Study Shows the Best Times of Day to Post to Social Media Dragons

Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum: 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around me I see something very different, let us say — a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale.

— William Carlos Williams, born  in 1883

The future is still so much bigger than the past.

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If you want to see bloggers and writers' desks, The Guardian has you covered; if you want still more, see Blog Lily's post; if you want mine, see here. 

People want to have a web they can trust. People want apps that help them do what they want and need to do — without spying on them. Apps that don’t have an ulterior motive of distracting them with propositions to buy this or that. People will pay for this kind of quality and assurance. For example, today people pay for storage in places like Dropbox. There is a need for Solid, and the different, beneficial approach it will provide. One Small Step for the Web… Tim Berners-Lee, Medium.“Solid POD

Study: people tend to cluster into four distinct personality “types” ars technica. No neurotic introverts? What are they thinking?

So-called “Instagram museums” claim to reinvent art. But visiting them feels like a masochistic march through an existential void  

Like Uber, but for politics

*MEdia Dragon, Dominic Kelly, investigates the false promise of digital democracy 

A review of Britain’s railways will not consider nationalisation The Economist

Privatization, the EU and a Bridge Consortium News

Harvard Business Review: “U.S. companies are expected to spend more than $37 billion dollars on social media promotion annually each year by 2020, representing 24% of the economy’s total digital advertising spend. It’s an astounding number, given that the vast majority of social media managers charged with getting customers to click on posts and through to their websites operate with little strategy beyond what we call “spray and pray,” an approach that litters social media with firm generated content in the hopes that one or more of those posts draw in customers. There is a better way. Our research on circadian rhythms suggests that content platforms like CNN, ESPN, National Geographic, and others can enhance their profit payoffs by at least 8% simply by posting content following the biological responses of their audience’s sleep-wake cycles and targeting content types to when the audience is most naturally receptive to it. On the surface such an approach doesn’t sound difficult. But social media managers face innumerable possibilities for posting content. For example, a social media manager tasked with posting 10 stories in a day and with a budget to promote four of those stories can schedule the sequence of social media posts in over 7 trillion ways. By replacing rules-of-thumb and gut feeling with precise science rooted in biology, we believe social media scheduling can not only be more cost-efficient, but also be a strong part of content platforms’ profitability…” [Its all about being an earlier rise!]

Selena Scola worked as a public content contractor, or content moderator, for Facebook in its Silicon Valley offices. She left the company in March after less than a year.  In documents filed last week in California, Scola alleges unsafe work practices led her to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from witnessing “thousands of acts of extreme and graphic violence”.

Via Deepest Blogger Marginal Velvet Revolution Here is a new Lancet paper by Stephen S. Lim, et.al., via the excellent Charles Klingman.  Finland is first, the United States is #27, and China and Russia are #44 and #49 respectively.  There is plenty of “rigor” in the paper, but I say this is a good example of what is wrong with the social sciences and more specifically the publication process.  The correct answer is a weighted average of the median, the average, the high peaks, and a country’s ability to innovate, part of which depends upon the market size a person has in his or her sights.  So in reality the United States is number one, and China and Russia should both rank much higher (Cuba and Brunei beat them out, for instance, Cuba at #41, Brunei at #29).  And does it really make sense to put North Korea (#113) between Ecuador and Egypt?  I’m fine with Finland being in the top fifteen, but I am not even sure it beats Sweden.  Overall the paper would do better by simply measuring non-natural resource-based per capita gdp, though of course that could be improved upon too.

Now, I did zero work on that one, and came up with a better result than the authors.  What does that tell you?

Addendum: You will note the first sentence of the paper’s background claims: human capital refers to “the level of education and health in a population”.  The first two sentences of the actual paper immediately contradict this: “Human capital refers to the attributes of a population that, along with physical capital such as buildings, equip ment, and other tangible assets, contribute to economic productivity. Human capital is characterised as the aggregate levels of education, training, skills, and health in a population, affecting the rate at which technologies can be developed, adopted, and employed to increase productivity.”  The paper does an OK job of measuring the former, but absolutely fails on the latter.


Internet, social media use and device ownership in U.S. have plateaued after years of growth “The use of digital technology has had a long stretch of rapid growth in the United States, but the share of Americans who go online, use social media or own key devices has remained stable the past two years, according to a new analysis of Pew Research Center data


Even former PM is slowing down: Malcolm Turnbull takes the axe to Twitter

Malcolm Turnbull (@TurnbullMalcolm) | Twitter

Die neuesten Tweets von Malcolm Turnbull (@TurnbullMalcolm). 29th Prime Minister of Australia - 2015 -2018. https://t.co/8b99pSaleZ. Sydney, NSW, Australia.

Uninformed Consent Harvard Business Review

Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access to Your Shadow Contact Information Gizmodo

Google’s privacy chief confirms existence of ‘censored Chinese search engine’ Project Dragonfly SCMP

Former Google Scientist Tells Senate to Act Over Company’s “Unethical and Unaccountable” China Censorship Plan The Intercept

Big Tech Is Fighting to Change Washington’s Pioneering Rules on Election Ad Transparency The Stranger (CL). For “change”, read “gut.”

“The use of digital technology has had a long stretch of rapid growth in the United States, but the share of Americans who go online, use social media or own key devices has remained stable the past two years, according to a new analysis of Pew Research Center data. The shares of U.S. adults who say they use the internet, use social media, own a smartphone or own a tablet computer are all nearly identical to the shares who said so in 2016. The share who say they have broadband internet service at home currently stands at 65% – nearly identical to the 67% who said this in a survey conducted in summer 2015. And when it comes to desktop or laptop ownership, there has actually been a small dip in the overall numbers over the last two years – from 78% in 2016 to 73% today. A contributing factor behind this slowing growth is that parts of the population have reached near-saturation levels of adoption of some technologies. Put simply, in some instances there just aren’t many non-users left. For example, nine-in-ten or more adults younger than 50 say they go online or own a smartphone. And a similar share of those in higher-income households have laptops or desktops. Still, there are noteworthy numbers of non-users of various technologies. Surveys conducted by the Center over the years highlight how these non-adopters of various technologies often face substantial and multifaceted barriers…”

Mining passion; Jemele Hill's return; journalism gets results with Kavanaugh; when directors do podcasts

Love animals? Love discovery? Love video? Ben Lerer's Group Nine is selling passion and expertise with The Dodo, NowThis, Thrillist and Seeker, but it's still not big enough.

Lerer sat on stage, complimenting BuzzFeed and Vice, two other digital-only pioneers that have hit speed bumps and have been friendly with platforms. Yet Lerer acknowledged that those two digital-only pioneers and even his own company must keep growing in a new media environment.

In the middle of a talk before Hollywood and digital insiders on Monday, Lerer spoke about the ways his company figures out how a story can provide revenue on Facebook, YouTube and its own sites. He suggested his company's skill with younger video-oriented audiences or passionate groups like animal lovers can translate to consulting fees and sponsored, ads or a way to monetize a library of content. He said that his company can produce big Facebook Watch successes such as “Odd Couples,” about cross-species animal friendships, glueing viewers to their screens for 3- and 4-minute segments.

Every episode of "Odd Couples" has tens of millions of views, he said. In the world of Facebook, where people may spend two hours a day grazing, three minutes of "Odd Couples" may not seem like much, but Lerer said it's time "that they're not consuming other brands." 

Succeeding in this realm is hard, and the media world is still awaiting the digital-only product that gets big enough and sustains it. 

“You need to be good at a lot of things, and it’s so hard to be good at one thing,” Lerer told The Grill, an annual conference from the business-of-Hollywood publication The Wrap. Lerer said he hopes to weather uncertainty over distribution and creation — “You don’t know who’s a buyer or a seller, including at the top of the food chain.”

With his verticals and their passionate audiences, platforms have been coming to him, attracted to learning how to succeed in three different forms of video production, with a specific age group or niche.

"We are playing a long game," he said.

Quick hits 

WHAT JOURNALISM CAN DO: We never would have had the Christine Blasey Ford hearing or an FBI investigation, however limited, without a free press, Margaret Sullivan writes. Journalists are under fire in the Kavanaugh confirmation, and Sullivan acknowledes they have faults. "They’re highly distractible. They’re guilty of tunnel vision, arrogance and groupthink," she writes. "Even so, they might be American democracy’s best hope at the moment."

JEMELE HILL IS BACK: The NABJ's journalist of the year, who departed ESPN after 12 years, has landed at The Atlantic as a staff writer. “You can’t talk about sports without talking about race, class, gender and politics," Hill said. "I want to explore the complications and discomforts with a publication that has a long history of supporting this kind of work.”

IN OTHER NEWS: The Atlantic announced a new crossword puzzle, a space The New Yorker has jumped into after subscription and impressive digital time numbers from The New York Times. We're "creating a cozy and reliable space" for the puzzle, writes Atlantic.com editor Adrienne LaFrance.

WHEN DIRECTORS DO PODCASTS: What happens when you take five hot directors, the BBC World Service and Sundance? A very interesting five-episode podcast called Neighbourhood, narrated by Robert Redford, that launches today. We'll have more later on Neighbourhood, but episodes look at everything from a community garden in a diverse Massachusetts neighborhood to a land claim by Shinnecock Native Americans in an upscale Long Island enclave to Finland’s unique, self-deprecating national identity. Its first episode: Fake marriages for real estate. We'll have more on this in coming days. 

THE MEMORY HOUSE: How do you spur memories from people suffering from dementia? Studies from Ohio to the Netherlands have sought to recreate familiar places, sounds, even people. But this is a controversial practice. How much does it help? asks The New Yorker's Larissa MacFarquhar. 

BULKING UP: The Los Angeles Times is creating a Singapore bureau and reopening its Seoul bureau, part of a new investment in the paper by billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. Shashank Bengali and David Pierson will open the Singapore office; Victoria Kim, who spent her childhood on the Korean Peninsula (and referred to that past in this moving story), will shift from covering L.A.'s Koreatown to Seoul. Alice Su will join the Beijing bureau and Rebecca Bryant will become an assistant foreign/national editor, announced Mitchell Landsberg, the paper's veteran national/foreign editor.  We'll have more from the paper's new owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, later in the week.

MORE JOBS: PBS NewsHour is adding more positions to its 15-member digital staff. Apply here. Jobs include senior director of digital strategy, digital senior video editor, podcast producer, digital video producer, digital associate producer (general assignment), digital associate producer (politics), interactive designer, junior developer, social media editor/producer.

WHY HE QUIT: At first, Daniel Sieberg, co-founder and eco-system growth lead at Civil, said he quit the cryptocurrency/blockchain journalism venture for his family. Then he issued an extraordinary "correction." 

MOVES: Longtime Facebook vet Adam Mosseri will take over Instagram following the departure of Instagram's co-founders from the social network. "Humbled and excited by the new role," Mosseri tweeted.

APOLOGY AND RETRACTION: That's what The Washington Times issued for an op-ed peddling a branch of a conspiracy theory involving slain DNC staffer Seth Rich. The retraction, which said the newspaper published statements it now knows to be false, came as part of a settlement with Aaron Rich, CNN's Oliver Darcy reported.

THE LAST WORD: Owned by the world's richest person, embarrassed by its union, The Washington Post has effectively tripled what the Washingtonian magazine called the paper's crummy 1 percent 401K match.