Why Content Curation Is Here to Stay Steve Rosenbaum is the CEO of Magnify.net, a video Curation and Publishing platform. Rosenbaum is a blogger, video maker and documentarian. You can follow him on Twitter @magnify and read more about Curation at CurationNation.org. For website content publishers and content creators, there's a debate raging as to the rights and wrongs of curation. While content aggregation has been around for a while with sites using algorithms to find and link to content, the relatively new practice of editorial curation — human filtering and organizing — has created what I'm dubbing, "The Great Creationism Debate." The debate pits creators against curators, asking big questions about the rules and ethical questions around content aggregation. In trying to understand the issue and the new emerging rules, I reached out to some of the experts who are weighing in on how curation could help creators and web users have a better online experience. The Issues at Hand Who are curators? Where We Stand Now
Top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites Here are the top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites as derived from our eBizMBA Rank which is a continually updated average of each website's U.S. Traffic Rank from Quantcast and Global Traffic Rank from both Alexa and SimilarWeb."*#*" Denotes an estimate for sites with limited data. 1 | facebook3 - eBizMBA Rank | 1,500,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 5 - Quantcast Rank | 3 - Alexa Rank | 2 - SimilarWeb Rank | Last Updated: May 1, 2017. The Most Popular Social Networking Sites | eBizMBA 2 | YouTube3 - eBizMBA Rank | 1,499,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 2 - Quantcast Rank | 4 - Alexa Rank | 3 - SimilarWeb Rank | Last Updated: May 1, 2017. 3 | Twitter11 - eBizMBA Rank | 400,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 11 - Quantcast Rank | 16 - Alexa Rank | 7 - SimilarWeb Rank | Last Updated: May 1, 2017.
You are what you curate: why Pinterest is hawt Evolution of social media by Elad Gill (graphic courtesy of Elad Gill) Updated: The new hot social thing on the web these days is a Palo Alto, Calif.–based company started by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp. (I incorrectly described this group as ex-Facebookers. 2012 will likely see an acceleration of structured, push button, social curation across the web. The way I see it, Pinterest is yet another example of basic human behavior’s being transposed on to the web. Back when I was young, my cousins would cut out photos, ads and visuals from fashion and lifestyle magazines and create collages. In 2005, David Galbraith, a friend of mine who has a nasty habit of predicting the future before everyone else, built a service called Wists. Well, since everyone is using “curate,” why don’t we? From the foods we eat, the drinks we chug, the jeans we wear, the bags we buy, the shoes we run in — they are pretty universal.
Cheezburger's Ben Huh Wants to Break the News So He Can Fix It | Underwire AUSTIN, Texas — Ben Huh is already over the viral video “Kony 2012.” But it’s not because as the CEO of the Cheezburger Network he’s already moved on to the next meme. It’s that for him the video, while socially relevant, has taken a groundswell of internet attention and pointed it at a single issue, while scores of others go unnoticed. [bug id="sxsw2012"]“The thing is that those are not as sexy as, you know, an evil man who is drugging children to kill people,” Huh told Wired during an interview at the South by Southwest Interactive conference. “That’s a great internet sound bite.” Huh would rather the internet’s attention — its “one-click altruism,” as he calls it — be turned to things like displacement in Africa or other large issues instead of “something you can easily hate.” It may surprise some people that the guy who is mainly known for popularizing fat cats with misspelled photo captions has so much to say about the news. Only recently have they gotten traction.
Have online comment sections become 'a joke'? Gawker Media founder Nick Denton says majority of online comments have become "off topic" and "toxic." Gawker chief: Idea of positive online comments has become a jokeNick Denton speaks at the South by Southwest Interactive festivalHe said the bigger a site is, the harder it is to curate comment sectionsOne idea? Making certain stories only open to a few select commenters Austin, Texas (CNN) -- In the early days of the Internet, there was hope that the unprecedented tool for global communication would lead to thoughtful sharing and discussion on its most popular sites. A decade and a half later, the very idea is laughable, says Gawker Media founder Nick Denton. "It didn't happen," said Denton, whose properties include the blogs Gawker, Jezebel, Gizmodo, io9 and Lifehacker. "The idea of capturing the intelligence of the readership -- that's a joke." Denton was speaking at South by Southwest Interactive, the annual festival here devoted to Web and digital culture. So, what's the solution?
Valley Boys It was June 26, 4:45 a.m., and Digg founder Kevin Rose was slugging back tea and trying to keep his eyes open as he drove his Volkswagen Golf to Digg's headquarters above the offices of the SF Bay Guardian in Potrero Hill. This was the day Rose would test everything. Two years earlier, Rose had gambled on his idea to change newsgathering, letting the masses "dig up" the most interesting stories on the Web and vote them onto his online "front page" on Digg.com. Rose had given every last piece of himself to the project -- all his time, all his cash, and even his girlfriend, who fought with him after he poured his savings into Digg instead of a downpayment on a house. Today, Digg, Version 3, the one that would go beyond tech news to include politics, gossip, business, and videos, was going live. At 29, Rose was on his way either to a cool $60 million or to total failure. Slide Show >> Digg's stature changed dramatically that day. It's not as dot-com déjà vu as it sounds.
With $2M In Tow, Branch Teams Up With Twitter Co-Founders’ Obvious For ‘New Brand Of Discourse’ Last June, Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone announced that he was stepping back from Twitter to again team up with co-founder Evan Williams and early employee Jason Goldman to re-start The Obvious Corporation — an idea incubator — the one that initially helped give life to Twitter. A few months later, The Obvious Corp announced that its first incubation project would be Lift, an app development startup founded by Tony Stubblebine and Jon Crosby. Today, the Obvious team has unveiled its second project: A partnership with New York City-based Branch — the startup-formerly-known-as the group blogging platform RoundTable. The bootstrapped startup was created by developers Josh Miller, Cemre Güngöre, and Hursh Agrawal. Although the details are a bit sketchy, in a “Branch Bulletin” today, Josh Miller described the team’s goal as a “mission to turn the Internet’s monologues into dialogues,” initially building its prototype on top of Twitter.
Mission Creep on Online Reading Services The new version of Instapaper integrates social networking, editors’ suggestions and a Web browser. The appeal of Readability, the online reading service, has always been simplicity. By installing the Readability browser plug-in, a user could avoid the distractions of the Web with the push of a button. Loud advertisements, messy interfaces and the rest of the Internet would disappear, leaving nothing but a single column of text on a white background. The service, modest as it was, solved a basic problem of reading on the Web. But readability’s simple pitch to readers — press this button and read with fewer distractions — has now become more complicated. The app works fine, and reading articles on it is comfortable. Instapaper, another popular reading app, has also been experiencing a bit of mission creep lately. The latest version of Instapaper’s app is designed to do more than pluck articles from the Web and store them for later reading. Sometimes it is better to keep it simple.
The New York Times Digital Subscription You just shared a link. How long will people pay attention? How long is a link “alive” before people stop caring? Does it matter what kind of content it is, or where you shared it? At bitly we see a lot of links, and while every link is special, we’re learning a few general principles that we can share.Let’s take a look at one particular story - Baby otter befriended by orphaned kittens - which was first shared by StylistMagazine on Facebook on Tuesday at 7:12am. Rate of clicks per 10 minutes on “Baby otter befriended by orphaned kittens”We can evaluate the persistence of the link by calculating what we’re calling the half life: the amount of time at which this link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak. Rate of clicks per minute on “East Coast earthquake: 5.8 magnitude epicenter hits Virginia”While the exact details of the traffic are a little different, and the scale of the traffic to this link is much larger, we see essentially the same pattern: a fast rise, and a more relaxed drop-off.
With or Without Apple: Sparrow for iPhone Will Soon Get Push Notifications There are a fair amount of third-party iPhone email clients out there, but few ever received the kind of reception that Sparrow for iPhone got a few weeks ago. Sadly, though, unless you have a jailbroken iPhone or use a third-party service like Boxcar, you won’t be able to get push notifications for new emails from Sparrow – but this could soon change. Apple, in its infinite wisdom, decided that Sparrow couldn’t use the same kind of special push mechanism that VoIP apps like Skype use for calls and chats. According to Sparrow, the team could have enabled regular push notifications, but that would have meant storing all of its users email credentials on its own servers. Today, Sparrow launched version 1.1 of its app. Even Sparrow itself notes that this is somewhat of a risky tactic. Version 1.2 will also include localization in nine languages, as well as support for composing messages in landscape mode.
Websites Have to Get Better As Anil Dash pointed out this weekend, arguments about the ethics and functionality of save-for-later apps like Instapaper and Readability have reached the same fever pitch as Blogger-vs.-WordPress-vs.-Tumblr had a few years ago. That’s as it should be, but there’s definitely something worth arguing about for people who publish on the Web. The Competition Websites should think of Instapaper as competition. Readability is more complicated. Readability wants publishers to like this arrangement. Publishers shouldn’t settle for that. Websites Worth Visiting If publishers want to stem the tide of impressions and money lost to read-later services, their sites need to not suck. It would help, of course, if articles were legible and ads were valuable in the publication itself. But there are so many ways content sites can be worth more time and money than they can collect from articles and advertising. Live Experiences You can’t save something for later that’s happening right now. Dynamic Content
Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Convertible Note Seed Financings (But Were Afraid To Ask) Editor’s note: Scott Edward Walker is the founder and CEO of Walker Corporate Law Group, a boutique corporate law firm specializing in the representation of entrepreneurs. Check out his blog or follow him on Twitter as @ScottEdWalker. We are in the golden age of seed financing. Venture capital funds, seed funds, super angels, angel groups, incubators, and “friends and family” are all playing the seed financing game and investing early in startups in an attempt to land the next Facebook. As a result, the pendulum has swung dramatically in the founders’ favor, and the issuance of convertible notes for seed financing has never been more prolific. Indeed, as a corporate lawyer for 18+ years, I have seen this development first-hand. This post is the first part of a three-part primer on convertible note seed financings. Part 3 will cover certain special issues, such as (i) what happens if the startup is acquired prior to the note’s conversion to equity? What is a Convertible Note? It can.
Convertible Note Seed Financings: Founders Beware! Editor’s note: Scott Edward Walker is the founder and CEO of Walker Corporate Law Group, a boutique corporate law firm specializing in the representation of entrepreneurs. Check out his blog or follow him on Twitter as @ScottEdWalker. This post is the third part of a three-part primer on convertible note seed financings. Part 1, entitled “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Convertible Note Seed Financings (But Were Afraid To Ask),” addressed the basics. Part 2, entitled “Convertible Note Seed Financings: Econ 101 for Founders,” addressed the economics. This part will address certain tricky issues. What Happens If a Startup is Acquired Prior to the Note’s Conversion to Shares of Preferred Stock? As discussed in part 1, in the context of a seed financing, a convertible note is a loan that typically automatically converts into shares of preferred stock upon the closing of a Series A round of financing. 1) Money Back, Plus Interest (Founder-Friendly). This is another tricky issue.