Does Twitter have an obligation to avoid bias?
The thing we’re facing now is that, you know, the State Department is suddenly really cozy with Twitter because they are like, “Oh wow, we were trying to get this done with AK-47s and you guys got it done with Tweets. Can we be friends?” But I maintain that it has to be a neutral...
Is StumbleUpon trying to make the traffic it drives more “sticky”?
Now, with the widgets, publishers will have the ability to embed content that it on another page of their site, giving StumbleUpon users something else to click on locally, rather than nearly being encouraged to leave. According to a StumbleUpon representative: The widget is a way for us to offer people a better way to...
How an open source products amasses millions of users with very little publicity
For my latest article on The Next Web, I interviewed Ryan Ozimek, who oversees Joomla, about how the open source CMS amassed 23 million users: Ozimek, president of the nonprofit that oversees Joomla, the product in question, told me that nonprofits often have less incentive to publicize such milestones. “Joomla isn’t a corporate enterprise,” he...
The traffic-conscious journalist
Let me be clear… as I’ve said in previous posts, all these statistical reports are meant to inform our journalism, NOT to rule it. The new content engine we’re building calls for each full-time staffer and each contributor (all topic-specific experts) to be responsible for attracting and building an audience of repeat visitors — that...
The Kindle is becoming a platform for spammers
What seems to be happening is that Amazon’s platform is being overwhelmed by spammers who “scrape” content from websites or, in some cases, actually lift entire texts, and republish them as ebooks. And, in a neat twist, each of these ersatz “books” can be marketed under several different titles as coming from different authors. Thus...
What does J.K. Rowling’s ebook announcement mean for the future of self-publishing?
The books will be available exclusively through the Pottermore site, meaning that Rowling is self-e-publishing the novels. While self-publishing is, of course, nothing new, digital publishing and digital readership has helped self-publishing become more popular and, for authors, more lucrative. As we reported earlier this week, Amazon recently announced that self-published author John Locke had...
Where does the NPR model fit in the digital age?
So what is Digital Services? Public Interactive, a NPR operation housed in Boston, became NPR Digital Services about six months ago, when Bob Kempf, an alum of Boston Globe’s Boston.com, Gatehouse, and Ottoway Community digital operations. It is now staffed by 21 people. If the new initiative is fully funded, it will grow to 42...
Where does the NPR model fit in the digital age?
So what is Digital Services? Public Interactive, a NPR operation housed in Boston, became NPR Digital Services about six months ago, when Bob Kempf, an alum of Boston Globe’s Boston.com, Gatehouse, and Ottoway Community digital operations. It is now staffed by 21 people. If the new initiative is fully funded, it will grow to 42...
Where does the NPR model fit in the digital age?
So what is Digital Services? Public Interactive, a NPR operation housed in Boston, became NPR Digital Services about six months ago, when Bob Kempf, an alum of Boston Globe’s Boston.com, Gatehouse, and Ottoway Community digital operations. It is now staffed by 21 people. If the new initiative is fully funded, it will grow to 42...
Understanding the Facebook fan to website visitor ratio
Hitwise has leveraged its data sets and shown that 1 Facebook fan is apparently equal to 20 additional visits to a retailer’s website over the course of a year. So, if you have 1,000 Facebook fans, that means an extra 20,000 visits to your site. 1 Facebook fan is worth 20 visits to a company’s...
Neil Gaiman angry he hasn’t won a Pulitzer
You can follow me on Twitter or go ahead and hire me.
Will the Guardian let go editorial staffers in its layoffs?
“Yes, we will need to lose some people and will try to do it in a voluntary way,” [Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger] told BBC Radio. “We will need to lose significant numbers but we don’t need to do it tomorrow. We can do it over the next couple of years and have a civilized conversation...
