Here’s the problem with interactivity: There’s no evidence people actually want it in their stories. No one watches Mad Men or reads Gone Girl yearning for control of the story as it unfolds. Interaction is precisely what most of us don’t want during story time. The more we interact with a story, the more we have to maintain the alertness of the mind operating in the real world. We can’t achieve the dreamy trance that constitutes so much of the joy of story--and the power. And the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Finnegan’s Wake, for all its splendor as a kind of impressionistic word painting, repels readers because of its interactivity. Most critics think that Joyce was trying to get away from what he called “wideawake language” to re-create the chaos of dreaming life. Paradoxically, however, the sheer difficulty of Finnegan’s Wake forces readers to maintain a “wideawake” frame of mind as they attempt to puzzle their way through. They can’t slip into the waking dream of story time.

Story resists reinvention. As the example of Finnegan’s Wake shows, storytelling is not something that can be endlessly rejiggered and reengineered. Story is like a circle. A circle is a circle. The minute you start fussing with the line you create a non-circle. Similarly, story only works inside narrow bounds of possibility. Imagine narrative transportation as this powerful brain capacity that is protected by a lock. The lock can only be opened with a specific combination. For as long as there have been humans, the ways of undoing the lock have been passed down through generations of storytellers. Going back to the earliest forms of oral folktales and moving forward through stage plays, to printed novels, and modern YouTube shorts, the fundamentals of successful storytelling have not changed at all.

When it comes to the fundamentals of story, there is not now--and never will be--anything new under the sun.

Unwelcome news for marketers in France who aim to appeal to people on social networks: A majority of those consumers find such ads unpleasant, useless and poorly targeted.

Sixty-eight percent of web users polled said they found advertising on social sites “intolerable, “ and 59% said it was pointless because it did not reflect their interests or buying habits.

Moreover, ads on these sites seemed to be less effective than most other kinds of online advertising. Only 19% of web users polled by IFOP and Generix said they had ever bought a product or service as a result of seeing an ad on social media, compared to 60% who had made a purchase prompted by an email.

five states that are using WordPress as the front-end for their own state online healthcare exchanges, as well as one state—Illinois—that is using the popular content management system within their own joint Federal-State exchange.

Byers was perhaps spurred on by one of his sources for the piece, Peter Slutsky, director of platform services as Automattic, the commercial venture behind web site hosting service Wordpress.com. Slutsky and Byer's other source, venture capitalist Fred Wilson, advocated the use of Wordpress or some other open source based CMS, like Drupal or Joomla, as they way to go for HealthCare.gov.

Posting pictures to Facebook only works well if the pictures are self-explanatory.

Use digits rather than words. “10 ways to…” works better than “Ten ways to….” This is often a common blogging mistake that can easily be avoided.

Being specific, while also showing that the article will be in depth, is one of the most important things to focus on.

its AdWords product - shown beside searches

"Advertisers have long been able to add informative visual elements to their search ads, with features like Media Ads" - which adds video ads on Google search results page - Product Listing Ads" - which appear in Google's shopping results box - "and Image Extensions", which allows advertisers to put small images alongside "sponsored results", when they buy advertising space over search results.

The thesis of a knowledge-led enlightenment now faces its antithesis, a menacing, secretive techno-centralism, with as yet no synthesis.

This giant revolution in access to knowledge has not dispersed power but rather passed it to new and in many cases sinister oligarchies. In Hannah Arendt's words, these do not appear to be "thinking the unthinkable" but rather just "not thinking".