David Newland › Comments

"Essentially, Twitter left a ball and a stick in a field and lurked on the sidelines as its users invented baseball." - David Newland

The most important thing about this story is the fact that 4 billion people are apparently using mobile phones. - David Newland

This may be good news: it's not like I want to keep trying to keep up with new social networks all the time. What I'd prefer is for everyone to get comfortable with whatever we settle on, and start making great stuff. - David Newland

Linda Anderson, comScore VP of marketing solutions and author of the study, concludes that "... marketers who attempt to optimize their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84% of Internet users who don't click on an ad... " - David Newland

This is the first new media pay content idea I've seen that I think may actually work. Smart, smart, smart: people are USED to paying for stuff on phones... - David Newland

This may be the craziest mashup I've seen: 88 counties in Ohio; 88 keys on a piano... you do the math! What a neat demonstration of map and mashup technological possibility. - David Newland

I'm not even sure that these "myths" are out there, but this is a pretty informative look at what's involved in doing social media seriously. - David Newland

Part opinion, part snark, part in-joke for the English market, this list is nevertheless worth saving for its historical bookmark factor. - David Newland

Great advice! Who knew that past tweets were not searchable? The simple suggestions in this article - like plugging your twitter RSS into your Google Reader - could be invaluable. - David Newland

AnnArbor.com - web AND print version! - will be an entity to watch, as the gamble of the owners plays out... I like the idea that the paper will look more like a social media site. I just wonder what that means. - David Newland

This interactive feature would be brilliant as an addition to Canadian election coverage. - David Newland

Great tips for branching into social networking, with quick bullets to help remember what the tips are. * Pave the Cowpaths * Talk Like a Person * Play Well with Others * Learn from Games * Respect the Ethical Dimension - David Newland

Some good tips here, not directed at editorial use of Twitter but worth noting just the same. - David Newland

"United Breaks Guitars" is going to go down in history as one of the most successful viral videos ever - if by "successful" we mean "costly to the company targeted." The video correlates to a ten per cent stock price drop: 180 million bucks! - David Newland

Looks like the CBC doesn't actually HAVE a social networking strategy... but one is being created, organically, by the employees who are blogging and tweeting. Now who will step in to herd the cats? - David Newland

You know you're going to love it as soon as you hear the name: the mullet strategy means putting the business up front, and the party in the back of your website. I.e. editorial control makes the front page a sober and professional space while all the UGC keeps growing traffic "in back." - David Newland

Great quote. Interesting insight. - David Newland

I wonder how long it will be before the "authenticity" fad fades, or gets hopped up on steroids and becomes a perverted caricature of itself? Meanwhile it's nice to see marketers telling people to be authentic. - David Newland

"It's great to monitor online activity, better to develop reporting around online activity, and better yet to engage customers in their native online habitats." - David Newland

"Technologies that facilitate conversations." Not a ground-breaking definition for social media, but the correct one. Gratifying to see conversation considered at the heart of matters - again, not for the first time but it's good to see it's becoming part of the vernacular. - David Newland

I thought this article made some interesting points about how online communication forums tend to deteriorate even as they promise to bridge the distances between us. This quotation in particular resonated for me: "The bully who will relentlessly attack the target of his rage from the safety of a blog is often the same person railing against the lack of human decency today." - David Newland

Thank goodness for Gladwell.... where I only had a worrisome gut feeling about Chris Anderson's pronouncements in "Free," Gladwell's got the intellectual clarity to expose the claptrap. - David Newland

I'm curious about how to square Chris Anderson's idea of "wasting" processor resources, storage, etc. with the notion that what's really becoming scarce is human attention. I'm also wondering whether there's a limit. We used to waste trees because they were cheap too. - David Newland

Whether or not Daniel Bachhuber, "a 21 year-old photographer, writer, skier, and traveler from Oregon," has the authority to support his suggestions, there's a lot in this blog post about how to rescue the news business that's worth seriously considering. - David Newland

How not to start (or spread) a social media site.... - David Newland

Hilarious and pointed article about the lunacy of taking a run at Google without improving what Google does.... - David Newland

I love the way Kevin Kelly's mind works, and his interest in how other peoples' minds work. This collection of hand-drawn maps of the internet is charming and revealing! - David Newland

"The main theme in Rossi’s talk was of building a product for readers and of shifting your economic dependence as far toward readers and away from advertisers as possible." Sounds like a great strategy, if you're the Economist and your readers are relatively rich. - David Newland

Neat rundown on the various, mostly lame ways that Canadian banks are attempting to tap into the popularity of Twitter. The times, they are a changing, but not so much. - David Newland

Good thoughts on the paywall proposition. I like the comment that "we know enought to know almost intuitively that this is spot-on." - David Newland