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Recent research suggests that emotions hold the secret to viral web content. Articles, posts, or videos that evoke positive emotions have greater viral potential than something that evokes negative feelings, but both do a better job recruiting clicks than neutral content. The finer details tell a similar story: triggering high-arousal emotions, such as anger or humor, is a surer path to click gold than triggering low-arousal ones, such as contentment or sadness.

positive emotions best negative ones, any emotion bests none at all.

content evoking high-arousal emotions (in this case, awe, anger, and anxiety, emotions that tend to whip us into action) went viral more often than articles evoking a low-arousal emotion (sadness, an emotion that often leaves us subdued).

“If you’re designing a website and not thinking about the user experience on mobile and tablets, you’re going to disappoint a lot of users,” he warns. Designer Tom Muller thinks big brands getting on board will lead to agencies “increasingly using responsive design as a major selling point, persuading clients to future-proof digital marketing communications”. When doing so, Clearleft founder Andy Budd believes we’ll see an end to retrofitting RWD into existing products: “Instead, RWD will be a key element for a company’s mobile strategy, baked in from the start.” Because of this, Budd predicts standalone mobile-optimised sites and native apps will go into decline: “This will reduce the number of mobile apps that are website clones, and force companies to design unique mobile experiences targeted towards specific customers and behaviours.”

During 2012, the average site size crept over a megabyte, which designer/developer Mat Marquis describes as “pretty gross”, but he reckons there’s a trend towards “leaner, faster, more efficient websites” – and hopes it sticks. He adds: “Loosing a gigantic website onto the web isn’t much different from building a site that requires browser ‘X’: it’s putting the onus on users, for our own sakes.”

Designer and writer Stephanie Rieger reckons that although people now know “web design isn’t print,” they’ve “forgotten it’s actually software, and performance is therefore a critical UX factor”.

Twitter is a very different beast than Facebook - one that only 13% of adults report having used at all, compared to an earlier Pew study showing that 67% of Americans who use the internet are Facebook users.

Naturally, for those among us who live and breathe tweets, Twitter seems like a realtime cross-section of everyone's thoughts about, well, everything. But as common sense and the Pew report make clear, Twitter is an imperfect zeitgeist at best.

Unruly Media's research reveals that branded Vines (see Doritos example below) are shared four times as often as branded Internet videos. What's more, Unruly found that five Vines are shared every second on Twitter—so the non-advertising world apparently digs the six-second videos, too.

4 percent of the top 100 shared Vines were made by brands. Comparatively, according to the New York-based firm, only 1 percent of Top 100 viral online videos were the work of brands.

Vines are tweeted more during the weekend than all of the weekdays combined. Also, between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m ET is when Vine activity peaks.

there’s a flaw in the “app for everything” ideology: now every single website these days wants to be an app. This is a bad because… Not everything needs to be an app If every site has an app, app stores will just end up like worse versions of the Internet (poor discovery, gatekeepers, etc.) Apps are high-friction (require more bandwidth, passwords, etc)

Tumblr blogs tend to lack the glossy, professional, high-minded design of other social networking sites, including the behemoth that is Facebook and the SMS-inspired Twitter. If anything, these teenaged Tumblrs harken back to earlier web days where users built their own pages on AngelFire and Geocities, with atrocious backgrounds, upgraded cursors, and dancing GIF images galore. GIFs, in fact, are so hugely popular on Tumblr that the company even began experimenting with GIF-based ads.

According to Pew Internet’s study from earlier this year, 13 percent of Internet users ages 18-29 use Tumblr, while only 5 percent of those 30-49 do, 3 percent of those 50-64

Demographic data from Quantcast further drives home just how youthful a site Tumblr has become. 21 percent of its audience is under 18, 30 percent is 18 to 24, and 22 percent is 25 to 34

According to the ITU's "facts and figures" publication, mobile penetration rates (pdf) are now about equal to the global population - including an 89% penetration rate in "developing countries," which currently have the highest mobile growth rates.

nearly everyone on the planet has a mobile phone - or will have one soon enough.

"mobile broadband" subscriptions have grown from 278 million in 2007 - when the iPhone was first introduced - to 2.1 billion in 2013 - an annual growth rate of 40%. 

75% of ad agency executives say that online video ads are more effective than traditional TV ads, compared with just 17% who say they are less effective.

research estimates that video views among Internet users grew by 23% this year.

research predicts spending on digital video advertisements to grow by more than 40% this year

the brands that win will prioritize engagement over exposure. They will flip the traditional approach of using mass reach to connect with the subset of people who matter on its head. They will super-serve the most important people for their brand first and use the resulting insights and advocacy to then broaden their reach and make the entire media and marketing plan work harder.

This generation has grown up living digital lives. This has fundamentally changed their relationship with media and technology — and with brands. They don’t want to be talked at, but they do want to be invited in to the discussion. They thrive on creation, curation, connection and community. As a result, we call them Gen C. The behaviors of Gen C have less to do with the year they were born and more to do with their attitude and mindset. For example, while 80% of people under 35 are Gen C, only 65% of Gen C is under 35 [1].

Gen C cares more about expressing themselves than any generation before.

a Facebook post receives half of its reach within 30 minutes

Smartphone owners tend to reach for their phones around meal times and 86 percent of mobile internet users report using their device while watching TV

Weekends and weekdays, between 5:00-8:00pm, aren’t necessarily the optimal time to post because of newsfeed competition. During these hours, you’re likely to compete with your fans’ hundreds of friends and the other brands they follow.

Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the world’s phone and Internet traffic. Since at least the early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It doesn’t need permission. That’s its job.

shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans’ private conversations.

Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more.

A popular cartoon making the rounds in Turkey these days shows viewers watching a documentary on penguins on CNN Turk (which is, literally, what the channel broadcast during the uprising). Meanwhile, the other frame shows penguins watching CNN International with live coverage of protests in Istanbul.

When the democratically elected Erdogan slammed social media as “the worst menace to society” last week

the prime minister himself is an avid Twitter user with over 2.8 million followers.

audience for mobile apps has hit 58 million in primetime — 8 p.m.

The IAB estimates that the U.S. mobile ad market brought in $3.4 billion in 2012. The IAB didn't break out revenues for apps vs. the mobile web, but Flurry has estimated that 80% of mobile activity occurs on apps

Kantar Media calculated that TV advertising accounted for $74 billion in ad revenues in 2012. Even if apps generated 100% of mobile ad revenues, the market would still be just 4.5% that of TV.

the role of content strategy is focused on the brand’s relationship with its target audience

with your content. Desktop PCs and laptops are where the internet matured, but nothing in technology stands still – and while platforms such as game consoles and TVs are currently underutilised, this will not be for long. It’s clear that mobile devices will be key in the future, but smartphones and tablets are not yet fully featured computers, and this poses one of the biggest challenges.

when planning you will need to ensure that your content is planned and built so that it renders in the way you intend on different browsers, operating systems, native mobile interfaces, mobile applications, media players and access technologies.

Pela primeira vez, o investimento publicitário em Internet no Brasil ultrapassou o montante destinado a revistas. Assim indicam os dados do Projeto Inter-Meios relativos aos primeiros dois meses do ano. No período em análise, a web recebeu 189,7 milhões de reais (cerca de 72,4 milhões de euros), sem contar com as redes sociais e os motores de busca. Superando, assim, os 188,42 milhões de reais (cerca de 72 milhões de euros) investidos em revistas.

During “primetime,” which for apps also includes those “after-work” hours of around 7 to 10 p.m., app usage among the top 250 iOS and Android applications spikes to a peak of 52 million consumers, the company found.

App usage tends to drop off overnight, and weekends see higher daytime app usage through the day (9-5). During the normal workday, people use apps at least 75 percent as much as on weekends

reaching the key 18 to 49-year-old demographic using traditional media will become increasingly difficult as they turn towards digital media more. Flurry cited a report from Morgan Stanley, which showed that there has been a 50 percent decline in TV audience ratings since 2002

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.

"It's interesting. Do I want everything I read to be broadcasted? To be honest, I'm not sure I always do," Herman says. "Which is why, on Storify at least, I cancel it when it's not something I want to share." Should readers have to be on guard and take that extra step? And what's the upside of frictionless sharing? Why is this good for readers? "I mean, clearly it's more meaningful when someone decides to actively share something," Herman says. "It would be bad if a share from just happening to read something through Open Graph got the same weight as something that you actually shared."

Instead of a willful act of sharing, which says to your Facebook friends, "This matters to me," frictionless sharing is just a broadcast of your Internet habits. There's no benefit for you except as a kind of vain performance, and there's very little benefit to your friends, since the signal-to-noise ratio goes way up.

[Facebook is] doing some tweaking with the algorithm to make it less prominent," Herman says. "I guess they're realizing, you know, maybe these things aren't as engaging as they thought they would be."