In his post, entitled “This Is What Happens When Publishers Invest In Long Stories,” FastCo Labs editor Chris Dannen talked about how the site decided to experiment with what he calls “slow live-blogging” — that is, a series of stories that would take shape over time, beginning with a short stub article consisting mostly of a topic paragraph or summary of an issue, and then get added to as new developments arose. Dannen explained that this was a way of blending news with a more feature-like approach.

“Instead of starting with a fresh article every time we want to cover something inside a regular beat, which might require a long catch-up introduction, context, background and so forth, we could just put fresh news at the top and let the reader scroll down to read previous updates.”

Readers stay longer and read more

What happened when this approach started getting rolled out, Dannen says, was fairly dramatic. As he puts it in his post, the results “blew up my assumptions about how to drive traffic.” Among other things, the tech site’s “bounce rate” — that is, the rate at which readers decided to quit reading and go elsewhere — dropped substantially. The average amount of time spent at the site also increased, as did the number of pages per visit that were read by users.

Dannen says it’s too early to tell how permanent these effects will be for Fast Co. Labs, just as it’s impossible to know whether those favorable results stem from the changes they made in their approach to longer stories. But he says that regardless of these caveats, “it sure as hell looks like it’s working,” and that he believes long-form journalism is the future.

It’s not length, it’s engagement

I am a big believer in the value of longer pieces in general, and I think the once-popular myth that people don’t read longform articles online has been largely disproven (although I wonder how many of those who praised the New York Times feature Snow Fall read the whole thing). But it’s also true that editors and publishers often conflate length and quality — as Caroline O’Donovan pointed out in a (short) post on Fast Co.’s experience at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

I think Fast Company’s results actually show something very different from the appeal of longform articles per se: since these posts began with “stub” articles and then grew over time, as more news or analysis emerged about the topic itself, I think they show the value of engaging readers by following a story over time and providing some kind of comprehensive background and context, instead of just bombarding them with a stream of news briefs.

That approach may result in longer stories, but I think that’s almost a side effect rather than the main attraction. No one is going to read those kinds of posts simply because they are long — but if a site builds a narrative and a point of view and some context over time about an issue (the mobile news-reading app Circa is trying to do this by allowing users to “follow” specific breaking news stories, and then alerting them to updates) then it pays off in engagement.

There are lessons in there not just for new-media players but for traditional media outlets that are trying to find a recipe for success online as well.

Note: This post was updated on May 14 at 12:12 am to correct the spelling of Chris Dannen’s name.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Scholastic

The case began in 2011 after Black Tower Press, a publisher of sci-fi and fantasy titles, filed a trademark suit in response to Apple’s announcement that it would use the word “iBooks” to describe software that allows users to purchase online books. Here’s a look at the two marks:

Black Tower came into possession of the “ibooks” mark in 2006 by purchasing the assets of another publishing company that had used the word for an imprint that sold millions of sci-fi and horror books in the early 2000′s. Neither Black Tower nor its predecessor, however, obtained a registered trademark for the word.

Apple, on the other hand, did obtain registered trademark rights. It first obtained a license to use “iBook” from another software company in 1999 to describe a line of colorful computers; in 2010, Apple bought the other company’s trademark entirely.

In a detailed decision, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote explained that the word “ibooks” was simply descriptive of books sold on the internet, and that Black Tower had not acquired any distinctive meaning in the word — only in the word and lightbulb logo used together.

Cote also wrote that she was granting summary judgment to Apple for a second reason: that no consumers would be confused by the two companies’ products:

Thanks to those who helped make paidContent Live a success, and thanks for your interest in our speakers.

• 65 percent of Buzzfeed’s traffic now comes from mobile devices
• How the public is reshaping media at Reddit, Vox and LinkedIn
• Content personalization still has a long way to go
• One-third of the Guardian’s readers are American, with US traffic growing 37% last year
• Tumblr CEO David Karp says at least 70 users have turned blogging into book deals
• The definitive answer of web or apps as the future of mobile content? It depends.
• The Atlantic is going to launch a paid content offering soon
• Can brands evolve from digital advertisers to mass communicators?
• Why digital book publishers are starting to embrace data
• Native advertising: winners, losers and a lot of hype
• A lesson from the blogging elite: there are many ways to the top
• Aereo CEO says free content might be on the way

So, now that the takeover has come to pass (the Financial Times reports the deal value as £45 million (USD $69 million), or around £20 per user), what fallout should we expect?

Cleaner data

According to Mendeley CEO Victor Henning, everything should be just fine. Mendeley will “stay an independent site” with plans to expand its 50-strong team to 80 within the next 18 months, he told me, adding that the deal would give both parties better data:

“All those resources will help us do two things. One is more integration — the biggest gap in our product offering is that it’s too difficult for users to get to full text content. When people found something on Mendeley it was usually just the metadata with a link to the publisher’s website. Elsevier publishes around 20pc of the world’s scientific output and has deals with other publishers for its Scopus database. We’ll be working to integrate Mendeley with Scopus and ScienceDirect to make it easier for our users to enrich and clean up the content we already have — our content is crowdsourced. Elsevier has a lot of clean structured data we can use to clean it up, and our data can enrich Elsevier’s because we have rich social information.

“We can now also take a more long-term perspective about monetization versus feature development and user growth. As an independent startup we were always trying to break even as soon as possible, and were under pressure to monetize new features. Now we can pick up certain things for the roadmap, for example hiring a fully-fledged mobile team. There will be a new iOS app soon, and we’re going to start building an Android app from scratch.”

Henning added that Elsevier’s existing 17 million author profiles would also have a positive effect. “Now, once we’re integrated, when you sign up to Mendeley we will immediately be able to present you with your profile to claim,” he said. “It will make it easier for users to get started.”

But what about all that criticism of Elsevier? There, Henning insisted there was little risk of users taking flight:

“People have criticized Elsevier for things they’ve done in the past but, particularly last year when they were subjected to criticism for their stance on open access publishing, they’ve taken that feedback to heart. They’ve doubled the number of open access journals that they publish. They do support open access publishing and they will expand on it in the future. Another move they made last year is, people were saying they’d like to text-mine content that you have, and they opened up to the community about that.”

Elsevier, meanwhile, also said in a blog post that Mendeley was “open, social and collaborative, and it is important to [Elsevier] that it retains all of those traits”.

“Elsevier has all the power”

However, not everyone is sounding so positive. One notable perspective is that of Jason Hoyt, Mendeley’s former R&D head and, since leaving the company, founder of open access publisher PeerJ.

Hoyt said in a post on Tuesday that Elsevier had previously hampered or outright stymied open access projects at Mendeley, including the service’s PDF preview functionality and a scheme to automatically put papers filed with Mendeley into the open access archive of the author’s institution:

“If one is honest, from a business perspective the Mendeley founders did the right thing to comply with Elsevier’s demands. My personal passions about Open Access hindered that, so no surprise it didn’t work out for more than a few years… I think that Mendeley as it stands today will continue to be useful even at Elsevier. That said, I think it will be challenging for Mendeley to become a truly transformative tool in science, which is what had originally convinced me to move from San Francisco to London four years ago.”

Meanwhile, open access blogger Mike Taylor noted that “Elsevier has all the power in the relationship” with Mendeley:

“So Mendeley say things like ‘very little will change for you as a Mendeley user’ and ‘we will continue to support standard and open data formats’, and I’m sure they believe them. But it’s dependent on the whim of Elsevier. The moment it becomes inconvenient or financially disadvantageous for them to do these things, they’ll stop.”

It will be worth keeping an eye on the user numbers of Mendeley and its main academic community rivals (such as ResearchGate) and reference management rivals (such as Zotero) to see which way the scholarly users themselves feel the wind is blowing.

Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of science publisher Elsevier, is an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the company that publishes GigaOM.

Chief technology officer Eric Feng said in an interview prior to the launch of the new version that this is much more than just an evolution of Flipboard — it’s a major push into a whole new area, namely curation and publishing of content by individual users. “It’s one of the most ambitious efforts we have ever undertaken,” said the former CTO of Hulu. “It’s been more than 18 months since the inception of the idea, so this is a pretty big deal for us. We were originally focused on discovery and filtering of content, but now we are moving into curation in a big way.”

Flipboard has always had curated topics such as technology and sports, where the service uses a combination of human editors and algorithms — based on frequency of sharing and other metrics — to highlight specific content. In effect, the new tools allow any Flipboard user to take on the same role as an editor and create their own magazine around a topic, and share it with other users.

Reader magazines get promoted in Flipboard

In a nutshell, users with the new features (which are available only for iPhone and iPad currently, but will appear in an Android version soon, according to the company) can simply click a “plus” sign next to a blog post or article they are reading — as well as any video or audio content that appears in their stream — and add that piece of content or “flip it into” to a magazine, which will then be available to them or any other user who searches for that topic.

And Flipboard isn’t just giving users that ability within the app: the service is also launching a bookmarklet that will allow users to pull in content from anywhere on the web — whether it’s a blog post, a news website or Twitter and Facebook — and add it to their custom-created magazine. In a sense, Flipboard is trying to capitalize on the same curatorial impulse that makes people create collections about specific topics on Pinterest or re-blog photos on Tumblr, and in many ways this move is a shot across the bow of those other services.

It’s also clearly a threat to the existing publishing industry, since a Flipboard user can now create their own custom publication using the content that comes from dozens of different magazines, blogs, websites and other sources. So Flipboard is trying to bring publishers in as well and get them to create their own custom magazines — such as a magazine about the Beatles created with archival content from Rolling Stone. It has even built e-commerce functionality into the app so users can click and buy directly from within an article or ad.

But the most subversive aspect of the new features from a media-industry point of view is that they can be used by anyone — including advertisers. If an advertiser can create their own magazine by pulling in their own editorial content as well as content from other sources, and build e-commerce functionality into it, then it gives new meaning to the idea of brands as publishers and media entities.

Bringing users into the editorial process

The new version of the app will have a section called “By Our Readers” in the table of contents, which will include a mix of magazines that have been created by users on a variety of topics — a small group of beta testers (including GigaOM) have had access to this function for several months. As with the other Flipboard sections, some of the magazines that are highlighted will be chosen based on the number of times they have been shared, and others will be chosen by editors.

Like most news-aggregation and recommendation apps such as Pulse and Zite (which is owned by CNN), Flipboard users have always had the ability to share specific stories or items, but the new magazine-creation features effectively allow a user to spend some time creating a collection of content they can then share all at once. Feng used the example of an editor who is getting married soon and created an entire magazine with content about weddings.

In a way, the new version of the app also picks up where Google Reader and other RSS services left off. Instead of just passively consuming text and photos in a chronological timeline or series of folders, Flipboard turns everything into part of a magazine-style experience. According to Feng, many users have already imported their Google Reader feeds into the app, and those feeds will be available once Google sunsets the service in July.

The move comes on the heels of earlier news that a rumored sale of Time Warner magazines to Iowa-based Meredith has fallen through. Under the terms of that proposed deal, Meredith would have acquired lifestyle and women’s interest brands like People.

Instead, Time Warner’s magazines will be slotted into a stand-alone corporation last year. In the company’s news release, CEO Jeff Bewkes said the move would be similar to earlier spin-offs involving Time Warner Cable and AOL.

“After a thorough review of options, we believe that a separation will better position both Time Warner and Time Inc. A complete spin-off of Time Inc. provides strategic clarity for Time Warner Inc., enabling us to focus entirely on our television networks and film and TV production businesses, and improves our growth profile,” said Bewkes, adding that current Time Inc. CEO Laura Lang will stay on in the short term for the transition but will soon step down.

The spin-off is likely to mean layoffs or closures at the newly independent magazine entity. In recent years, Time Warner has reaped large profits on its TV content but the magazines, despite their iconic status, have struggled in the face of an ongoing secular decline.

The split also mirrors what took place at media giant News Corp., which last year announced plans to move its publishing assets into a separate company.

According to New York Times sources, the Meredith deal failed to come through after Time Warner could not agree on money nor on what to do with four core titles — Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money — that Meredith did not want to take on.

Time Warner has not indicated how much equity it will retain in the newly spun-off corporation nor whether it will keep the “Time” in its name in the future. Not long ago, the company was known as AOL Time Warner; now, the Warner part is all that is left.

Veteran tech blogger Lauren Weinstein describes this risk well in a recent blog post, in which he calls what the government of France is doing “extortion,” and warns of the long-term risk of Google acceding to such demands that it pay for the simple act of linking and excerpting content:

“There is little evidence to suggest that ‘paying off’ a party making unreasonable demands will do much more than quiet them for the moment, and they’ll almost inevitably be back for more. And more. And more. Even worse, caving in such situations signals other parties that you may be susceptible to their making the same (or even more outrageous) demands, and this mindset can easily spread from attacking deep-pocketed firms to decimating much smaller companies, organizations, or even individuals.”

As my colleague Jeff Roberts noted in his post on the Google settlement, the French originally wanted the company to pay as much as $100 million, and wanted almost all of that to go into a fund that publishers could use for their own purposes, rather than into ad buying or other joint ventures. And he also noted that with the latest deal — which comes on the heels of a similar settlement with Belgium — Google is sending a very obvious message to other countries such as Germany that it is prepared to pay.

Google’s tactics set a dangerous precedent

This may make sense for Google, since it is trying to avoid as much litigation as possible, and wants to be on good terms with European countries (where it has already run into multiple roadblocks and barriers around services like Street View and privacy concerns). But I think Weinstein is right when he argues that this is only going to encourage countries like Germany — and plenty of others as well — to assume that if they push Google on the subject of linking, they will get cash.

Google wants these payments to be seen as a helping hand to publishers, which is why the fund is described as “supporting digital publishing initiatives,” and why it puts so much emphasis on the strategic partnership angle. But regardless of the picture it is trying to paint, the settlement is being described by many as a “pay for links” deal, and that perception is dangerous. As Weinstein puts it:

“France’s complaints regarding Google related to activities that are absolutely part and parcel of the fundamental and fully expected nature of the open Internet when dealing with publicly accessible Web sites [and its] success at obtaining financial and other concessions from Google associated with ordinary search and linking activities sends a loud, clear, and potentially disastrous message around the planet, a message that could doom the open Internet and Web that we’ve worked so long and hard to create.”

In other words, this issue is much bigger than just Google. While it may serve Google’s purposes to settle with France and Belgium, and perhaps other countries as well, all that does is encourage other governments and companies to see payment for links as an appropriate strategy. How long until U.S. newspapers and publishers start to argue the same thing? What about other companies? Director Harvey Weinstein (no relation to Lauren) said in a recent interview that the U.S. should have legislation to make this a reality — and Google is helping that kind of thinking gain momentum.

It’s cruelly ironic that the company spent so long arguing (correctly) that excerpts of books were fair use in its long-running legal battle with book publishers and authors — a battle in which at least one court has agreed with the company — and now here it is paying newspaper publishers for what is fundamentally the same practice. It’s a short-sighted appeasement strategy, and we could all be the worse for it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Alexander Santander and Flickr user Affiliate

Gravity’s recommendation system is based on its interest graph technology, which we detailed last year. Here’s how I described it then:

[T]he gist is that humans first serve as guides for machine-learning algorithms by determining connections between terms within large data sets, then the algorithms take over to complete the job faster than humans ever could. When they’re done, the humans step in one more time to kill any bad connections between terms. The result is a system that can determine with high accuracy that a person tweeting about Vanessa Laine (Los Angeles Laker Kobe Bryant’s ex-wife), for example, is probably more interested in basketball than about Laine’s date of birth or other accurate but irrelevant information.

As new content streams into Gravity’s system, it’s analyzed and categorized in real time, then presented to users accordingly based on their interests and behavioral history.

How Gravity’s platform works

Graph processing and graph databases — which store and analyze data based on their relationship to one another — are critical to our onlines lives, powering everything from online recommendations to social search to knowledge discovery. Graph technologies are also the focal point of some impressive life sciences work from companies such as Syapse and Ayasdi, which will be presenting at Structure: Data in New York next month.

But publishers struggling to stand out on a noisy web might have the most to gain from graphs and personalization, generally. At our PaidContent Live conference (April 17 in New York), executives from Prismatic, Zite and Bluefin Labs will take the stage to talk about the importance of personalization for helping consumers filter through the deluge of content online so they can find what they really want. It’s arguable that the trick to keeping readers happy is knowing what they want to read — possibly better than they do themselves.

According to Gravity, its platform currently “delivers more than 25 million personalized content recommendations per day to more than 200 million users. Beta partners have reported click through rates two to three times above previous levels, return visitation increases of 300 percent and session length increases up to 40 percent.”

On Monday, a number of sources discovered an article that had been published on Atlantic Media’s website about the Church of Scientology, and unlike much of what gets written about L. Ron Hubbard’s manufactured religion, it was a long and glowing piece about how well the church was doing — complete with positive comments congratulating the church (Gawker has screenshots of the original piece here). It soon became obvious that the story was sponsored content produced by the church, and Twitter and the blogosphere erupted in outrage.

“Seriously, that is ad-whoredom of a particularly egregious variety. The Atlantic is now partly sponsored by the Church of Scientology?” — former Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan

Are all sponsored posts bad, or just that one?

After much debate on Twitter and elsewhere over the ethics of this kind of publishing, The Atlantic eventually took the piece down, and replaced it with a statement saying that it planned to review “our policies that govern sponsor content and subsequent comment threads.” In a follow-up statement to a number of outlets, the magazine said: “We screwed up… We now realize that as we explored new forms of digital advertising, we failed to update the policies that must govern the decisions we make along the way. It’s safe to say that we are thinking a lot more about these policies after running this ad than we did beforehand.”

Nothing inherently wrong with @TheAtlantic's scientology post; it's just incredibly stupid and not worth the money they made off of it.

—
Ross Neumann (@rossneumann) January 15, 2013

So what was the Atlantic‘s offence in this case — was it that sponsored content isn’t appropriate at all, or that the magazine didn’t make it obvious enough that it was advertorial? Or is it that Scientology isn’t an appropriate subject for sponsored content, or not appropriate for The Atlantic? Depending on where you look, you can find arguments for all of those positions and more (we’re going to be talking about this topic with Justin Smith of Atlantic Media, Jon Steinberg from BuzzFeed and Lewis D’Vorkin from Forbes at our paidContent media conference in New York on April 17).

For the digital-media industry, however, “native” advertising is one of the few bright spots — or potential bright spots — in a landscape that is riddled with charts of ad revenue that are going in exactly the wrong direction. And it’s not just traditional media outlets like Forbes or The Atlantic that are experimenting: it’s also a critical part of new-media models at places like BuzzFeed, and even at social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Promoted tweets and sponsored stories are very much like “native” advertising, because they are inserted into the stream of regular content a user consumes.

The best thing about the Scientology ad is that it illustrates just show crappy and clumsy most advertorials are.

—
Peter Kafka (@pkafka) January 15, 2013

For native ads to work, they need to blend in

I think the big lesson from The Atlantic brouhaha is that — as Charlie Warzel points out at Ad Week — using sponsored content as one of the core components of your media strategy really ups the ante when it comes to figuring out whether an advertiser fits with your brand. What seemed to horrify many people (although not The New Republic) was the idea that a magazine they respected would provide a platform to what they see as a dangerous cult. In other words, there seemed to be a mismatch between the brand of the magazine and the brand of the thing it was helping to promote.

Similar complaints have been made about some of the content that appears at Forbes, where chief product officer Lewis D’Vorkin has created a sponsored-content style service called Brand Voice: in effect, Forbes provides brands and advertisers with a platform that is fundamentally identical — in both look and feel — to the one the magazine’s own bloggers get. That content lives or dies based on the same criteria as the magazine’s regular bloggers, namely whether it is relevant and useful to readers. But more traditional media players have criticized the magazine for diluting its brand in this way.

@dangillmor Agreed. I'm not against "Sponsored Content" but who you do business with gets reflected. @TheAtlantic Should be picky here too.

—
David Cohn (@Digidave) January 15, 2013

In the end, most online media and content companies will have no choice but to experiment with sponsored content and other forms of “native” advertising, because there just isn’t enough money coming from the traditional kind in our new world of unlimited supply and falling demand. But as The Atlantic‘s experience shows, it is easy to go astray, and the only way to avoid that kind of disaster is to keep your readers in mind: sponsored content has to be as useful as the kind you produce, if not more so, and it has to be aligned with your brand, or it will fail — sometimes spectacularly.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr/Stephen Brace and Shutterstock/Gl0ck

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the education-focused division of the McGraw-Hill Companies unveiled the SmartBook, an adaptive ebook that adjusts the reading experience to each student’s pace and mastery level.

Content is still structured somewhat like a textbook but instead of asking students to read it thoroughly from start to finish, it coaches the student on how to read the material and quizzes them on various concepts as they move through each section. Depending on their responses, they’re guided along to different highlighted passages. McGraw-Hill said it expects to release SmartBooks at prices starting at $19.99 for about 90 courses later this Spring.

The program, which is available on computers and tablets, builds on the 12 billion data points on student learning collected from LearnSmart, McGraw-Hill’s adaptive learning platform, the company said. But where LearnSmart is more focused on reviewing material, SmartBook attempts to help students read more efficiently to better retain information.

“To revolutionize learning, you need to revolutionize reading,” said Brian Kibby, president of McGraw-Hill Education. “We’re focused on attacking graduation rates and getting results.”

From a demo, it does seem that the SmartBook aims to provide an adaptive reading experience that adjusts to students with a good deal of granularity, using dynamic text and voice instructions to literally talk them through the program and point out the areas on which they should focus.  But McGraw-Hill’s products are not the only adaptive learning platforms out there. A year ago, at CES, for example, publishing giant Pearson announced that adaptive learning company Knewton would power its digital offerings. Macmillan also offers an adaptive assessment tool in its PrepU program.

The program closely tracks student behavior and, according to the Wall Street Journal, the company may share that data with instructors to improve courses, which could raise privacy questions for students and parents. But the company has said that it takes data protection seriously.

With increasing options for digital content, including open content and self-authoring platforms, McGraw-Hill Education and other textbook publishers are attempting to set themselves apart with products that make textbooks more interactive and smarter. The digital textbook market is still a small piece of the overall textbook universe but it’s expected to become a driver of growth. Kibby has been especially bullish on digital textbooks, arguing that higher education should go totally digital by 2015.

In November, McGraw-Hill announced that it planned to sell its education arm to private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $2.5 billion, but the deal has not yet closed.