“The digital place you love is gone” – Joe Sokohl at EuroIA
…became their “place”. Typically, as time has gone on, layer upon layer of complexity has been added to AOL and Facebook. It reminded me of the “Featuritis” curve slide by Carrie Buckingham and Erica Drecker that was doing the rounds on Twitter from another talk. As time passes, users go through an adoption curve of “This is new”, “Yes! I can do this”, “Woah, where did they put that thing?” to something like “Sweet Holy Jeebus I can’t even find ou…
“Every story starts with an audience of zero” – Jay Lauf of Quartz at news:rewired
…publisher of Quartz. “Every story starts with an audience of zero” – Jay Lauf Jay Lauf started by apologising for being the “business” side talking to a room full of journalists, but he needn’t have worried because his core message about Quartz was about putting good stories and good journalism at the heart of an operation. It is barely a year old, and qz.com is on course to average around 3.3million unique users a month. Jay Lauf’s question to t…
Did the Times of Israel say genocide was permissible? Spoiler: NO
…opinion of the Times Of Israel is like saying any newspaper with a post-moderation policy is racist/sexist/votes Ukip because of the comments left underneath their articles….
SEOing the death of Robin Williams isn’t evil. It’s the equivalent of shouting “READ ALL ABAHT IT”
…SEO is a misguided reaction. As I’ve said many times, there is no robot or computer in the world compelling people in news organisations to make decisions. All decisions about SEO are taken by humans. And all the decisions you take in a news organisation reflect your editorial values. “Buzzy” may have been a horrible phrase to use in an internal memo about the recent death of a star, but the reason those words and phrases are “buzzy” is not becaus…
An open letter to the Independent about reporting the royal baby news
…If your schtick is that you don’t make a big fuss about reporting news about the royal family, then tweeting out that that you didn’t make a big fuss about it with a #RoyalBaby hashtag appears to be self-defeating How the @Independent newspaper reported the #RoyalBaby news pic.twitter.com/FRHP8ipQhD — The Independent (@Independent) September 9, 2014 You used to do this… Go back to doing that….
Friday Reading S02E06
…emailing me saying they jerked off to my conference talk video (you’re welcome btw) is mild in comparison to sending photoshopped pictures of me covered in blood.” Read. “Stop Acting So Surprised: How Microaggressions Enforce Stereotypes in Tech” – Livio De La Cruz “We’ve been excluding all sorts of people from our field, not just women. For instance, according to the stereotype, if you learned to program at a young age, then that’s indicative of…
Friday Reading is now a publication on Medium
…enting with publishing Friday Reading on Medium rather than on martinbelam.com – cue massive debate about hosting your own content vs better distribution etc etc. Anyway, I’ve been pleased with how that has worked out so far, and so I have now turned Friday Reading into a publication on Medium. That means, if you have a Medium account, you can follow it to get updates when I publish, and–fingers crossed–it will get delivered to you in an email as…
I’m Martin Belam! You might know me from such internet projects as…
…chers message board, as explained by my former colleague Nigel Smith. I’ve come to believe that online communities on media sites always seem to struggle because reasons. And of course, if you work with something day-to-day, you end up having strong feelings about it. Here are my 9 pet peeves from running the UsVsTh3m social media brand accounts. I get really annoyed when people ask is blogging journalism and if journalists should learn to code. W…
Friday Reading S05E03
…talking about how the alt-right manosphere has poisoned politics. I left a comment under it, which did #numbers on Twitter: “Oh this very much chimes with my experience. I started hanging out on a MGTOW forum (‘Men Going Their Own Way’ – men trying to live with as little contact with women as possible except to use them for sex) forum as part of research into something – and after a while I began to look at it like it was a grooming operation. At…
‘Little c’ christmas is fine – it is ‘Big C’ Christmas that people fear disappearing
…t to change; a promise to defend overcooked sprouts and snowball fights, O Come All Ye Faithful and grandchildren being forced to write proper thankyou cards rather than beastly emails.” “The War on Christmas” is maybe an area that smug metropolitan liberals might consider that we are again talking at cross-purposes to many of the people that we are poking fun of. I think the two groups are talking about entirely different Christmases. It’s self-e…