Tag: Internet

In Which I Face My Social Media Ineptitude Squarely

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Live from Cyberspace: Welcome praise for J. Bradford DeLong (2015): The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation – Milken Institute Review: Hiccup … or Endgame? Much appreciated. Thanks…

Paul Krugman: “Good Review by Brad DeLong: There are still real policy issues out there! The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation” https://t.co/f5ancyOEHT

Paul’s tweet July 23 has 180 likes and 91 retweets… The Milken Review’s tweet June 29 has 1 like and 2 retweets… My tweet last October 17 http://tinyurl.com/dl20151017a has 11 likes and 6 retweets…

I am becoming more and more convinced that in the modern age content has to be deployed in stages so that there is never more than a tenfold gap between the length of a teaser or summary and the length of the next largest and most comprehensive version. The gap between a tweet-20 words–and a 4000 word essay is just too great to expect people to bridge.

That means that everything 10,000-70,000 words has to come with a 1,000-7,000-word version, and everything with 1,000-7,000 words has to come with a 100-700 word version, and that even 400-700-word things need to come with a super-tweet version: a screenshot paragraph…

Must-Read: Austin Smith: Don’t Punish Journalists for Software Problems

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Austin Smith: Don’t Punish Journalists for Software Problems: “Editors are cornered by two problems…

…a hard job that gets harder by the month, and a media/social beast that feeds ravenously on every minor mistake.

No, wait, sorry, some editors are cornered by three problems, because their news organizations can’t get their damn CMS straight…. At the heart of any CMS is a text editor, which must offer writers and editors many different options for presenting an article correctly in every form factor. The text editor in the Daily News’s CMS stripped out formatting that declared blockquotes or hanging indents. Whoops! Of these three problems… one is actually possible to solve right now. It is absolutely possible to build a CMS that handles inbound formatting neatly…

Must-Read: Jay Rosen: Facebook Backs Off on the View from Nowhere

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Must-Read: Jay Rosen: Facebook Backs Off on the View from Nowhere: “Today Facebook released a document it calls: News Feed Values. It’s a start…

…For a long time Facebook wouldn’t even say it had priorities. It would describe you as the editor of News Feed: you, rather than Facebook…. But… we want to know: what are you optimizing for, along with user interest? How do you see your role within a news ecosystem where you are more and more the dominant player? In news, you have power now. It is growing. Help us understand how you intend to use it. What kind of filter will you be? What kind of player… playing for what? The document released today is not a revelation, but it does say a few interesting things. Here is my summary of News Feed’s editorial philosophy:

Your social graph comes first, not the public world. Informing you is a higher priority than entertaining you. But we think ‘information’ comes in many forms, not just serious news. A good recipe for beer can chicken is information to the person who is looking for it. We don’t exclude points of view we don’t like, or favor the sources we do like. We let the invisible hand of user choice make those decisions. Except: We do try to edit out what people find misleading, sensational, spammy–mere click bait. We do police nudity, hate speech, personal abuse, and violent or overly graphic content….

No one should expect Facebook to be a traffic distributor because that is not a priority the company has for its product…. One more thing Facebook says… its committed to the personalization of News Feed as a kind of right that users have. ‘You control your experience.’ I will be worth watching how this rights revolution in news display unfolds…

Must-Read: Andrew Golis: Comments Are Usually Garbage. We’re Adding Comments to This.!

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Andrew Golis: Comments Are Usually Garbage. We’re Adding Comments to This.!: “Comments, on most websites most of the time, are garbage…

…When comments are garbage, so are our communities. The conversations we have allow us to explore ideas and stories, and to build relationships. Comments form conversations, and conversations form communities. So when we started This. (a network where you can share just 1 link a day), we knew two things: 1. the first version of the site wouldn’t have comments, and 2. we’d only add them when we thought we could devote the time and attention to succeeding where others have failed…. Over the course of the next 6 months, we’ll build what we think will be a powerful new way to comment…. This first step is pretty rudimentary: simple text comments below a shared link. But it comes with 3 unique elements…. 1. Members can opt out…. 2. Conversations get their own notifications page…. 3. No Assholes…. We think conversations will allow our members to form into a fun, smart-as-hell community. We can’t wait to unveil what we’ve got coming in the weeks and months ahead. As always, we work best when we hear from our members. Have thoughts? See bugs? Have a suitcase full of cold hard cash in need of a new home? Email me.

Must-read: Brian Feldman: “A Bunch of Websites Migrate to Medium–Following: How We Live Online”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Brian Feldman: A Bunch of Websites Migrate to Medium–Following: How We Live Online: “Medium has now placed its bets firmly on the ‘platform’ side of its bipolar business…

…It makes sense. Of the many reasons given for the decline of the media establishment, one of the most compelling has been the technological blind spot of many publishing companies, which operate at a slower pace than the portals and social networks that dictate how much traffic they receive. Part of the reason that BuzzFeed–to name the most prominent example–ate everyone else’s lunch so quickly is due to their substantial in-house tech department. Many others outsource development of new features to contractors. Medium wants to be everyone’s tech department (and, eventually, their ad department as well). In return for bearing the brunt of that work, Medium gets a bunch of publications to publish good stuff on their platform. And for a small website in particular, the pitch is good….

The dream of the internet, with its low overhead and near-infinite user base, is that a smart publication can find a large audience whose attention and traffic can sustain it. But it’s increasingly clear that the demands of the web economy are squeezing out the already-small middle class of independent content creators — even those with audiences in the hundreds of thousands. If Medium can help small and self-sustaining publishers like the Awl and Pacific Standard be better, for longer, that’s something to celebrate. But it also feels like the latest in a series of increasingly clear signals that the display-ad model, relying as it does on irritating and cheap programmatic ad networks, and competition with much larger publications (not to mention social networks), is not a sustainable business model even for the smart and popular.

Must-read: Gavyn Davies: “The internet and the Productivity Slump”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Gavyn Davies: The internet and the Productivity Slump: “How much would an average American, whose annual disposable income is $42,300…

…need to be paid in order to be persuaded to give up their mobile phone and access to the internet, for a full year? Would it be more, or less, than $8,400 for the year?… Chad Syverson… calculates that the productivity slowdown in the US is equivalent to about $2.7 trillion of lost output per annum by 2015. Even on the most generous method that he can find to calculate the extent of the underestimated consumer surplus from the digital economy, he reckons that only about one third of the productivity gap can be explained in this way…. He suggests, on prima facie grounds, that few people would value their access to the digital economy at one fifth of their disposable income. Maybe, but… most people are now extremely reliant upon, or addicted to, the internet, especially via their smartphones. Faced with the choice, I doubt whether they would be prepared to be transported back to the obsolete technology of a decade ago in exchange for an annual payment of less than, say, a few thousand dollars a year–i.e. far less than than the value currently accorded to digital activity in GDP…

Must-reads: January 5, 2016

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Ben Thompson: Google and the Shift From Web to Apps, Indexing App-Only Content, Streaming Apps

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: The walled gardens of the pre-1995 .net strike back. I am left curious: why are browsers good enough on the desktop and the laptop to wipe the floor with walled gardens, but not so on smart phones?

Ben Thompson: Google and the Shift From Web to Apps, Indexing App-Only Content, Streaming Apps: “The core reality that drove Google’s dominance…

…the public availability of linked information… [is] at least weakening…. The first phase was the shift in usage from the web to apps… [where] the actual infrastructure and logic for displaying content is downloaded and installed when you get the app from the App Store. Then… the app simply downloads… content… and drops the content into the pre-existing templates. It’s super fast. This was certainly an annoyance for Google… [which] has focused on deep linking… to a mobile web site….

Now we are into the second phase in the shift from the web to apps: apps that don’t exist on the web at all…. “Up until now, Google has only been able to show information from apps that have matching web content. Because we recognize that there’s a lot of great content that lives only in apps, starting today, we’ll be able to show some ‘app-first’ content in Search as well….”

This is a far graver threat to Google than someone simply starting their search in a vertical app like Yelp or Trip Advisor: Google can win that fight by delivering a superior experience, and they’ve made great strides in that regard over the past few years…. There’s one big problem with Google’s new capability, though: how do you actually show said content to users? The app installation problem remains a significant one: there is simply too much friction in expecting a search user to download an app to see a result. Enter app streaming…

Must-Read: Charlie Stross: A Question About the Future of the World Wide Web

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Charlie Stross: A Question About the Future of the World Wide Web: “The current state of the ad-funded web…

…is a death-spiral…. Casual information consumers won’t pay for access to paywalled sites, and a lot of the struggling/bottom-feeding resources on the web are engaged in a zero-sum game for access to the same eyeballs that are increasingly irritated by the clickbait and attention-grabbing excesses of the worst advertisers…. Is there any way to get to a micro-billing infrastructure from where we are today that doesn’t involve burning down the web and starting again from scratch?

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/09/a-question-about-the-future-of.html