Archive For The “Journalism & Media” Category
Any consumer tech that further erodes individual privacy should be kept on a short leash. By pushing back against Google and against individual Glass users, ordinary people can set a red line of privacy, beyond which no tech company shall be allowed to pass.
When you design a site with small visual elements — or worse, unavoidable pop-up ads — that can’t be cleanly pushed with a finger on a touchscreen, you’re inconveniencing your guests and increasing your abandonment rate.
I co-host a weekly men’s lifestyle podcast that’s been on the market for more than two years. Our experiences — as well as knowledge-sharing with several other industry-recognized podcasters and audio professionals — have led to a bit of wisdom about what works and what doesn’t.
When your theme is “Web marketing” or “social media,” though, there are so many people churning out the exact same content that new insights come rarely. Some writers get around this barrier by going pseudo-philosophical, presenting gentle exhortations and pep-talks as a surrogate for new ideas. This strategy is akin to deciding that you’ve exhausted your skills as a bartender so you’re going to breathlessly release new gin-and-tonic recipes, each one bold and visionary because you’re changing the brand of gin or the ratio of tonic. Bottom line: It’s still a gin and tonic.
Truth is, the whole AdTech market is screwed up; too many liberties have been taken for too long with consumer data that any backlash or correction really will have a non-trivial impact on the market. But the backlash is necessary: There’s simply no good justification for a commercial firm to track and aggregate a person’s private or behavioral data against his will, then package and sell it for a profit.
Despite the hubbub over former NYT public editor Arthur Brisbane’s post earlier this year about “truth vigilantes,” and the subsequent recent reversal of his question by his successor, the press of late seems to be having something of a field day with fact checking. Or rather, the premise of fact checking. Let’s stipulate that some things [...]
Until we can classify people by what they consume across all of their overlapping online profiles, in what content channels, in what volumes, and correlate that to susceptibility through ad metrics, and then link these people in a chain with upline influencers and downline influencees, the ROI for social media will remain more of an art than a science.
A membership policy that’s written to include freelancers and bloggers but is explicitly designed to create barriers to their access causes frustration among those who are told they’re not welcome no matter how they identify themselves, while reinforcing archaic J-school pretensions about what a “real” journalist really is.
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