As part of paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads on May 23 in New York, I’ll be talking with venture capitalist Fred Wilson about the future of media and with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Vivian Schiller of NBC News about real-time politics. Read more at GigaOM »
With the rise of social platforms and emergence of new mobile and connected devices, we have entered the post-search world and companies are finding ways to organize information around “knowledge” and “interests.” Today, Twitter is introducing a way to follow others based on interests. Read more »
Now that Pinterest has a big new investor and a $1.5 billion valuation, it needs to keep users engaged. One good way to do that is through e-mail. Read more »
New research about how news is verified through Twitter and a crowdsourced debunking of some fake Wikipedia entries reinforce the point that social networks and online communities can be powerful tools for the real-time verification of events, something that used to take place behind closed doors. Read more at GigaOM »
Twitter describes itself as an information network rather than a media entity, but it is making some interesting moves into the content business, including hiring a sports producer to curate content and sending out a weekly email of highlighted content. How far will it go? Read more at GigaOM »
Is the web run by large corporations, or is it powered primarily by peer-to-peer networks? That’s the question behind one of the longest-running wagers of the modern web era — a six-year-old bet between author and web sceptic Nick Carr and Harvard professor Yochai Benkler. Read more at GigaOM »
Attempts by various levels of government both in the U.S. and around the world to track dissidents through social networks has put pressure on companies like Twitter to comply with these court orders — but Twitter seems determined to uphold its users rights whenever possible. Read more at GigaOM »
Surrounded by an overwhelming amount of digital content, many people are looking for something that can fill the role of a digital newspaper — filtering and highlighting interesting content. Among the many startups trying to solve this problem is a San Francisco outfit called Prismatic. Read more at GigaOM »
Luxury brand Burberry is in legal trouble for using an iconic image from the film Casablanca in a social media campaign to promote its trenchcoats. Read more »
Google is doing everything it can to integrate the Google+ social network into all of its properties, so that it can become a “social layer” across the entire company. But that same behavior is irritating users like actor — and prominent Google+ user — Wil Wheaton. Read more at GigaOM »
The changes Twitter just announced it is making to its “Discover” tab are designed to make recommended links and topics more personalized, and therefore more accurate — which is a good thing, because that is the single biggest business challenge the company faces right now. Read more at GigaOM »
Women at NBCU, NBCUniversal’s female-targeted ad sales, marketing and research initiative, is launching a new digital advisory board called Women@NBCU. Members include Google’s Marissa Mayer, Twitter’s Chloe Sladden and One Kings Lane’s Alison Pincus. Read more »
In a candid ruling, a New York judge said a protester can’t stop prosecutors from searching his Twitter account because he doesn’t own the tweets in the first place. Read more »
Some critics have raised the question of whether Facebook and Twitter are making us more lonely and disconnected from one another. But the Web and social media are just tools: They can be used to create connections or to create distance, just like any other technology. Read more at GigaOM »
Gawker Media founder Nick Denton talks about whether we are in another technology bubble, what the decline of Facebook and Twitter as conversational media say about social networks, the death of advertising and whether he has any interest in selling his digital empire. Read more at GigaOM »
Every week the media seems to offer a new account of some dumb crook who is off to the slammer because he posted about his caper on Facebook. It turns out this phenomenon may be even more widespread than we think. Read more »
In a first among major tech companies, Twitter is taking steps to ensure that its patents don’t become fuel for future intellectual property wars. Read more »
Rolling Stone’s new social networking hub, #RSFans, aims to be a “two-way conversation” between Rolling Stone editors and Facebook, Twitter and Instagram users. Read more »
Read It Later is making its app completely free — no more premium version — and renaming it Pocket to express the fact that users can save any type of content, not just articles. Read more »
Being a cynical optimist by nature, whenever I fall head over heels in love (no, not in the romantic sense) with a product, and the startup and the founder(s), I know that startup/product is going to be a winner. The Instagram-Facebook deal is decent testimony. Read more »
When a movie opens to nearly $153 million dollars, the studio executives backing it always tend to look like geniuses. But in the case of th… Read more »
I thought it would be cool to be retweeted by the President, but it kind of sucked. Read more »
Germany may be Europe’s biggest economy, but Twitter has relatively low take-up there. So why does the company appear to be preparing to set… Read more »
Digital influence is one of the hottest trends in social media and it is also one of the least understood. Like some relationships on Facebo… Read more »
PeerIndex, a service started by a former Reuters (NYSE: TRI) and Economist journalist to measure Twitter users’ influence in topics, is taki… Read more »
We’ve heard that social media is a great source of traffic for news outlets so often that it’s close to textbook. Yes, Facebook, Twitter an… Read more »
A sprawling lawsuit filed in Texas this week targets Path, Instagram, Facebook and others for instructing their apps to suck up user address… Read more »
McDonald’s is launching a new social media campaign just two months after its last effort backfired disastrously. Unfortunately, Twitter use… Read more »
Barry Diller’s latest investment in media disruption hasn’t even launched yet and it’s already in court. That’s part of the appeal of Aereo… Read more »
A judge has once again rebuffed Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul’s efforts to unmask the people who used his name to launch racist… Read more »
A controversial Twitter marketing campaign that used celebrities, not Promoted Tweets, to advertise chocolate did not cross a line, the UK’s… Read more »
Prior to the digital age, there were three companies that, acting like undersea currents, steered all news. Namely, I am referring to the bi… Read more »
Much of the talk about Andrew Breitbart today, in the wake of his death, has focused on his politics, which people either tend to love or ha… Read more »
DataSift’s new Historics service promises to mine the Twitter archives going back two years for insights that could guide business decisions… Read more »
Here is a roundup of some of the latest executive-level hirings and exits in the world of mobile and digital media business…
– Callaway… Read more »
Here is a roundup of some of the latest executive-level hirings and exits in the world of digital media business…
– NPR: The radio news… Read more »
Here is a round-up of some of the latest executive-level hirings and exits in the world of digital media business… Read more »
Is Twitter a publisher and distributor of information like a newspaper, or is it just a dumb pipe like a telephone network? Lawyers in Australia seem to believe that a case could be made that Twitter is a publisher, like a newspaper, and therefore it can be sued for defamation as a result of a single tweet. That may be a stretch — especially in the United States, which has legislation that protects online commentary from such lawsuits — but it highlights the difficulties that Twitter could have as it tries to expand around the globe and into different legal environments. Read more »
A week after mobile social network Path found itself in the tech industry spotlight for uploading iOS contacts without explicit permission,… Read more »
Two days after social TV made a splash at the Super Bowl, yet another new entry in that field, Flingo, announced that it has secured $7 mill… Read more »
