Fans of the social-blogging network might not like the idea much, but a $1-billion acquisition of Tumblr would arguably solve a number of problems for Yahoo — and do the same for Tumblr CEO David Karp. Read more at GigaOM »
Looking for a book suggestion? Culling information from your Twitter feed and turning that into accurate recommendations is harder than it looks, but Parakweet is looking to use natural language procesing to do just that. Read more at GigaOM »
Journalists and organizations now have the ability to use sensors to collect their own real-time data and report on it. The practice raises both practical and ethical questions, Columbia’s Emily Bell said Thursday. Read more »
Research from McKinsey seems to suggest that print-based media still commands a large proportion of time spent by consumers of news — but that is just part of the larger picture media companies have to understand. Read more »
Whenever a breaking news event leads to errors on Twitter, critics suggest that the service needs some kind of built in correction or editing mechanism — but adding one would not only be complicated, it would also be unwise. Read more at GigaOM »
Feedly has faced two outages since adding millions of users in the wake of the announcement that Google will retire its Google Reader service. Now Feedly is accelerating its monetization plans. Read more »
How are book publishers learning more about our evolving reading habits? Not surprisingly, ebook publishers are turning the industry toward thinking more about making data-driven decisions. Read more »
Mendeley, an open collaboration platform for scientific research, has promised that it won’t become less open after being acquired by journal publisher Elsevier, but some prominent users aren’t waiting around. Read more »
The rumored takeover is now reality, at a reported price of $69 million. But, given Elsevier’s reputation and Mendeley’s open access ethos, will this deal turn out to be a harmonious success? Read more »
An early blogger and startup founder who had recently launched a new business focused on health and fitness, Allen Stern passed away last week and was remembered by his friends and blogging colleagues. Read more »
Though tablets and ebook readers are now mainstream, the revolution in the way they display content – and how that content will be generated dynamically – is yet to come. Read more »
Flipboard’s new curation tools for creating custom magazines may appeal to individual users, but they will likely also appeal to advertisers and other brands — and therein lies the potential for real media disruption. Read more »
Flipboard has become a leading player in the digital news-consumption field, and now it wants to hand the same filtering and curation tools employed by its editors over to users of the app, to create their own magazines. Read more at GigaOM »
Although some might expect a 17-year-old startup founder to take his windfall from a Yahoo acquisition and run, Summly CEO Nick D’Aloisio says he wants to stick around and help Yahoo figure out how mobile content works. Read more at GigaOM »
In buying Summly, a mobile news-consumption app created by teenaged entrepreneur Nick D’Aloisio, Yahoo gets to inject some much-needed fresh thinking about mobile content, and also shows it is serious about change. Read more at GigaOM »
Are algorithms actually making society dumber? Yes, says at least one big data expert. We can’t throw computers at our problems until we better define those problems though human input. Read more »
As Punchfork gets ready to shut down its API post Pinterest acquisition, Yummly hopes to step into its shoes, proving recipe content to food sites and apps. Yummly’s semantic search technology, however, has a lot to offer. Read more at GigaOM »
A lot of die-hard RSS users are upset that Google has decided to kill off its Google Reader service, but for me Twitter and other platforms based on social news are far superior to any RSS reader and have been for some time. Read more at GigaOM »
Devices like Google Glass are going to change the way that we consume the news and other information — how will media companies have to change the way they think about the news and how it is constructed? Read more »
If LinkedIn were to buy the Pulse news-recommendation app — something a number of reports say could be in the works — it would give the corporate social network a powerful way of filtering content for its users. Read more »
Facebook is making changes to its news feed in order to try and filter content better for users, while Twitter continues to provide a largely unfiltered experience. Which one is better? That depends on how you use it. Read more at GigaOM »
Media outlets such as the Guardian take a long time to produce data-backed reports and visualizations, while big data analytics apps move fast but don’t lack a human touch. Is there a happy medium? Read more »
A new system of warnings for users who download copyrighted content is being rolled out by some of the biggest internet service providers in the United States. Is it something you should be concerned about? That depends. Read more at GigaOM »
Twitter’s new advertising API is just part of an ongoing seismic shift in the way advertising works online, where algorithms and self-serve networks are taking over from traditional ad buying and further destabilizing the media industry. Read more »
The head of the research lab at the New York Times says the newspaper has launched an advertising product called Sparking Stories that allows advertisers to insert ads into specific content that is trending on Twitter. Read more »
Netflix doesn’t release any ratings for its original content – but it’s keeping a very close watch on who is viewing what in order to greenlight and promote shows. Read more »
Most of the startups and networks focused on hyperlocal or community news and information try to be as open as possible, but Nextdoor is taking the exact opposite approach and making the barrier to entry for users as high as it can. Read more at GigaOM »
Sailthru helps sites deliver personalized content or shopping offers to their email subscribers. Now, the company has received a major investment from Benchmark as it expands its “smart data” products. Read more at GigaOM »
Gravity, a startup that personalizes reader content for web publishers, is opening up its recommendation engine to anyone that wants to use it. Considering the increasing importance of personalization online, this could be a good deal. Read more »
Researchers are creating software that analyzes 22 years of New York Times archives, Wikipedia and about 90 other web resources to predict future disease outbreaks, riots and deaths — and hopefully prevent them. Read more at GigaOM »
Truth Teller is a prototype launched by the Washington Post — with funding from the Knight Foundation — that is designed to fact-check political speeches in real time. But can it do this? And will anyone care? Read more »
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer told attendees at the World Economic Forum that the key to the company’s future success is partnering with other players like Apple, Google and Facebook. But is that a future worth betting on? Read more at GigaOM »
Facebook’s new social-graph search may look like a fairly boring feature of interest only to marketers, but the information it is able to reveal highlights how much we make public without even realizing it. Read more at GigaOM »
The Janus Friis-backed serendipitous browsing tool is now available and, based on a pre-launch play-around, there really is something new and interesting in there. Read more »
Evidence of Twitter’s ambition to become a media entity continues to accumulate, but if it wants to fulfil its role as a digital-media player, it is going to have to get a lot better at finding relevant content for its users. Read more »
Random House is attempting to aid online book discovery with a new Facebook app, BookScout, that gives users book recommendations from multiple publishers based on their Facebook Open Graph. So why’d it recommend me I Can Read: Berenstain Bears? Read more »
Redbox Instant is letting its users play for prizes to get feedback on its beta test, and collect a lot of useful data in the process. Data that one day could be used to improve the service’s movie discovery. Read more »
A year after it launched as a skunkworks project inside music data company The Echo Nest, trendy social music site This Is My Jam is “looking at options” for going independent — as well as getting ready to launch some fun new site exploration features. Read more »
Despite a new agreement with Google, Belgian media will launch their own shared user management and payment system, reducing the amount of free content on their sites. Read more »
It will soon become legal in the UK to copy music from a CD to an iPod, show copyrighted texts on an interactive whiteboard and use copyrighted works in a parody. In other words, this reform was sorely needed. Read more »
