Posts tagged Social media

“I still can’t believe we got them to say ‘blogosphere’.”

Via XKCD.

Them, not that or there: Bing and the social search engine

Let’s speak cryptically, because the mood today calls for it: the search engine as self has always been a middle man (or woman), pointing us toward wikipedia, yelp, or wherever else we want to go online but don’t actually know it yet.

But what if instead of sending us out there, it told us who knew what — who, among my friends and acquaintances, can give me suggestions on where the best hikes are in upstate New York, and help me avoid those old looking state park sites that don’t tell me anything? Well, Bing to the rescue.

via Fast Company:

“We’re literally no longer indexing text,” [Bing director Stefan] Weitz says. “We’re trying to associate data that exists on the web in all forms with the physical object that spawned it in the first place.”

That means that when searching for upstate hiking trails, you’ll be shown who among your friends may have been somewhere up there, during a Summer trip five years ago that they never mentioned but maybe, conveniently, made into a photo album on Facebook that you never saw.

But, like most new ideas, there are hurdles.

via Co.Design:

Bing isn’t taking all user-generated content into consideration when it makes its people-relevance decisions. That’s because it would take an extraordinary amount of computing power to analyze all the free text people generate and determine its meaning (for example, if you write about “turkey,” are you talking about the bird or the country?).

So instead, Bing is simply looking at what your friends Like, share, or search for to assess their expertise on certain topics. But those proxies might not be sufficient to actually get you to the right people. “Just because there’s someone in my social graph who Likes Hawaii doesn’t mean they’re the best person to recommend a hotel on Kauai,” Rebecca Lieb of the Altimeter Group tells Fast Company.

FJP: One oversight on Bing’s part may be the fact that I don’t want to ask that one guy I haven’t seen in three years what the Adirondacks are like. But it’s still a good idea.

From the Times’ article Joe Weisenthal vs. the 24-Hour News Cycle

Weisenthal’s bosses, well aware of his insane work schedule, worry about burnout. Someone else now works the 4 a.m. shift at least once each week, generally Thursdays, so he can sleep. And every month or so, Weisenthal says that he just completely crashes and can’t muster the energy to do anything else but watch a full day of television.

“We also ensure that he takes his vacations,” Julie Hansen, the company’s president and chief operating officer, said. “I think he’s figured out by now that that’s good.”

But it’s hard to unplug. In early March he left work just after 5 p.m. to take his wife to a fancy birthday dinner at Babbo, the Mario Batali restaurant in the West Village.

By 8 p.m. he was back at his computer, tweeting and blogging.

“Gay marriage conversation peaked at 7,347 Tweets per minute at 3:22p ET yesterday.” — @gov.

It more or less kicked off with Matthew Keys’ (ProducerMatthew) Twitter post breaking the news.

Meme/Circa leader Ben Huh gets asked about the truth, speaks honestly

Recently, when asked about whether there should be standards for credibility in the news (and online), Huh made his thoughts very clear —

Huh: I disagree. I totally, absolutely, positively, wholeheartedly, absolutely disagree.

[Adrienne] LaFrance: All right, let’s hear it.

Huh: I think — among entrepreneurs, too — there’s an idealistic notion that there is a truth, a singular one truth. Among journalists, there is “the truth,” slightly liberal, slightly populist, but most of the time it’s “We’re the truth.” If you ask the people who watch Fox News who is credible, they’ll tell you Bill O’Reilly is credible. Maybe I disagree. Maybe I believe that he stretches truths a lot, but the fact of the matter is, it’s human biology to seek out shared perspective.

Creating a singular measure of credibility is a slippery slope to censorship. Like, “Oh, these people are not credible, so maybe we should all act in concert to not print their things,” or discard them. The world’s greatest ideas come from the crazies, the people on the fringe. For a while, they’re not credible, but then one day they are. So that’s a very, very dangerous idea. It smacks of centralized mind-control to me. And I’m probably extrapolating from what he’s saying really to the extreme, and I’m sure there are good ideas, but a universal credibility measure? Even if they could create such a thing, why would you? It’s very Orwellian. I don’t like that idea at all.

Huh went on to say that just stating the facts isn’t a viable alternative, and neither is any facade of objectivity. What’s his solution, then? He doesn’t know yet, but one thing he likes is the blogger spirit.

When asked about who he thinks does it right, Huh said the following:

Well, there’s not a specific person but you saw people debunking the birther movement. You had the newspapers who were just banging their heads against one another but then you had bloggers asking really interesting questions, explaining that, “You know what, this is actually how it works in Hawaii with a birth certificate.”

This is the part about being organic. The future of journalism is going to come in from some place really strange. I don’t think we have technology or the platform or the social consciousness, actually, to recognize that that’s the future of journalism. We think that the future will look linearly similar to today, because for the last 100 years, it kind of did before. But it won’t.

See Huh’s new and uncertain news project, Circa, here.

Photo: John Keatley

Facebook Social Reader Engagement is Cratering

Via Buzzfeed:

The Washington Post was the first publication to experiment with a “frictionless” social reader app, which launched last year. If you use Facebook you’ve probably come across it: it manifests as a clustered list of stories that are almost completely unrelated except for the fact that they all come from the same publication.

If you decide to click on a link it doesn’t take you to the story. Instead, it shunts you over to a signup screen for Social Reader, which you have to accept if you want to make it through to the site. This forceful behavior is how the Post’s reader app gained tens of millions of users in a few short months; it’s also how, as Jeff Bercovici at Forbes pointed out this morning, the Washington Post seems to have worn its readers — or Facebook — out. They’re annoyed, and they’re quitting in droves.

Via CNET:

Even worse, the tool had been getting more than 4 million daily users as recently as the second week of April, but ended up near zero for most of the rest of the month and is currently wallowing at around 220,000 daily. The publication’s social reader is advertised with this catchy plug: “News travels fast on Washington Post Social Reader. Get articles from the Web’s best sources, instantly share the stories you read with your friends, and see what your friends are reading. Start spreading the news!”

But what seems clear is that the only thing that’s spreading is a viral disgust with the application.

The same seems to hold true of other social readers. Dailymotion, which is a video site that features a social-reading app, also seems to be hemorrhaging users, dropping from a high of about 3.5 million in early April to about 670,000 today. And The Guardian, which topped out at nearly 6 million monthly average users and was still at 5.5 million last week, has now fallen to 3.9 million monthly average users.

FJP: Possible cause — interface design within Facebook is annoying. A user shares an article, you’re interested so select a link but instead of going to the article you’re brought to an interstitial page where you’re required to sign up for the app in order to access the content.

Second possible cause — as we share and share and share, we’re beginning to realize that a lot of what we read is a bit silly and it might be better not to share so much.

Third possible cause — as suggested by the Washington Post’s Engagement Producer Ryan Kellet, Facebook’s “Trending Articles” feature is superseding Social Reader stories by decreasing their prominence and bucketing “most important” stories all in one place. Again, an interface issue. — Michael

Speed-produced Longshot Radio to make its next episode this week with Radiolab, in 48 hours, with everybody

Think improv where you can cry if you want, and where there’s no stage or troupe - just a booth and a microphone. From their camp at the 99% Conference (which doesn’t have anything to do with Occupy Wall Street) theme-based Longshot Radio will release a series of radio pieces on experimentation and the times when risks don’t pan out. And they’ll do it really fast.

There are many ways to become involved from anywhere, all of which are clearly spelled out here.

And seeing as how the show asks passersby to go out on a limb and tell a personal story, we asked executive producer Jody Avirgan to share some of his experiments-gone-wrong, and how he and his friends managed to create something so unique. He told us this:

Certainly at 4am on Sunday last time around, we were questioning the whole endeavor. But, yes, the idea is to not be afraid to try things, and to react to each little failure with a tweak and an adjustment, rather than throwing up your hands. So, there are countless moments where you have a big idea (“we should get people from every country in the world to remix the same radio piece in the next four hours”) that butts up against possible failure. You then adjust, and find other unexpected victories.