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Pedro Gonçalves

Waiting For Prometheus | TechCrunch - 0 views

  • What matters is that they are even capable of viewing and collecting our personal, private data in this way. Why is it even possible that Verizon has this level of data to disclose? Why is it even possible that Apple can infer and cache our locations based on metadata? Why is it even possible that our emails can be skimmed for advertising opportunities? If we did not explicitly permit these things, then we have implicitly done so by choosing to go ahead and use the Internet this way either because the pros outweighed the cons. But now the cons are starting to add up.
  • we use the Internet as a sort of phantom extension of our own computers, putting things where they are accessible to us but we are not responsible for them. This was the so-called web 2.0: every personal computer and device, vastly more powerful and connected than ever before, yet acting as a thin client. Clearly, this is where we began to lose touch with reality.
  • How did we decide we were in control of the data we sent Google or Facebook? Why would we submit to such an obvious delusion? Does anyone really believe that these companies have our best interests in mind to any greater a degree than a dairy farmer and his cows? We submitted because they were the only option
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  • And now, after we voluntarily put all our data in someone else’s keeping, alternately trusting and ignoring them when they told us how they can read it but wouldn’t dare, could sell it but don’t need to, might disclose it to the government but only if they have to, we’re finding out they’ve been doing all this and more the whole time. We’ve been pouring our data into the river for years and just pretending there was no one downstream.
  • I believe we are going to decentralize and cellularize once we realize how needlessly dependent on distant and dubiously beneficial third parties.
  • In a way, we want the opposite of Pandora’s box. Something that, once shut, no one can open but us: Pandora’s lockbox.
  • the direction of development in the tech sector really does seem geared towards trivialities.
  • Here, then, is the real question: where is the breakthrough device or software that decouples our data from the oppressive web 2.0 superstructure with no loss to functionality? One might ask: where is the Napster for privacy?
  • The networks that we have come to rely on were once only possible through powerful intermediaries. But what was once symbiotic has become parasitic, and those intermediaries have now outlasted their usefulness and squandered whatever trust they conned out of us when we were given the choice between tainted privilege and safe obsolescence. We did it their way. It’s time to take the highway.
Pedro Gonçalves

How To Maintain Hierarchy Through Content Choreography | Smashing Magazine - 0 views

  • Three specifications that we’ll likely find ourselves using in the future are: “Flexbox4,” “Regions5,” “Grid Layout6.”
  • Magic numbers in CSS are best avoided.
  • We need fewer of these HTML containers and more CSS virtual container classes that we can apply to different elements as needed. In other words, instead of this… <div id="container"> <div>Content here</div> <div>Content here</div> <div>Content here</div> </div> … we need more of this: <div class="container">Content here</div> <div class="container">Content here</div> <div class="container">Content here</div>
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  • In the latter block, each division might have a different class name or perhaps different additional classes applied. This allows for greater flexibility in rearranging them in the layout. In the first block of code, the three content divisions will always reside inside their parent container.
  • With CSS, we have the ability to rearrange blocks inside a container. We don’t have the ability to break content out of one container and move it inside another container. If you want more mixing of blocks, then you’ll need fewer containers.
  • there are currently far more instances of websites that are dropping columns wholesale
  • Every element is its own unique block and serves as its own container. The page’s main heading is its own contained block. All of the meta information is inside another container directly below it. After that, every paragraph, subheading and image is also its own self-contained block of content. The same goes for anything else that might end up in a post, such as a block quote or code block.
  • a challenge to how we think about structuring our HTML, particularly to how we use containers. Elements can’t move from one container to the next. We can fake it with complex CSS, or we can rewrite the HTML with JavaScript; but, ultimately, if we want to intermix elements, we’re best of using fewer HTML containers to create columns. Instead, we should leave more of our content blocks in their own containers and use CSS to create virtual columns in the layout. This solution doesn’t confine our elements to structural containers and instead enables us to more easily rearrange the elements in different layouts.
Pedro Gonçalves

New Defaults In Web Design - How Much Has The Web Really Changed? | Smashing Magazine - 0 views

  • Many mouseover interactions are completely dysfunctional on a touch device
  • Instead of buying a state of the art monitor, buying a cheap monitor and several low-end devices to test your work on might be a better investment.
  • Hiding content and showing it on mouseover was considered to be a decent design pattern
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  • When you hover over a menu item, a submenu appears. But apart from hovering over an item, you can also simply click on it to follow the link. Now, what should happen when you tap on the item with a touch device? Should the submenus appear, or should the link activate? Or both? Or should something else happen? On iOS, something else happens. The first time you tap a link like that, the submenu appears; in other words, the hover event fires. You have to tap a second time to actually follow the link. This is confusing, and not many people will tap a second time. On Android, the submenu appears and the link is followed simultaneously. I don’t have to explain to you that this is confusing.
  • It’s very well possible to think of complex solutions11 whereby you define different interactions for different input devices. But the better solution, I think, is to make sure that the default interaction, the activate event, just works for everybody. If you really need to, you could choose to enhance this default experience for certain users.
  • The same principle that we follow for interactions — whereby we design the activate event first and enhance it later — applies to graphic design. We should start designing the things that we know everyone will see. That’s the content. No matter how big or small a screen is and no matter how minimal the feature set of a browser, it will be able to show letters.
  • rather than pollute the page with all kinds of links to get people out of there, we should really focus on that thing in the middle. Make sure it works. Make sure it looks good. Make sure it’s readable.
  • you start by designing the relationship between the different font sizes.
  • When the typography is done, you would start designing the layout for bigger screens; you can think of this as an enhancement for people with bigger screens. And after that, when the different layouts are done, you could add the paint. And by paint, I mean color, gradients, borders, etc.
  • When I say to start with typography, I don’t mean that you aren’t allowed to think about paint at the same time. Rather, I’m trying to find the things that all of these different devices, with all of their different screen sizes and all of their different features, have in common. It just seems logical to first design this shared core thoroughly. The strange thing is that this core is often overlooked: Web professionals tend to view their own creations with top-of-the-line devices with up-to-date browsers. They see only the enhancements. The shared core with the basic experience is often invisible.
  • All of the things we created first — the navigation, the widgets, the footer — they all helped the visitor to leave the page. But the visitor probably wanted to be there! That was weird.
  • To build a responsive website that works on all kinds of screens, designing for a small screen first is easiest. It forces you to focus on what’s really important: if it doesn’t fit in this small square, it is probably not terribly important. It forces you to think better about hierarchy, about the right order of components on the page.
  • Once you’re done with the content, you can start to ask yourself whether this content needs a header. Or a logo. Or subnavigation. Does it need navigation at all? And does it really need all of those widgets? The answer to that last question is “No.” I’ve never understood what those widgets are for. I have never seen a useful widget. I have never seen a widget that’s better than white space.
  • does the logo really need to be at the top16 of every page? It could very well go in the footer on many websites
  • the option to add extra luggage to a flight booking might be most effective right there in the overview of the flight, instead of in the middle of a list of links somewhere on the left of the page.
  • does the main navigation look more important than the main content? Most of the time it shouldn’t be, and I usually consider the navigation to be footer content.
Pedro Gonçalves

In 2014, The Mobile Web Will Die-And Other Mobile Predictions - ReadWrite - 0 views

  • In 2014, the mobile Web will die. That’s right, that bastardized version of the normal Web will crawl into a shallow grave and leave us all in peace. No more websites crippled with horrible “mobile.yourawfulwebsite.com” URLs. No more reading janky websites that display way too much fine print or omit crucial features when viewed on your smartphone or tablet. 
  • The mobile Web will die because the companies that make the engines it ran upon are killing their mobile browsers and replacing them with fully functional versions that run on any device. In 2014, these browsers will be updated to put the final nail in its coffin. In turn, developers will continue to build websites that can work across any screen size. Responsive design (what we do at ReadWrite to make the site look pretty everywhere) will continue to grow in 2014 as people realize that their old websites are losing them a lot of traffic from mobile devices.
  • Location-based consumer apps didn't let me down; as predicted, they remained stagnant this year. Foursquare and its kindred just are not hot anymore, even if Foursquare did just raise a funding round this week.
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  • HTML5 Takes Over The Mobile Web
  • Combined with CSS and JavaScript, HTML5 is what the Web will be built on in the future. And it will just be the Web, mobile or otherwise.
Pedro Gonçalves

25 years after inventing the web, Tim Berners-Lee invites users to help draft global "b... - 0 views

  • The principles behind Web We Want, which is coordinated by the World Wide Web Foundation, are as follows: Affordable access to a universally available communications platform The protection of personal user information and the right to communicate in private Freedom of expression online and offline Diverse, decentralized and open infrastructure Neutral networks that don’t discriminate against content or users
Pedro Gonçalves

Latency: The New Web Performance Bottleneck - igvita.com - 0 views

  • Upgrading your connection from 1Mbps to 2Mbps halves the PLT, but quickly thereafter we are into diminishing returns. In fact, upgrading from 5Mbps to 10Mbps results in a mere 5% improvement in page loading times!
  • For every 20ms improvement in latency, we have a linear improvement in page loading times.
  • Latency on the other hand affords no such "easy" wins. Yes, the equipment can be improved to shave off a few milliseconds, but if you want significant improvements, then the answer is simple: you need new, shorter cables to reduce the propagation delay.
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  • In 2012, the average worldwide RTT to Google is still ~100ms, and ~50-60ms within the US.
  • Fiber-to-the-home services provided 17 milliseconds (ms) round-trip latency on average, while cable-based
  • That's 17-44ms of latency just to the closest measuring node within your ISP, before your packet hits any internet backbone.
  • depending on your network, quality of signal, and time of day, then just traversing your way to the internet backbone can take anywhere from 50 to 200ms+. From there, add backbone time and multiply by two: we are looking at 100-1000ms RTT range on mobile.
  • the only way to improve the situation is to move the bits closer: place your servers closers to your users, leverage CDN's, reuse connections where possible (TCP slow start), and of course, no bit is faster than no bit - send fewer bits.
  • "High speed" connectivity is not all about bandwidth, unlike what many of our ISPs would like to promote.
Pedro Gonçalves

Hover is dead, long live hover | Feature | .net magazine - 0 views

  • Right now, we're at a turning point. Whatever we do it’ll be wrong, either in the short term or the long term. Looking to the future and not using hover will cause pain to the majority of users today or cause pain to the increasing touchscreen user base. Offering hover interactions to only those using desktop/laptops we could consider to be a progressive enhancement. But what about hybrid devices like the Microsoft Surface that offer both touch and mouse/keyboard? Can we accurately know what input method is being used? Simple media queries are not enough to know what interaction is possible.
  • We want our designs to be device agnostic. If we build a website we want to do the minimum to make sure it works across device. We can tweak designs at different sizes to meet needs but changing an interaction style by device seems like old-fashioned thinking.
Pedro Gonçalves

Will The New York Times Redesign Lead To A New Web Standard? | Co.Design: business + in... - 0 views

  • Couldn’t the NYT just know what I’d want to read and serve that up to me via algorithm? “Hell, yeah!” Adelman responds to that last question. “The fact that we continue to reflect that organization structure is not a statement about how we think things should be consumed. It is a statement about, there are some very natural ways for people to look for things.” Those “natural” ways of looking at things really come down to, again, user expectation. While the redesign does incorporate some algorithmically suggested sections within navigation, Adelman stresses that the NYT simply can’t remove the option to predictably click on particular topics, lest their audience question the publication’s transparency.
  • “There’s an element of trust that’s important in any relationship, whether it’s with the NYT or another publication, or a tool or experience you’re accustomed to,” Adelman says. “You don’t want to feel like things are moving under your feet." They also can’t merely fill the NYT homepage with articles they think someone might like to read, because then they cease to be what they are--the world’s news, presented without assumptions or bias. “I don’t think people want a customized version of the NYT homepage. They might benefit from some amount of material focused on their interests, but people come to the NYT because they want the NYT’s take on things.”
Pedro Gonçalves

Memes With Meaning: Why We Create And Share Cat Videos And Why It Matters To People And... - 0 views

  • We uploaded over half a million variations of Harlem Shake to YouTube in the past few months. Google searches for Cat GIFs hit an all-time high last month.
  • The research showed us that far from distracting us from more serious things, these viral pictures, videos, and memes reconnect us to an essential part of ourselves. And by understanding what’s at the root of our obsession with the visual web, brands can create the kind of content that resonates in today’s culture.
  • It may seem that all we’re doing is just capturing every mundane moment. But look closely. These everyday moments are shot, displayed, and juxtaposed in a way that offers us a new perspective. And then all of a sudden these everyday moments, places, and things look . . . fascinating.
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  • Neuroscientists explain that synapses occur inside the brain when we’ve made a connection between various different things. The more random the components connected, the more synapses occur. Synapses are the basis of creativity. In other words, synapses firing equals creative joy. As kids, that happens all the time because everything is new. Everything is unlike. And we aren’t constrained by the rules about what “goes together.” Why else was putting the Barbie in the toy car wash more fun than putting the car in the car wash? The visual web frees us to return to this childlike state, where we can adventure through a whole array of different, seemingly unrelated images and clips--be they old, new, from a world away or own backyard--sparking our all-important synapses and helping us come up with new combinations and ideas so easily.
  • The only thing better than going on this journey of discovery is sharing it with others. This “gift” of sharing contributes to an energy exchange that amplifies our own pleasure--and is something we’re hardwired to do.
  • start thinking like a creator, less like an advertiser. While posting the glossy photos from the photo shoot or :30 spots online may be part of your approach, it shouldn’t be your entire approach. Think content, not commercials.
  • Help us rediscover the beauty of a forgotten familiar. Find something familiar--in your product, brand, or from people’s lives--and help us see it in a fascinating new light. It could be as simple as taking a kitchen appliance and turning it into a science experiment or reminding people to capture just one second of their daily lives and compile a beautiful montage.
  • Search for your brand online. Chances are your fans are already mixing and mashing your brand with something seemingly unrelated. Build on it, fuel it, steer it, and help us make more with it.
  • Ditch the pitch. Instead, start an energy exchange. Create content that reminds us of our own capacity for excitement, happiness, and vivacity so we want to share in it with others.
Pedro Gonçalves

The Ideal Length for All Online Content - 0 views

  • 100 characters is the engagement sweet spot for a tweet. 
  • a spike in retweets among those in the 71-100 character range—so-called “medium” length tweets. These medium tweets have enough characters for the original poster to say something of value and for the person retweeting to add commentary as well.
  • the ultra-short 40-character posts received 86 percent higher engagement than others.
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  • In the last update, Google changed the layout of posts so that you only see three lines of the original post before you see “Read more” link. In other words, your first sentence has to be a gripping teaser to get people to click “Read More.”
  • The ideal length of a Google+ headline is less than 60 characters To maximize the readability and appearance of your posts on Google+, you may want to keep your text on one line.
  • Many different studies over the years have confirmed that shorter posts are better on Facebook.
  • Writing for KISSmetrics, headline expert Bnonn cites usability research revealing we don’t only scan body copy, we also scan headlines. As such, we tend to absorb only the first three words and the last three words of a headline. If you want to maximize the chance that your entire headline gets read, keep your headline to six words.
  • some of the highest-converting headlines on the web are as long as 30 words. As a rule, if it won’t fit in a tweet it’s too long. But let me suggest that rather than worrying about length you should worry about making every word count. Especially the first and last 3.
  • The ideal length of a blog post is 7 minutes, 1,600 words
  • to ensure maximum comprehension and the appearance of simplicity, the perfect line length ranges between 40 and 55 characters per line, or in other words, a content column that varies between 250-350 pixels wide (it depends on font size and choice).
  • Consider that shorter lines appear as less work for the reader; they make it easier to focus and to jump quickly from one line to the next. Opening paragraphs with larger fonts—and therefore fewer characters per line—are like a a running start to reading a piece of content. This style gets readers  hooked with an easy-to-read opening paragraph, then you can adjust the line width from there.
  • In September 2012, MailChimp published the following headline on its blog: Subject Line Length Means Absolutely Nothing. This was quite the authoritative statement, but MailChimp had the data to back it up.
  • Beyond the perfect length, you can also adhere to best practices. In general, a 50-character maximum is recommended, although MailChimp does point out that there can be exceptions: The general rule of thumb in email marketing is to keep your subject line to 50 characters or less. Our analysis found this to generally be the rule. The exception was for highly targeted audiences, where the reader apparently appreciated the additional information in the subject line.
  • The ideal length of a title tag is 55 characters Title tags are the bits of text that define your page on a search results page. Brick-and-mortar stores have business names; your web page has a title tag. Recent changes to the design of Google’s results pages mean that the maximum length for titles is around 60 characters. If your title exceeds 60 characters, it will get truncated with an ellipse.
  • Finding a hard-and-fast rule for the maximum recommendation of a title tag isn’t as easy as you’d think. Quick typography lesson: Google uses Arial for the titles on its results pages, Arial is a proportionally-spaced font, meaning that different letters take up different width. A lowercase “i” is going to be narrower than a lowercase “w.” Therefore, the actual letters in your title will change the maximum allowable characters that can fit on one line.
Pedro Gonçalves

10 Developer Tips To Build A Responsive Website [Infographic] - ReadWrite - 0 views

  • “We are now looking at how we display and order content differently from screen size to screen size,” said Jeff Moriarty, Boston Globe VP of digital properties in an interview last year. “This ‘responsive content’ concept is emerging and we are starting to see in data that users want different types of content depending on their context and the device they are on. We have to now think about how content performs differently from the biggest screens to the smallest, how that content is organized and even how headlines are written from platform to platform.”
  • The first thing to think of when building a responsive site is simplicity.
  • some website builders may over-design for the desktop, making some websites fun to play with but absolutely impossible to navigate.
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  • focus around content and avoid the pitfalls that certain aspects of websites can create.
Pedro Gonçalves

Behind Pinterest's Crackdown On Paid Pins: Stopping Visual Pollution - ReadWrite - 0 views

  • We don’t allow schemes that buy and sell Pins or pay people per Pin, follow, etc. We know that some popular Pinners have relationships with approved affiliate networks or participate in paid social media campaigns, and that’s still okay, as long as they’re not being compensated for each action on Pinterest. So if you're in a deal to earn $1 every time you pin a corporation's products, you're out of luck. But if you’re a highly influential blogger in a five-figure partnership with a brand, making money is A-OK. Here's more: A business can pay someone to help them put together a board that represents their brand. For example, it’s okay for a guest blogger to curate a board for a local boutique’s profile. We don’t allow that boutique to pay the blogger to Pin products to her own boards. A person can be given commission by an approved affiliate network. For example, it’s okay for a blogger to get paid when someone purchases a product that blogger has Pinned. However, we don’t allow the blogger to be paid just to Pin. In other words, Pinterest isn’t trying to keep brands or bloggers from making money. It just doesn't want anyone paid for filling up its network with garbage images.
  • “[Pinterest] will be a tremendous type of ad unit—truly based on your interests as a person,” Gupta said. “In a traditional demographic based ad, I might give you an ad for camping equipment because you’re 25 to 35 and male. But on Pinterest, I’d advertise it because you’re pinning a lot of camping equipment. I don’t care that you’re actually 55. I know you’ll be a buyer.”
  • It’s clear that Pinterest is simply trying to keep its content authentic, not transactional. But when you’re weighing that against a billion dollar valuation, the company has to move carefully.
Pedro Gonçalves

Microsoft Premieres TV-Quality 'Halo' Series on YouTube - 0 views

  • “You talk about low barriers to entry and reaching potential sci-fi and game consumers, and its hard to look much further than the numbers on Machinima’s YouTube channel,” McCloskey says. “It’s a fantastic vehicle to accomplish what we want to accomplish. We wouldn’t have reached as many people or gotten them excited about the game if we had put up a bunch of barriers to entry, like making them pay, going to a theater, stuff like that.”
  • Scripted web shows are taking off online, but many of the popular ones focused on gamers. Felicia Day‘s web series The Guild receives millions of views on YouTube, and is on its sixth season of production. Machinima also runs other popular shows, like Mortal Combat: Legacy.
Pedro Gonçalves

A scientific guide to posting tweets, Facebook posts, emails and blog posts at the best... - 0 views

  • In terms of specific days and times to post on Facebook, here are some of the stats I found: Engagement rates are 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays. I love the way this was explained in Buddy Media’s study: as they put it, “the less people want to be at work, the more they are on Facebook!”
  • Another study found that engagement was 32% higher on weekends, so the end of the week is definitely a good rough guide to start experimenting with.
  • The best time of day to post on Facebook is debatable, with stats ranging from 1pm to get the most shares, to 3pm to get more clicks, to the broader suggestion of anytime between 9am and 7pm. It seems that this generally points to early afternoon being a solid time to post, and anytime after dinner and before work being a long shot.
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  • Twitter engagement for brands is 17% higher on weekends.
  • weekdays provide 14% more engagement than weekends, so this is definitely one you’ll want to test on your audience.
  • retweets have been shown to be highest around 5pm.
  • For click-throughs, the best times seem to be around noon and 6pm.
  • Twitter did an interesting study of these users and found that they are 181% more likely to be on Twitter during their commute.
  • They’re also 119% more likely to use Twitter during school or work hours.
  • 10pm–6am: This is the dead zone, when hardly any emails get opened. 6am–10am: Consumer-based marketing emails are best sent early in the morning. 10am-noon: Most people are working, and probably won’t open your email. Noon–2pm: News and magazine updates are popular during lunch breaks. 2–3pm: After lunch lots of people buckle down and ignore their inbox. 3–5pm: Property and financial-related offers are best sent in the early afternoon. 5–7pm: Holiday promotions & B2B promotions get opened mostly in the early evening. 7–10pm: Consumer promotions are popular again after dinner.
  •  23.63% of emails are opened within an hour of being received, this is something we definitely want to get right.
  • For more general emails, open rates, click-through rates and abuse reports were all found to be highest during early mornings and on weekends.
  • In a different study by MailChimp open rates were shown to be noticeably lower on weekends.
  • open rates increased after 12pm, and were highest between 2pm and 5pm.
  • A GetResponse study backed this up by showing that open rates drop off slightly, and click-through rates drop significantly on weekends. GetResponse found that Thursday is the best day for both open rates and click-throughs.
  • 70% of users say they read blogs in the morning More men read blogs at night than women Mondays are the highest traffic days for an average blog 11am is usually the highest traffic hour for an average blog Comments are usually highest on Saturdays and around 9am on most days Blogs that post more than once per day have a higher chance of inbound links and more unique views
Pedro Gonçalves

Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices | Smashing Magazine - 0 views

  • Only 34% of websites use a serif typeface for body copy.
  • Two thirds of the websites we surveyed used sans-serif fonts for body copy.
  • the most popular font sizes ranged from 18 to 29 pixels, with 18 to 20 pixels and 24 to 26 pixels being the most popular choices.
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  • From our sample size, we saw a clear tendency towards sizes between 12 and 14 pixels. The most popular font size (38%) is 13 pixels, with 14 pixels slightly more popular than 12 pixels. Overall, the average font size for body copy is 13 pixels.
  • Heading font size ÷ Body copy font size = 1.96
  • The overall value, then, is 1.96. This means that when you have chosen a font size for your body copy, you may want to multiply it by 2 to get your heading font size.
  • line height (pixels) ÷ body copy font size (pixels) = 1.48Note that 1.5 is a value that is commonly recommended in classic typographic books, so our study backs up this rule of thumb. Very few websites use anything less than that. The number of websites that go above 1.48 decreases as you get further from this value.
  • line length (pixels) ÷ line height (pixels) = 27.8The average line length is 538.64 pixels (excluding margins and paddings)
  • space between paragraphs (pixels) ÷ line height (pixels) = 0.754
  • According to a classic rule of Web typography, 55 to 75 is an optimal number of characters per line.
Pedro Gonçalves

How The Internet Will Tell You What To Eat, Where To Go, And Even Who To Date - ReadWrite - 0 views

  • anticipatory systems. 
  • Increasingly, rather than waiting for us to tell them what we want, in the form of a search query or command, they'll prompt us with suggestions.
  • Here's a simple definition of anticipatory systems. Think of them as artificially intelligent services that are aware of external context — including ambient inputs like time of day, social connections, upcoming meetings, local weather, traffic and more.
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  • all of the trends we're kind of bored with now — social, local, mobile, big data — have laid the groundwork for the realization of anticipatory systems' promise.
  • Foursquare, for example, has been collecting years of data about where people are and what places they're interested in — not just their explicit check-ins, but their local searches, tips and likes. So far, that's allowed Foursquare to offer personalized recommendations. But now the company is taking the next step into anticipating users' needs, Foursquare's head of search, Andrew Hogue, told Fast Company. Hogue gave the example of giving users recommendations for lunch spots at 11 a.m., rather than requiring users to type "lunch" into a search.
  • calendars are a perpetual act of optimism, subject to real-time revision by factors we can manage — like self-discipline — and factors we can't, like traffic and transit delays.
Pedro Gonçalves

Where Did All The Search Traffic Go - 0 views

  • Search traffic to publishers has taken a dive in the last eight months, with traffic from Google dropping more than 30% from August 2012 through March 2013, according to research done by BuzzFeed. While Google makes up the bulk of search traffic to publishers, traffic from all search engines has dropped by 20% in the same period.
  • Of the three major search engines — Google, Yahoo and Bing — only Yahoo saw growth in this period. While Yahoo grew search traffic in this period, it sent 21M referrals to publishers in March, less than half of the 48M referrals sent by Google. Traffic from Bing dropped 12%.
  • In the past, we've reported how referrals from social platforms like Facebook to the BuzzFeed Network were growing, and at times sending more traffic than search. While that difference was at times marginal — 5 to 10M referrals — its now sustained and significant. In March, Facebook sent 1.5x more traffic than Google, the greatest difference we've ever measured between the platforms. At the same time, we've watched traffic from other social platforms — Twitter and Pinterest -—continue to grow an audience and drive traffic traffic to publishers. "Dark social," that netherland of direct traffic, is also accelerating on the network, growing referral traffic to publishers by 52% over the past twelve months. By comparison, referrals from social platforms, i.e. the Facebooks, Twitters, Pinterests and Reddits of the world, grew by 25%. It begs the question, could direct traffic be taking the place of search?
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  • user behavior is changing, and we are seeing a shift in the way readers discover their content.
  • We know that most of direct/dark social traffic is from mobile and apps. Could it be that social apps that aggregate content like Pulse or Flipboard are growing in importance?
  • When SEO was king, publishers sought to program their content to be discovered by Google. Now that content requires human muscle to be shared on social platforms, publishers need to expend a different kind of energy focused on creating content that's emotional, funny and discoverable — i.e. the stuff you might want to share. And this may be what's killing search traffic too.
Pedro Gonçalves

Content Marketing: Start With Your Story - 0 views

  • Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and one of the first evangelists for content marketing, describes content marketing as: //Zone: 300x250 googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1336852434508-3'); … a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
  • In the past, editors and reporters held companies captive, and we vied for their attention to cover our products, services or insights on trends. But no longer.Today, communities and influencers have overtaken the importance of media outlets, and the responsibility of reporting has shifted to the marketing department. In fact, many organizations now consider themselves publishers rather than marketers. And that’s smart
  • A good story entices someone to want to know more, and they transition to the next step: engagement.
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