Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Begin: WordPress Article Content Facebook is doing what many publishers had hoped it would one day do, according to Recode: opening up another key revenue stream for video producers. The so-called “mid-roll” ad unit, which inserts an advertiser’s clip in the middle of a video instead of up front or at the end, will enter…
An ex-Snapchat employee says the company is misleading investors to drive up its IPO and he was fired for being a whistleblower, according to a heavily redacted complaint filed Wednesday in L.A. County Superior Court. Anthony Pompliano says “the avarice of the small group of executives at the helm” of Snapchat and his refusal…
People often say that online behavior would improve if every comment system forced people to use their real names. It sounds like it should be true – surely nobody would say mean things if they faced consequences for their actions? Yet the balance of experimental evidence over the past thirty years suggests that this is not the case….
From BuzzFeed to Target, six brands had some embarrassing slipups. In April, when Facebook rolled out livestreaming to the public, brands were eager to try it out, and many did so in inventive ways. BuzzFeed showed us how to blow up a watermelon, NASA displayed its International Space Station, McDonald’s painted a hamburger in a…
I deactivated my Twitter account today. It was more of a spontaneous impulse than a New Year resolution, although it does feel like a juice cleanse, a moulting, a polar-bear plunge, a clean slate (except the opposite – like throwing your slate into a volcano and running). One moment I was brains-deep in the usual…
My resolutions for 2017 are pretty straightforward. I want to listen more. I want to live more in a state of action than reaction. I definitely want to limit my tunneling into Twitter rabbit holes of outrage. And based on how this week’s been going, I’m not going to wait till January 1 to get started….
Over the past few months, I’ve been making a handful of “honeybots”– bots that act as a honeypot for Twitter troll. There are a lot of people on Twitter who search for specific terms and then yell at people who mention them; they go on about topics that range from chemtrails and the flat earth to various…
Throughout the ‘Fake News’ uproar of the post-election cycle I kept thinking back to this line that I wrote in The Boy Kings about the launch of News Feed in 2006. The story concerns a moment when a Facebook coworker tested a News Feed story by putting the two of us ‘in a relationship’ on…
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.John Lamparski/Getty Images A bug in a recent version of Twitter’s Android app inflated video advertising metrics by as much as 35%, a person familiar with the matter told Business Insider. Twitter let advertisers know about the error earlier this week. The company has issued advertisers refunds for over-billing from video campaigns that ran…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Book readings, interviews, and news radio are coming to Facebook thanks to its new Live Audio feature launching today with a few publishers and authors before opening up next year. A complement to its Facebook Live video streaming, it could bring audio-first content like podcasts to the News Feed, and provide…