlvykk5cacr6a7

Did you know Club Penguin has more employees than Twitter? That Spotify has larger revenues than Tagged, which in turn has more users than Twitter? That Pinterest may be a hot property, but Foursquare still has more users? (All revenue figures are in U.S. dollars, by the way.)

via Social Media Companies: A Cheat Sheet [INFOGRAPHIC].

Some of the most exciting work taking place in The New York Times building is being done on the 28th floor, in the paper’s Research and Development Lab. The group serves essentially as a skunkworks project for a news institution that stands to benefit, financially and otherwise, from creative thinking; as Michael Zimbalist, the Times’ vice president of R&D, puts it, the team is “investigating the ideas at the edges of today and thinking about how they’re going to impact business decisions tomorrow.” (For more on the group’s doings, check out the series of videos that we shot there a couple of years ago.)

via The New York Times’ R&D Lab has built a tool that explores the life stories take in the social space » Nieman Journalism Lab.

Many dismiss copywriting as something that ad agency people do. Truthfully, all of us need to pay close attention to copywriting if we want to achieve our business objectives.

The goal of a “regular” text is to inform or entertain. The goal of Web copy (and ideally your website in general) is to get people to do something—to sign up, make a purchase, or something similar. Hiring a professional copywriter can be very expensive, which is one of the reasons why this is a valuable skill to have yourself.

via Quick Course On Effective Website Copywriting | Smashing Magazine.

Ken Burns is somewhat of a a legend when it comes to stories and film making. His documentaries cover some fantastic issues within the U.S. and have a fine tension throughout the film which keeps his audience captivated. In this short interview by Redglass Pictures, Ken shares what he feels the key elements of a captivating story are. How do you think his idea of that “extra element” applies to what you shoot or edit?

via [Video] The Making of Inspiring Documentaries | Fstoppers.

Svitak made a compelling case for social empowerment among “the generation of eye-rollers,” drawing from recent trends, studies and anecdotes from her own life growing up in the thick of a changing social landscape. Only problem is, adults can have a hard time understanding just how beneficial that engagement can be.

via Are Millennials the Most Distracted or Engaged Generation?.