A researcher who specializes in analysing the way that information flows through Wikipedia during a breaking news event compared the way seven mass shootings — including the recent incident at an elementary school in Connecticut — were reported on the crowdsourced encyclopedia and found some interesting … Read More »
Bio:Mathew is a senior writer with GigaOM, where he covers media in all its forms — social and otherwise — as well as web culture and related issues. He is an award-winning journalist who has spent the past 15 years writing about business, technology and new media as a reporter, columnist and blogger. Prior to joining GigaOM, he was a blogger and technology writer for the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto, and was also the paper’s first online Communities Editor. Mathew is also one of the founders of mesh, Canada’s leading web conference. You can find more about him here.
My Focus
Social media
Privacy
Recent Posts
Instagram has come under fire — as other services based on user-generated content have — for changing its terms of service in a way that suggests it might experiment with advertising. But should that really be a surprise? What else should we expect from a free … Read More »
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Critics of the kind of real-time verification that National Public Radio editor Andy Carvin practices on Twitter during events like the Sandy Hook shootings say the process introduces too many errors and sows confusion — but the benefits of this approach arguably outweigh the disadvantages. Read More »
According to one report, Apple is considering a partnership with Foursquare that would involve using the location-based service’s data inside Apple’s maps. That would be a smart move for Apple at a time when its maps have come under heavy fire for a lack of features. Read More »
In an attempt to help get around what they call a financial blockade of WikiLeaks and to help fund-raise for other public-interest groups, some high-profile journalists and freedom-of-information activists have set up the Freedom of the Press Foundation, an umbrella group that launched on Monday. Read More »
The way that inaccurate news reports about a mass shooting in Connecticut filtered out through social media has brought up many of the same criticisms as Hurricane Sandy — that social media isn’t an appropriate forum for journalism. But this is simply the way news works … Read More »
Closed and proprietary networks and platforms like Facebook and Apple and Amazon are appealing in many ways because they are so easy to use, but in depending on them for so much of our online lives, we give up many of the benefits of the open … Read More »
More Must Reads
After a year-long experiment that saw its Facebook “social reading” app gain more than six million monthly users — and then lose more than half of those after the network changed the way those apps work — the Guardian has decided to take back control of … Read More »
Everyone seems determined to copy Instagram’s filters as a way of trying to co-opt their success at photo-sharing, but few — with the exception of Flickr — are seeing the real value of Instagram’s service, which is the ability to share photos with friends on multiple … Read More »
Facebook has come under fire for removing the right of users to vote on significant changes to the way the site handles privacy and other matters. But the reality is that users never had much say over what the social network did in the first place. Read More »
Printed newspapers may be fading as a business because of the shift to digital media, but two incidents this week show that they still have power because of the shared experience they involve. What happens when that is replaced by thousands of online sources? Read More »
In a recent “Ask Me Anything” interview with Reddit users, the Washington bureau chief for the New York Times had some refreshingly reasonable things to say about how the web has helped improve journalism, and how the practice of journalism will survive even if newspapers don’t. Read More »
Instead of filing traditional news reports about Syria to traditional outlets like ABC News and Bloomberg, foreign correspondent Lara Setrakian decided to start her own dedicated news site about the conflict in the war-torn country — part of an ongoing trend towards the unbundling of the … Read More »
Instagram says it is removing the ability for Twitter to embed photos because it wants users to go to its own website instead of Twitter’s to see that content. Other media companies should probably also be asking themselves similar questions about their relationship with Twitter. Read More »
Prismatic, a San Francisco-based startup that uses machine-learning algorithms to recommend news and other content to users based on their social activity, has raised a $15-million Series A round from a star-studded group of investors including Accel Partners and Russian investor Yuri Milner. Read More »
It seems that no discussion of the merits or weaknesses of newspaper paywalls is complete unless one side accuses the other of having virtually nothing intelligent to say on the topic. Is there no common ground at all between paywall advocates and paywall skeptics? Read More »
News Corp. has said it is finally shutting down The Daily, the iPad-only newspaper it launched in 2011. Although the media giant should be given some credit for experimenting with a new medium, there were obvious signs that The Daily was doomed from the start. Read More »
The United Nations may not be trying to take over the internet, but its telecom arm is discussing proposals that could seriously threaten the openness of the network, according to people like Vint Cerf — and could also change the way we pay for it. Read More »
Many publishers seem to assume that the best way to publish their content online is to try and recreate the look and feel of the printed product they are trying to replace, but a better approach is to strip away everything that isn’t absolutely necessary. Read More »
After critics accused its new Jerusalem bureau chief of making inappropriate comments about the Middle East on Twitter and Facebook, the New York Times has appointed a senior editor review her posts — but this robs social media of the power it has when used for … Read More »
A manifesto on the future of news published by Columbia University’s center for digital journalism argues that the news industry as we know it no longer exists, and existing players need to figure out how to adapt to the new realities of news, and quickly. Read More »
New forms of media are often disruptive to existing forms, but Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says that his network is complementary to traditional forms like television, because it adds the kind of real-time discussion we associate with the town square or the “pulse of the planet.” Read More »
Critics of the Washington Post say that the only approach that will solve the newspaper’s financial problems is to put up a paywall around their content like everyone else — but while that might buy time, it’s not a long-term strategy for new-media success. Read More »
Included in the changes that Facebook recently announced to its privacy and governance policies was an admission that it aggregates and shares data on user activity with advertisers — and Facebook says it plans do so not just inside the network but on external websites as … Read More »
Critics of Apple’s social features have argued that it should buy Twitter, but former Apple engineer Patrick Gibson says the real value in such a deal would be that Twitter might be able to help Apple build web services that actually work. Read More »
Twitter has been restricting the ways in which external services can use its API, and has also said that it plans to launch curation tools for journalists — both of which could potentially affect Storify’s future. But co-founder Burt Herman says the company isn’t afraid. Read More »
In the past, information flow during a military campaign was mostly controlled by the armies involved, but now that everyone has the ability to publish and distribute data including photos and videos, it changes the nature of attacks like the latest Israeli campaign against Hamas. Read More »
The Washington Post’s new editor, former Boston Globe editor Marty Baron, faces a mountain of problems at the newspaper, which has seen circulation and revenues fall dramatically. Here are some areas he needs to focus on in order to turn the sinking ship around. Read More »
Israel is waging war on Hamas, but it is also waging an information war using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other tools. How firmly do these networks support the principle of free speech, and how do they decide what content to permit and what to remove? Read More »
How does it change the way we perceive a war when the armies involved become media entities — publishing their own live news reports, uploading photos and videos and even live-tweeting their attacks as they happen? The Israeli army has started doing just that. Read More »
Some prominent users of Facebook such as billionaire sports-team owner Mark Cuban are complaining that the social network wants to charge them to reach their users with marketing messages — but shouldn’t it be fairly obvious that this was part of Facebook’s plan all along? Read More »
When a friend or loved one dies, their online identity often continues for some time after their death, thanks to Facebook and Twitter and other networks. Is being reminded of them every time we sign into those services a good thing or a bad thing? Read More »
The news industry is being disrupted by the democratization of information distribution, since anyone can now become a publisher — including original sources of content who once were forced to use newspapers. But media economist Robert Picard wonders whether journalists are prepared for the value-added future. Read More »
There have been calls for a restructuring of the British public broadcaster in the wake of scandals involving sexual-abuse charges against prominent British citizens. But does the BBC just need to be shaken up, or does its entire mandate for public journalism need to be reviewed? Read More »
An article at Jezebel identifies high-school students who posted racist tweets in the wake of the election, raising a number of questions about what we consider to be an appropriate response to that kind of behavior, and when the cure is worse than the disease. Read More »
As costs continue to rise along with pageviews, Reddit is looking to its community of users for help by promoting a membership model called Reddit Gold — an approach that other media entities might want to consider instead of just putting up a paywall. Read More »
Many startups like Tumblr and Airbnb have become successful because they focused on filling a need that their founders had, and then turned that into a business, and there are a number of important lessons in that kind of approach for traditional media companies. Read More »
Any web service that is growing as quickly as Tumblr is should be of interest to Facebook — but especially one that focuses on creating and sharing viral social content, and one that is appealing to growing numbers of young users. Read More »
Sound is one of the main ways we interact with our surroundings and so SoundCloud wants to find as many different ways as possible to incorporate it into how we interact with the internet too, co-founder Alex Ljung told attendees at RoadMap on Monday. Read More »
Mobile technology and social networks aren’t just disruptive to existing industries like communications and media, they are also helping the change the way that students learn and how education is delivered both in North America and around the world. And the disruption is just beginning. Read More »
A Twitter user named @ComfortablySmug has been held up as a villain for posting fake news reports to Twitter, and his identity has been forcibly revealed by BuzzFeed — but is that, and all that it implies, an appropriate punishment for his alleged crimes? Read More »
Critics of social media like to focus on how much fake news gets circulated during events like Hurricane Sandy, but Twitter and other services are also quick to correct those kinds of reports, and have become part of an expanding ecosystem of real-time news. Read More »
Tthe New York Times and the Wall Street Journal lowered their paywalls in advance of the arrival of Hurricane Sandy, and a discussion about their motivation for doing so highlights the tension between the newspaper as a vehicle for public information and as a commercial entity. Read More »
Journalists like Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward have questioned whether social media or the web have anything to contribute to journalism, but the case of Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong shows alternative sources like blogs and Twitter can play a powerful role in breaking news. Read More »
Just as Tumblr seems to be trying to imitate a mainstream media entity by hiring bloggers to cover political conventions, traditional media outlets are trying to become more Tumblr-like by adopting animated GIFs and other tools as a way of making their content more viral. Read More »
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