Yahoo has confirmed it is buying Tumblr for $1.1 billion. “We promise not to screw it up,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wrote on her Tumblr blog.
Tumblr CEO David Karp reassured users in his own Tumblr post that the acquisition would not change his six-year-old site’s user experience or mission, but rather make it faster.
Buzzfeed to offer training in storytelling to ad agencies.
Marketers who complain about how easy it is to make ‘branded content’ that spreads are in an equivalent position to their topic as music fans who roll their eyes at the simplicity of pop songs. But it’s hard not to be amused imagining the look of granite disdain on the face of an adland grandee exposed to this golden paragraph.
“We know dog content resonates strongly online, so we have created a number of stories around the loving and joyful connection between dogs and owners,” Melinda Winter, senior brand manager at Milk-Bone, said in a statement. One of these stories, for instance, is a collection of 10 GIFS of dogs warmly greeting humans.
(via tomewing)
One Big Workbench
Under different circumstances, or in some earlier America, Yair Silbermintz might have spent his weekday evenings tinkering with a soldering iron alone in the basement of a suburban ranch house.
But Mr. Silbermintz, 27, lives with his wife in a one-bedroom apartment in Fair Lawn, N.J. And though he works as a Web developer for a Manhattan publisher, in this uncertain economy he is unlikely to increase his square-footage anytime soon to indulge his interest in electronics. So on a recent night he could be found at MakerBar, a hacker space in an old factory in Hoboken, N.J.
Mr. Silbermintz has been coming to MakerBar for months on dedicated nights when the club opens to the public. Still, as he stood in the raw, loft-like space, he seemed in awe of the workbenches bustling with people, the metal shelves crammed with supplies, the cool (and costly) tools available for use, like a drill press and a 3-D printer.
Full Story: NYT
Creative research agency FACE, has just launched a new social media intelligence toolPulsar TRAC, and along with it, a new series of data studies called How Stuff Spreads which looks at how digital content (videos, articles, websites, and images) travel the social web.
Last week, the official account of the Associated Press (@AP) was hacked and the account was used to Tweet the false news that the White House had been bombed and President Obama was injured as part of a potential attack. The Dow Jones Industrial Average proceeded to plummet almost 150 points, as did several other market indices around the world. I think this is an incredibly important moment in time and important learning experience, but not for the reasons you think.
I can’t think of a stronger sign of the importance of Twitter for the distribution of news than the market moving dramatically from one pretty obviously fake Tweet
Our latest Internet report finds that the well-educated and the well-off are more likely than others to participate in civic life online – just as they have always been more likely to be active in politics and community affairs offline.
graph via Deseret News
(via unionmetrics)
“I met Euan Semple quite a long time ago, the early days of the soon-to-be social scene. I am honoured to call him a friend and a positive influence” (S.Boyd)
“I met Euan Semple several weeks ago at HRTech London where some of my research was being presented ” (Me)
The interview recently published on Stowe Boyd’s blog is definitely worth a read
http://stoweboyd.com/post/48122546133/socialogy-interview-with-euan-semple
as is Euan’s book
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Organizations-Dont-Tweet-People-Do/dp/1119950554/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366125881&sr=8-1&keywords=euan+semple
SB: That actually brings me to the next thing I want to talk about: The real bang from social activities inside the world of business is going to take place inside of business. Do you think social business theory and practice — the process of making a business more human — can help in the balance between the individual’s desire for autonomy and meaning, and the corporation’s need for higher innovation and productivity. There is a tension there, and I think in the last decade the needle swung a little bit too far into productivity. Some of the research I’ve seen recently suggests that senior executives don’t believe they can get the next tranche of innovation just by speeding up the assembly line.
ES: I’ve been talking about people, about the Gen Y shift. I’ve never been a big fan of that, as a silver surfer myself. That slightly naive assumption that kids can use computers, that somehow they will get all this and manifest it in their organizational life. Whatever they call the next generation [the Millennials] — which is my daughter’s generation — a lot of the gen Yer’s and [and Millennials] are depressingly conventional. People at universities are still trying to get good grades, and tick the right boxes so they can get good jobs, blah blah blah. I say ‘Those organizations probably won’t be there when you graduate.’ And ‘Haven’t you got more imagination than wanting to be a wage slave till you’re 50, then buy stuff?’ I wonder if the [Millennials] have a healthy sense of disillusionment? And question organizations like the church and government.
SB: That’s right: we are losing our faith in large institutions.
This is an area that’s increasingly becoming of interest to me, and a focus for my own personal research. So I wanted to take the opportunity to try and formulate some opinion.
If our faith in large institutions as employees is to be addressed then it’s essential that in a networked age they prove themselves capable of enabling individuals to coordinate themselves, as efficiently within the organisation as they can outside. The web is both the cause and the solution to this eventuality.
As a consumer this requires institutions to coordinate themselves around our individual and evolving needs/requirements. Providing us with the service that meets our demands. Acting responsibly, openly and addressing the balance of informational asymmetry.
Euan refers to ‘The industrialisation of social media means that it’s owned by marketing and marketing agencies. It’s being turned into things that can be bought and sold’. A statement that leaves me a little confused.
Are we not looking at a post-industrialised, information, knowledge and service economy. Where we have faith social technologies will evolve these service based industries and amplify the capabilities (and well-being) of networked knowledge workers.
What we’re looking at, and hopeful for, is that the capabilities of these technologies not only prove disruptive to whole industries and organisation, but individual processes and operations, that when aggregated make up these industries.
I guess the point I’m hoping to make is that I believe social technologies can and will renew/maintain our faith in intuitions. But it must start with small and gradual change, just because it’s currently being packaged into something that can be bought and sold doesn’t deter from this. It’s merely a reflection of the society we live in. It’s merely a reflection of the processes and operations in place in that society, and are unlikely to be going anywhere anytime soon.
(I need to do more thinking around the ‘needle swinging a bit too far towards productivity’. But does this mean that as a society we’re still under estimating the value of conversation?)
This conference, organized by my colleagues Jason Tester, Anthony Townsend, and myself, not only explored a very interesting suite of emerging technologies, but went on to invite organizations to reimagine themselves based on the implications of these technologies and to explore the possible business models of the new competitors who will be even more free to leverage these emerging tools.
Are traditional institutions a technology on the verge of disruption?
