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Scott Rosenberg

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Links: IndieWeb optimism; Ouellette’s self analysis; native advertising’s scam

June 6, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

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  • How we’re on the verge of an amazing new open web: Ben Werdmuller of WithKnown lays out the IndieWeb argument:

    The social web was a proof of concept. We needed a space to experiment…. We’ve learned a lot about social behavior. We understand how to create a great user experience that people find comfortable to use; we understand how to make it easy to share and to publish. Those things didn’t come easily, but we have them, and the learning was made easier by creating simpler architectures: centralized systems where user activity could be observed.

    It’s time for the next step.

    Open follows closed. We know that we need to open our platforms, and that mass surveillance by governments around the world is a problem. It’s even fair to say that it’s a problem that’s been enabled by creating these centralized proofs of concept. Luckily, the next evolution of the web is taking place.

    The idea is simple: instead of everyone giving all their information to a site like Facebook, they keep it themselves, but still get to communicate easily using all of the great user experience discoveries we’ve made. You can still share selfies, make friends, listen to music together and share links, but now you do it in a space that’s really yours, and that you get to have more control over.

    The IndieWeb movement will be a key thread of what I’m covering here at Wordyard.

  • Jennifer Ouellette is interviewed about her new book on the science of self, Me, Myself, and Why, on public radio’s Science Friday (this bit is at the 23′ mark):

    Q: These days the self is online…. Do you think that social media has changed our selves in a fundamental way? In other words, now that we have the avatar, Facebook self, Twitter self, have we given away a part of the self? Do we need that now, because everybody else does it, to be a fully whole self?

    A: I don’t really see it as something new or dangerous. Believe it or not, I think that what we’re doing is pretty much the same thing we’ve always done when it comes to how we manage our public self. It’s just that there’s now a new realm into which we’ve extended it. One of the most amazing things about the self, and how the brain processes and constructs the self, is that it’s so flexible — it can expand and contract and adapt. And that public face, your avatar or your Twitter handle or that thing that goes out into public to represent you, is an extension of you. And we’ve always done that, whether it’s through magazines, or books, or cameras taking photographs. I think it’s always natural to assume every time there’s a new technology, that something is being lost. But it’s just a different realm, and the brain is doing what it’s always done.

    Q: As [your twitter handle and Second Life avatar] JenLucPiquant, do you think that’s allowed you to do things you wouldn’t do in normal life?

    A: She’s a fun thing, because she sometimes is my mouthpiece if there’s something kind of snarky that I don’t really want to say, I can put it in her mouth, and she can say it, and it gives me a little bit of distance. But only a little, because more and more it’s starting to become an extension of me.

  • Copyranter: BuzzFeed’s Native Advertising Is Nothing But A Confidence Game: [via Andrew Sullivan] There’s nothing new about camouflaging ads as editorial matter; it’s been going on as long as there’ve been ads and publications. (It was known as “advertorial” when I was a wee lad.) All that’s different today is the pattern on the camouflage. What’s constant is the pressure from the advertisers to blur the differentiation between the ad and the not-ad.

    This post offers an arresting take on today’s “native-ad” mania, refreshingly from the perspective of an ad guy — Mark “Copyranter” Duffy, who wrote ad reviews for Buzzfeed till he was let go.

    Duffy explains why “native ads” will fail: They serve neither the advertiser nor the reader, though at the moment they are filling Buzzfeed’s coffers and filling the “flavor of the month” niche of the Web ad business.

    Looking at BuzzFeed’s daily layout, it’s obvious that they’re praying to God you don’t notice that their ads are in fact yucky ads. It is purposely deceptive….

    The kicker is: BuzzFeed’s native advertising is really—ultimately—terrible for brands. But it’s great for BuzzFeed. And this giddy circle jerk underway between media sites desperate for revenue and misguided advertisers desperate to feel instant gratification, continues….

    …I would have asked [Buzzfeed VP Jonathan] Perelman this question: “What percentage of people who click BuzzFeed’s ad posts remember who the advertiser was?” Their data slicksters probably don’t put that number up on the wall, because I guarantee you it’s a very low one.

  • Today’s song speaks for itself: Graham Parker’s “Passion is No Ordinary Word” — this live version is from 1979.

Filed Under: Links, annotated, Project, Uncategorized

Links: Fake readers, real rep; Paltrow, Bowie and more

May 30, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

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I’ve got a huge backlog of interesting stuff to share, so some of these date back a little ways.

  • The Secret About Online Ad Traffic: One-Third Is Bogus – WSJ.com: When fake readers click on fake sites, they generate real ad revenue. According to this report, one out of every three ad impressions today is bogus (generated by botnets). And that’s just conventional Web ads. Wait till the bots get to work inside an ever-more-commercialized Facebook and Twitter. (The link is behind the Journal paywall; Business Insider, of course, has the free summary.)
  • Hello, Illinois? Rep. Tim Johnson Is on the Line – NYTimes.com: This story’s from 2012, but worth revisiting:
  • Representative Tim Johnson, Republican of Illinois, perpetually paces the Capitol hallways, a cellphone pressed to his ear as he talks to constituents, whom he calls all day long, one by one, just to say hello….Mr. Johnson said his calling habits grew out of his many years in the Illinois state legislature. “I came to the conclusion that the problem with government is that they were too out of touch with people and had very little individual relationships,” he said.

  • The era of Facebook is an anomaly | The Verge: Any interview with danah boyd is worth reading in full, but this part in particular spoke to the post-social me:
  • The era of Facebook is an anomaly. The idea of everybody going to one site is just weird. Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being. Is your social dynamic interest-driven or is it friendship-driven? Are you going there because there’s this place where other folks are really into anime, or is this the place you’re going because it’s where your pals from school are hanging out? That first [question] is a driving function.

  • Chief of British Conglomerate Calls 2013 Results ‘Disastrous’ – NYTimes.com – NYTimes.com: Business-speak is the locus classicus of inauthenticity, so I love it when, everyone now and then, some CEO decides to abandon euphemisms and admits to shareholders, colleagues, board members and the media: It’s true! We had a terrible year!
  • Don’t Worry, Get Botox – NYTimes.com: This study inverts our model of the emotions: apparently, frown-prohibiting botox injections can make people feel less depressed. We think feelings originate within and are represented on our faces; but perhaps we’re not a species of method actors after all.
  • The Botox studies, by contrast, suggest a circuit between the brain and the muscles of facial expression in which the brain monitors the emotional valence of the face and responds by generating the appropriate feeling. (Obviously, information flows in both directions, as you can think yourself into practically any emotional state and then have the face to match it.)

  • Farhad Manjoo, the Man Behind Tech’s Most Captivating Tweets:
  • This is hard to say without sound like some kind of tech dope. But in some way I think the person I am on Twitter is the real me. Twitter is the online service that replicates my brain most faithfully. For good and bad! As Sam will tell you. Let me get deeper into this: Obviously saying my Twitter is “the real me” is a loaded thing. We all have shades of personality expressed in different ways. But if (for some crazy reason) you wanted to get a glimpse of how I think, or the things I’m reading that influence how I think, I don’t think you can get closer than reading my tweets. (I don’t know if this is true just of me. Often I meet people I know on Twitter and they’re totally different in real life. And I wonder which one is the more authentic version of that person. For me, the answer is my Twitter version, because in real life, especially with new people, I am not quite myself.)

  • Blackness ever blackening: my lifetime of depression | Mosaic (Jenny Diski):
  • We all have a more or less deep sense of ‘what we really are’, which is buffeted and put at risk temporarily or permanently by moods, as a boat is by the turmoil of the Bay of Biscay or the dying of the winds in the doldrums. I’ve been on both of those boats and know the power the swell or stillness has over the conveyance, that sense of being a small object in the storm or the lull as it progresses. It is possible, though, that the essential self we perceive is a mirage. It might be no more fundamental, no more unitary, than the moods we want to say affect ‘us’ and change our feelings at any moment. What if our moods are our lives, if our selves are the flicker-book: that what we really are is a continuous fluxing of emotional shades created and conditioned by our biological and experiential environments – body, mind, world – and there is no more a single self, impinged on by fleeting moods, than there is that single mood my parents defined as interrupting my real self?

  • Gwyneth Paltrow Talks About Goop, Celebrity, Trolls at Code Conference | Re/code:
  • On creating an authentic self safe from online vitriol: The part that grows impervious to negativity from a stranger is the part that has the right value, the value that you are just you. And nothing is going to change that. And the more you you can be, the more you deepen in your authenticity, no matter what anyone says. It’s no accident that as the Internet grows and all the voices grow softer and softer because there are just so many of them, we’re drawn to authenticity.”

  • David Bowie on Stardust | Blank on Blank | PBS Digital Studios – YouTube: [via Andrew Sullivan]
  • I had no problem writing something for Iggy Pop or working with Lou Reed or writing for Mott the Hoople. I could get into their mood and what they want to do. But I find it extremely hard to write for me. So I found it quite easy to write for the artists that I would create. I did find it much easier, having created Ziggy, to then write for him. Even though it’s me doing it.

Filed Under: Links, annotated, Project

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