The Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership (also known as MoJo), recently completed their inaugural Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab on August 5, 2011. The 60+ participants each worked on a final project and submitted a short video pitch to describe how their project works. These end result is the production of a software product which could be integrated into a news organization.

via young journalists – 10,000 Words.

You may think you’re defending your favorite platform, because it’s just that good. But, according to a recently published study out of the University of Illinois, you may instead be defending yourself because you view criticisms of your favorite brand as a threat to your self image. The study, which will be published in the next issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, examines the strength of consumer-brand relationships, concluding that those who have more knowledge of and experience with a brand are more personally impacted by incidents of brand “failure.”

via Consumer Fanboys Confuse Brand Identity With Their Own | Wired Science | Wired.com.

The number of Facebook users in the US will increase 13.4% this year, eMarketer estimates, after 38.6% growth in 2010 and a whopping 90.3% rise the year before. The rate of adult Twitter user adoption has similarly begun to plateau, dropping from 293.1% growth in 2009 to 26.3% this year and still slowing. In many developing countries, these and other networks are seeing their audience growth taper off as most new users come from other countries such as the BRIC nations and Indonesia.

via What Changing Social Media Usage Means for Marketers – eMarketer.

There’s a new (well, sort of new) buzzword making the rounds these days. “Content marketing.” Whether you’ve been doing it for years (under its other names) or are just now jumping onto the quality content bandwagon, content marketing is a concept you’re bound to come across in social media.

Let’s take a look at content marketing today — what it is, what’s great about it, and what’s not so great about yet another social media buzzword like this.

via Is “Content Marketing” the New Dirty Word in Social Media?.

McKinsey_and_Company-internet_matters.pdf (Objet application/pdf).

5 Reasons Your Facebook Page Needs ‘Likeonomics’.

http://likeonomics.com/likeonomics-what-is-likeonomics

credibility now goes hand-in-hand with social relationships. People’s ability to acquire, believe in and retain new information is very much influenced by Facebook dynamics in particular, and that ought to inform any communications strategy, he says.

Here are five insights underlying Bhargava’s new buzz-phrase, likeonomics:

1. There is a modern believability crisis.
2. People make decisions emotionally, not logically.
3. Stories are the most compelling form of communication.
4. Simplicity is the foundation of all great communications.
5. In strangers and microexpertise providers we trust.

As part of a “social media summit” this week, the BBC posted an overview of how its user-generated content desk handles reports from the field — verifying and curating them in much the same way that Andy Carvin of NPR has been doing for the past few months during the upheaval in the Middle East. As I’ve written before, there is a growing need for this kind of curation, but there is also the need to start looking at news as a process and not as a pristine, finished product.

via Future of Media: Curation, Verification and News as a Process: Tech News and Analysis «.

• Overall, Drudge accounts for 7 percent of all traffic sent to news sites. That’s more than Facebook (3 percent) and Twitter (1 percent) combined.
• “Drudge Report drove more links than Facebook or Twitter on all the sites to which it drove traffic” (emphasis added). In other words, for every single news site Drudge was ranked as a traffic source, it maintained its lead over the social networking sites.
• Drudge drives traffic to sites across the ideological spectrum. Fox News (11 percent), Washington Post (15 percent), ABC News (11 percent), USA Today (8 percent), and Boston Globe (11 percent) all receive significant portions of their traffic from Drudge.
• Only Google tops the Drudge Report as a traffic source.

via Why Matt Drudge Still Beats Mark Zuckerberg: Tech News and Analysis «.

Say you’re zooming down the highway, when you spot one of those speed-limit enforcement cameras from the corner of your eye. You hit the brakes, but not before the camera’s flash catches you breaking the law. A speeding ticket is surely on its way to your mailbox.

A car passes a warning sign for speed cameras.

Now, imagine that same camera also snaps a photo of your car when you are driving at or under the speed limit. For your safe driving, you are entered into a lottery to win a portion of the money from fines paid by speeders.

via ‘Gamifying’ The System To Create Better Behavior : NPR.