About:Media — What You Think You Know About the Web Is Wrong

Tony Haile, Time, March 9, 2014

If you’re an average reader, I’ve got your attention for 15 seconds, so here goes: We are getting a lot wrong about the web these days. We confuse what people have clicked on for what they’ve read. We mistake sharing for reading. We race towards new trends like native advertising without fixing what was wrong with the old ones and make the same mistakes all over again.

Here’s An Updated Tally Of All The People Who Have Ever Died From A Marijuana Overdose Huffington PostThese Disturbing Fast Food Truths Will Make You Reconsider Your Lunch Huffington PostSophia Bush Wears Skintight See-Thru Corset in Sexy Magazine Spread PeopleThe road to 34-0: Behind the scenes with Wichita State at Arch Madness Sports Illustrated’Bachelor’ finale recap: Bait and ditch Entertainment Weekly

Not an average reader? Maybe you’ll give me more than 15 seconds then.

Read all: http://time.com/12933/what-you-think-you-know-about-the-web-is-wrong/

Knew The News new site version

During the last months, Knew The News was rebuild to offer improved user experience, better accessibility and easier gameplay.

Check it out on http://www.knewthenews.com/!

Redesign was made to further improve scalabilty also on small devices, and offers a more modern look.

Find the new question creation dialog, restructured, simplified and well designed.

If there is anything about the site what you do not like, please let us know:
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About:Media — Content Economics: News

Felix Salmon, Reuters, February 11, 2014

For centuries, news has been based on a broadcasting paradigm: a small group of journalists creates a product — a self-contained news bundle — which is then consumed by a very large group of viewers or readers or listeners. Various different bundles competed for your attention: you might get your news from the New York Times, or the Economist, or NPR, or the NBC Nightly News, or Newsweek, or any of a thousand other outlets. In any case, the atomic unit of news, from the consumer’s perspective, was the bundle, not the story. Any given individual would get her news from only a handful of outlets in any given week — quite frequently, only one or two.

Now, everybody is a journalist, or at least a contributor to other people’s news feeds. There are still a few individuals whose links matter a lot — Matt Drudge, most obviously, or John Gruber. They have an ability to provide the kind of links that millions of people want to follow. But the traffic they drive is dwarfed by the aggregated power of Facebook, where millions of links, and other snippets of information, are shared every minute.

Read all: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/02/11/content-economics-part-5-news/

About:Media — How Twitter Knows When You’re Depressed

Sam Frizell, Time Magazine, January 27, 2014

With its 230 million regular users, Twitter has become such a broad stream of personal expression that researchers are beginning to use it as a tool to dig into public health problems. Believe it or not, a scientist out there might actually care about the sandwich you ate for lunch—even if most of your followers don’t.

“Our attitude is that Twitter is the largest observational study of human behavior we’ve ever known, and we’re working very hard to take advantage of it,” explains Tyler McCormick of the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences at the University of Washington.

What if, for example, an artificial intelligence model could scan your Twitter feed and tell you if you’re at risk for depression? And what if you could receive notices from third parties, for instance, that warned you that you may want to seek help, just based on an automated scan of your tweets? Eric Horvitz, co-director of Microsoft Research Redmond has helped pioneer research on Twitter and depression. He says that could one day be a possibility.

Read all: http://business.time.com/2014/01/27/how-twitter-knows-when-youre-depressed/

About:Media — The Six Things That Make Stories Go Viral Will Amaze, and Maybe Infuriate, You

Maria Konnikova, The New Yorker, January 21, 2014

In 350 B.C., Aristotle was already wondering what could make content—in his case, a speech—persuasive and memorable, so that its ideas would pass from person to person. The answer, he argued, was three principles: ethos, pathos, and logos. Content should have an ethical appeal, an emotional appeal, or a logical appeal. A rhetorician strong on all three was likely to leave behind a persuaded audience. Replace rhetorician with online content creator, and Aristotle’s insights seem entirely modern. Ethics, emotion, logic—it’s credible and worthy, it appeals to me, it makes sense. If you look at the last few links you shared on your Facebook page or Twitter stream, or the last article you e-mailed or recommended to a friend, chances are good that they’ll fit into those categories.

The irony, of course, is that the more data we mine, and the closer we come to determining a precise calculus of sharing, the less likely it will be for what we know to remain true. If emotion and arousal are key, then, in a social application of the observer effect, we may be changing what will become popular even as we’re studying it. “If everyone is perfectly implementing the best headline to pass on, it’s not as effective any more,” Berger says. “What used to be emotionally arousing simply isn’t any longer.” Those in search of evidence for this should look no further than Viralnova.com, a site that was started just eight months ago and is already the seventh most popular site on the Web, at least as measured by Facebook shares. As I type, the lead story on its front page is “Her Little Boy Has No Idea His Mother Is About To Die. What She’s Doing About That Is Amazing.”

Read all: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/01/the-six-things-that-make-stories-go-viral-will-amaze-and-maybe-infuriate-you.html

About:Media — Our wildest fantasy: if only the French ran America…

The Economist, Jan 18th 2014

THE citizens of the world’s most powerful country have recently been distracted by a piece of meaningless tittle-tattle. The current issue of People magazine has revealed what le tout Washington knew anyway: that Barack Obama has been having an affair with Jennifer Aniston. This intrusion took place despite the president’s creditable attempts at discretion: putting aside the normal trappings of office, he travelled to Ms Aniston’s flat in the evening and left in the morning (after bagels had been brought by the Secret Service) on a scooter, wearing a helmet with the visor down to conceal his face.

While amorous adventures are not a problem in Washington, they should not be flaunted. The publicity surrounding George W. Bush’s divorce from his wife Laura and ostentatious marriage to Beyoncé, a singer, was not just arriviste but also unpopular.

But seriously…

Would America be a better place if its public figures behaved like François Hollande, Ségolène Royal, Valérie Trierweiler, Nicolas Sarkozy, Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand, and if its people took as relaxed a view of sex as the French do?

Probably more talented Americans would go into politics if they did not think they would be roasted alive for normal human frailty. There would be more Jack Kennedys and fewer Mitt Romneys. On the other hand, if France’s politicians were not protected by the law and a quiescent press, perhaps the National Front’s anti-elitist message would not go down so well. The answer, of course, is to follow the example of Britain, whose near-saintly politicians are gracefully monitored by the famously dignified denizens of Fleet Street.

Read all: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21594257-our-wildest-fantasy-if-only-french-ran-america-la-maison-blanche

About:Media — 2014 Oscar Predictions: Who Will and Who Should Be Nominated

By Marlow Stern and Kevin Fallon, The Daily Beast, January 15, 2014

Will Joaquin Phoenix make it? What about the Coen brothers? The Daily Beast’s resident Oscarologists debate who will—and who should—be nominated for the Oscars.

Predicting the Academy Awards nominations can be a fool’s task sometimes. Remember when Ben Affleck wasn’t nominated for directing Argo, a film that went on to win Best Picture? Or when everyone expected Kate Winslet to win Best Actress for Revolutionary Road, but she was nominated for The Reader instead? Or when The Blind Side—seriously—was nominated for Best Picture?

Nonetheless, it was a fantastic year in film, with David O. Russell dressing up all your favorite actors in delightfully garish ‘70s garb in American Hustle, Martin Scorsese getting in touch with his debaucherous wild side at age 71 with The Wolf of Wall Street, Steve McQueen offering up the most haunting film portrait yet of our country’s brutal slave history with 12 Years a Slave, and the likes of Cate Blanchett, Sandra Bullock, and even Oprah Winfrey delivering bonafide Movie Star performances.

Which will contend for Oscars when the nominations are announced Thursday morning at 8:30 a.m. EST? Marlow Stern and Kevin Fallon serve up their best guesses of who will be nominated…and a little bit about who should.

Read all: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/15/2014-oscar-predictions-who-will-and-who-should-be-nominated.html

Prediction Markets — Will the economy crash in march?

By Minda Zetlin, inc.com, Jan 8, 2014

Somewhere between March and June of this year, look for a worldwide economic downturn that will cause huge losses in stock exchanges around the globe. That prediction comes from Gerald Celente, who heads the Trends Research Institute.

For more than 25 years, Celente has been making predictions about everything from the price of gold to the market for organic foods, to geopolitical upheavals. He does it by analyzing current trends and forecasting where they will lead. Sometimes these forecasts are right on the mark, sometimes they’re not, but they’re always interesting and thought-provoking, as much for what they say about our world as it is as they do about the future.

The world economies spiral in spring or early summer.

Don’t blame Celente if he can’t get the timing exactly right, he says. “You don’t know what they’re doing behind the scenes.” The Federal Reserve had been buying some $85 million a month in bonds and mortgage-backed securities to stabilize the U.S. economy since the economic crisis began in 2008, he notes, and now is beginning to taper off those purchases. It’s been holding interest rates at or near zero, he adds, as have other central banks, but that can’t last forever.

Read all: http://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/will-the-economy-crash-in-march.html.

About:Media — Karl Rove’s Fearless Political Predictions for 2014

Knew The News, 3 Years Anniversary

3 Year Anniversary Contest

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