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Upon reading the title of this post I suspect your reaction is, "Really? I didn't even know it was a news organization." And that reaction is precisely why many people look with disbelief at the extraordinary estimates of Facebook's value. Facebook is not some plaything. It is a fully fledged news organization on a scale we have never seen.
News organizations do two major things, commercially speaking: they use news to grab attention and then sell that attention to advertisers.
In the old chain of news production, a piece of timely information was researched by journalists, sifted through by publishers, and disseminated. It was a reporting of the facts rather than an expression of opinion.
As traditional news organizations faced the maelstrom of the digital revolution, many noticed that it was not just the stuff that editors had deemed socially important that was drawing in readers. Tailored, specialized news — the style and sport sections — that appeal to specific demographics pulled attention and therefore advertiser interest. Some hypothesized that tailored content could go further. Local newspapers, for example, could provide hyper-local content of interest to neighborhoods, like newsletters but with ads.
Facebook is what became of the "hyper-local" notion. It just turned out that it wasn't a geographic neighborhood but a socially connected one. Facebook provided a platform whereby individuals became reporters, editors, and publishers.
In this regard, Facebook is delivering on the first task of the news organization. Some Facebook friends might express opinions, but more often they are reporting facts. What is more, because these facts are reported to social connections, they are actually accurate. Nothing binds one to the truth more than the accountability of an ongoing personal relationship. Do you ever hear it exclaimed, "I heard on Facebook that your train broke down and that turned out to be an exaggeration"?
Rumours began last summer that Google was gearing up to take on Facebook with a big social product codenamed “Google Me”. While no such fully formed product has emerged since, we’ve heard word today that it’s scheduled to launch at this year’s I/O developers’ conference on 10 and 11 May.
While Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested in September last year that a ‘social layer’ was coming to all the company’s products, it’s yet to materialise.
That said, many of its products have had social features added in recent months. Place reviews in Google Maps, personalised news, increasingly social search results and experiments with Foursquare-like features are just some of the examples of late. Throw in the acquisition of socially focused apps developer Slide back in August 2010, and it’s clear that the company is planning a more social future.
So, could the service launch at I/O? For the past two years, Google has made big product launches at the conference. Two years ago saw Wave make its debut and last year, Google TV was unveiled. That said, Wave has since been effectively mothballed, while Google TV is yet to make a real mark. If “Google Me” does show its face this May (not necessarily under that specific name), the company will surely be hoping for ‘third time lucky’.
We’ve contacted Google for comment.
YouTube expects to have its biggest hiring year in 2011, with plans to grow its staff by 30%.
The Google-owned video site has dozens of open positions in all areas — although an especially high number in advertising sales and customer support — and all around the world. A great number of the positions are based in YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, California, just outside San Francisco.
The company currently has about 650 employees. A 30% increase would mean YouTube could hire close to 200 more staffers this year.
“[B]ecause we believe that technology and platforms like YouTube are giving rise to the most diverse set of faces and voices ever seen or heard in human history, us YouTubers really enjoy and feel proud to work here,” YouTube wrote on its blog Thursday.
The company has continued to grow and make acquisitions. Just this week, it was reported that YouTube bought web video production company Next New Networks.
Thursday, the Washington Post launched @innovations, a Tumblr blog meant to showcase the news organization’s digital features and discuss the changing media landscape.
The blog acknowledges the new ways readers are engaging with Washington Post content (and all news for that matter). “We don’t want to just tell you what we think. We want to be transparent as we explore and experiment,” writes Social Media and Engagement Editor Amanda Zamora in the blog’s inaugural post.
In addition to giving web producers another avenue to connect with online readers, @innovations will explain washingtonpost.com‘s digital projects.
For example, a post today walked through the creation of the site’s Mideast turmoil map from conception to execution. This behind-the-scenes look gives readers a stronger connection with the content.
However, the most striking aspect of @innovations is its design. Though it is indeed hosted on Tumblr, you wouldn’t know it. It’s fully integrated into washingtonpost.com, retaining the site’s masthead, navigation bar and banner ad.
Curating content for your network is one great way to provide useful information. Everyone is super busy and it’s nice to have someone else read through all the news and find the really important stuff. For that very reason, content curation is pretty valuable, but can also take a bit of time to do properly. Here’s the method that I use every day which makes it easy to curate great content.
Content aggregation has been around as long as the Internet. Then it was the likes of AOL and Excite@Home; now it’s Google News, AllTop, and Reddit. But there’s another seemingly similar term that’s floating around with increasing frequency—content curation. The question that keeps popping up is this: Is curation the same as aggregation, just with a more fashionable name?
The answer is no. Content aggregation, the automatic gathering of links, merely presents content that’s related by broad topic, such as business, politics, and sports. However, there’s no connection—no theme—tying the individual articles together.
Content curation picks up where aggregation leaves off, requiring human intervention in the form of editorial judgment and organization. Just as a museum curator assembles a collection of artwork based on a theme (such as an artist, a period, etc.), a content curator pulls together related content on a particular topic from a variety of sources to tell a complete story.
There are several benefits to curating content on your company website. By gathering and presenting targeted material, you help establish your company as a thought leader in your industry. As well, you become the go-to source for prospects in the decision-making process. By promoting curated content on your social media platforms, you help drive traffic to your site and further your efforts to create a community of users interested in the industries your products and solutions address.
You can even curate your own content if you’re a large company with multiple business units. Pulling together related content on a topic from your various microsites gets you more bang for your content creation buck. At Tendo, this is a best practice we espouse daily: write once, use many. And for highly regulated industries, like financial services, curating content can be a viable alternative when tight restrictions make creating content difficult.
When curating content, make sure to give credit where credit’s due and attribute articles, blog posts, videos, etc. to the original creator, if it isn’t your company.
Do you currently curate content on your site? Tell us what the benefits have been for your company.
The New York Times released Thursday a finished version of the Recommendations platform it quietly introduced in beta in late January.
Available at nytimes.com/recommendations and on the “Recommended For You” tab on article pages, the tool is designed to help logged-in readers “see through the news fog,” as NYT lead technology reporter Nick Bilton put it. It serves up recommended stories based upon the kinds of articles visitors have read.
You might be a fan of the good ol’ Facebook “Poke,” but you probably never thought much of the act of poking. Well, that is going to change when you get your hands on Seth Godin’s new book, “Poke the Box.”
The fundamental message of "Poke the Box" is to start new things and dare to take initiative. David Meerman Scott, HubSpot's Marketer in Residence, was able to catch up with Seth about his new book and you can watch their interview below.
The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether Congress may take works out of the public domain and grant them copyright status.
A federal appeals panel, reversing a lower court, ruled in July against a group of orchestra conductors, educators, performers, publishers, film archivists and motion picture distributors who have relied on artistic works in the public domain for their livelihoods. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals set aside arguments that their First Amendment rights were breached because they could no longer exploit the works without paying royalties.
For a variety of reasons, the works at issue, which are foreign and were produced decades ago, became part of the public domain in the United States but were still copyrighted overseas. In 1994, Congress adopted legislation to move the works back into copyright, so U.S. policy would comport with an international copyright treaty known as the Berne Convention.
Some of the works at issue include:
H.G. Wells’ Things to Come
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
The musical compositions of Igor Fydorovich Stravinsky
The government argued that Congress adopted what was known as “Section 514″ for its “indisputable compliance” with the convention and to remedy “historic inequities of foreign authors who lost or never obtained copyrights in the United States.”
“In other words, the United States needed to impose the same burden on American reliance parties that it sought to impose on foreign reliance parties. Thus, the benefit that the government sought to provide to American authors is congruent with the burden that Section 514 imposes on reliance parties. The burdens on speech are therefore directly focused to the harms that the government sought to alleviate,” the appeals court wrote.
Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project and Stanford University and a plaintiff’s lawyer in the case, urged the justices to take the case.
“The point of copyright protection is to encourage people to create things that will ultimately belong to the public. While the scope and duration of copyright protection has changed over time, one aspect of the copyright system has remained consistent: once a work is placed in the public domain, it belongs to the public, and remains the property of the public – free for anyone to use for any purpose,” he wrote in a blog post.
When Charlie Cheever was first promoting Quora, he claimed that the site aimed to be “a civil place on the Internet where people can interact” and that this sense of community was key to Quora’s success. A few months later, as Quora continues to expand, is Quora living up to its “community” reputation?
Well, it’s certainly growing in size, steadily adding users to its base; however, does a larger network necessarily equal a strong community? In a post on the site last week, a new Quora user wrote a detailed account of her experience on Quora titled “Confessions of a Quora Newbie”. In it, she addresses many issues at length – from the role of editors on the site to the role of humour in questions and answers – but most of the account boils down to one issue: that she’s found it difficult to integrate and feel respected in Quora’s question and answer community: “The onslaught of new users has stirred resentment among some of Quora’s early adopters and has fuelled debate surrounding community identity, standards and guidelines. Some new users are being bullied or intimidated into silence, or simply shown the door. Those who are encouraged to stay are also encouraged to keep their activity to a minimum.”
The lengthy post addresses several issues the author has about Quora and while Quora enthusiasts and insiders might immediately balk at the accusations thrown in Quora’s direction, the post asks some important questions. And, being that 45 users have upvoted the post – and many more have commented in the thread below – it seems the opinions aren’t being expressed in isolation. While the post hurls many accusations in Quora’s direction, they can, mostly, be summarized by one key issue: community.
"It's not information overload. It's filter failure." That was the main theme of a thoughtful and influential talk that Clay Shirky gave at a technology conference back in 2008. It's an idea that's easy to like both because it feels intuitively correct and because it's reassuring: better filters will help reduce information overload, and better filters are things we can actually build. Information overload isn't an inevitable side effect of information abundance. It's a problem that has a solution. So let's roll up our sleeves and start coding.
There was one thing that bugged me, though, about Shirky's idea, and it was this paradox: The quality and speed of our information filters have been improving steadily for a few centuries, and have been improving extraordinarily quickly for the last two decades, and yet our sense of being overloaded with information is stronger than ever. If, as Shirky argues, improved filters will reduce overload, then why haven't they done so up until now? Why don't we feel that information overload is subsiding as a problem rather than getting worse? The reason, I've come to believe, is that Shirky's formulation gets it precisely backwards. Better filters don't mitigate information overload; they intensify it. It would be more accurate to say: "It's not information overload. It's filter success."
But let me back up a little, because it's actually more complicated than that. One of the traps we fall into when we talk about information overload is that we're usually talking about two very different things as if they were one thing. Information overload actually takes two forms, which I'll call situational overload and ambient overload, and they need to be treated separately.
Situational overload is the needle-in-the-haystack problem: You need a particular piece of information - in order to answer a question of one sort or another - and that piece of information is buried in a bunch of other pieces of information. The challenge is to pinpoint the required information, to extract the needle from the haystack, and to do it as quickly as possible. Filters have always been pretty effective at solving the problem of situational overload. The introduction of indexes and concordances - made possible by the earlier invention of alphabetization - helped solve the problem with books. Card catalogues and the Dewey decimal system helped solve the problem with libraries. Train and boat schedules helped solve the problem with transport. The Reader's Guide to Periodicals helped solve the problem with magazines. And search engines and other computerized navigational and organizational tools have helped solve the problem with online databases.
Whenever a new information medium comes along, we tend to quickly develop good filtering tools that enable us to sort and search the contents of the medium. That's as true today as it's ever been. In general, I think you could make a strong case that, even though the amount of information available to us has exploded in recent years, the problem of situational overload has continued to abate. Yes, there are still frustrating moments when our filters give us the hay instead of the needle, but for most questions most of the time, search engines and other digital filters, or software-based, human-powered filters like email or Twitter, are able to serve up good answers in an eyeblink or two.
Situational overload is not the problem. When we complain about information overload, what we're usually complaining about is ambient overload. This is an altogether different beast. Ambient overload doesn't involve needles in haystacks. It involves haystack-sized piles of needles. We experience ambient overload when we're surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the neverending pressure of trying to keep up with it all. We keep clicking links, keep hitting the refresh key, keep opening new tabs, keep checking email in-boxes and RSS feeds, keep scanning Amazon and Netflix recommendations - and yet the pile of interesting information never shrinks.
The cause of situational overload is too much noise. The cause of ambient overload is too much signal.
One can’t help but notice the increasing ubiquity of the Facebook ‘like’ button, thanks in no small part to Facebook’s aggressive promotion of the button to the exclusion of all other means of social network sharing.
A sea change in how web content is shared will always attract speculation and Steve Rubel is making a case for the like supplanting the link as the main means of web navigation. Rubel argues that “likes” currently function as a rival signal network to links, a network that operates by different rules:
“likes arguably are arguably easier to create. Moreover, they are explicit endorsements rather than implicit ones. Therefore, they carry more weight once they are pulled through the lens of our friends. More so than links, this new network of signals allows content to find you, rather than you having to go find it”
A more interesting conjecture is made about how links, the established sharing syntax of the web, can be gamed more easily than likes can. On the one hand, an alternative signal network which outwitted those who have worked out how to game search algorithms would be a very attractive prospect to those who favour content rich Internet engagement. On the other, a network of likes filtered through the lens of our immediate social circle could be susceptible to the detrimental effects of the ‘filter failure‘ argument.
Ça fait un petit moment que je lis des articles sur la curation (issue du mot anglais et non du sens français comme le faisait remarquer Titiou Lecoq dans so… (RT @mbattisti64: RT @hervelc: La curation en long, en large et (souvent) en travers [Atelier des médias] http://rfi.my/ehmB3c)
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Bluefly, a small publicly held online clothing retailer, is experimenting with adding game mechanics to its site to reward shoppers who watch videos, create wishlists, write reviews or read blog posts.
To do so, New York-based Bluefly partnered with Menlo Park-based Badgeville, which is focused on bringing game mechanics to retail, entertainment, media and other categories.
This falls under the heading of “gamification,” which operates on the premise that humans are often motivated by rewards (even if they aren’t worth much).
For retailers or others, the motivation is to make an experience that can be fun and provide reasons to stick around.
The techniques can be traced back to other companies, such as Zynga, the maker of social games on Facebook, or Foursquare.
Foursquare awards badges to people who check into restaurants and other businesses. If you check-in more than anyone else, you can become a fictitious mayor — which may earn you a free beer, but often not much else. Likewise, Zynga rewards users who harvest crops on time, or interact with other players, by advancing them to the next level.
In an interview earlier this year, Kris Duggan, Badgeville’s CEO and co-founder, said they’ve identified three mechanics that Zynga has become very successful in using:
Personal motivators: This is an achievement. Someone has done something that deserves rewarding.
Friend and social graph motivators: This is essentially peer pressure. A friend has done something, why don’t you?
Group motivators: This is competition. If you come back two more times a week, you’ll do it more than anyone else.
The Bluefly game works like this:
The more badges shoppers earn, the more they will be rewarded with early access to products, special deals and discounts. While those are tangible benefits, sometimes it’s only for bragging rights or recognition.
Badgeville, which is about a year old, has also worked with Moxsie.com, a boutique online retailer. Its other customers include Philly.com, which uses it to engage with its readers. Badgeville charges an annual fee to use its service.
Many of the company’s investors have ties to e-commerce, including former senior executives at eBay, PayPal, Chegg.com, Shopping.com and Drugstore.com.
Today we're looking at seven companies that announced investments raised over the past 24 hours. In the cutthroat world of startups and great ideas, which company will significantly affect our lives? On today's list we've got a site that makes it even easier to order in a pizza for dinner (as if we needed further prompting to make such a decision!), a site to help us find a job (for just an hour or a lifetime) and the company behind the super addictive Angry Birds app. We've got many more promising companies to consider. Tell us, readers, which of these companies will shape the world?
Updated: If you’re a traditional journalist, or someone who works for a traditional media outlet, the easiest way to cast aspersions at a digital media entity is to use the A word: that is, “aggregation.” New York Times executive editor Bill Keller stayed true to form in a piece he wrote for his newspaper Thursday, in which he categorized The Huffington Post and other unnamed online media outlets as pirates, who are in the business of “counterfeiting” content rather than engaging in “real” journalism. In only a few paragraphs, the NYT editor managed to say volumes about how little he understands where media is, or where it is going.
Keller’s piece starts out as a humble discussion of his status as the 50th most powerful person in the world (according to Forbes magazine) and how he thinks this is absurd, since he just runs a newspaper. But it quickly becomes a complaint about how members of the media — and assorted “flocks of media oxpeckers who ride the backs of pachyderms, feeding on ticks,” as well as professional pundits such as Clay Shirky and Jay Rosen — spend too much time talking about media in the abstract instead of doing it.
AOL eliminated approximately 900 jobs today, including 200 US employees in the media and tech group and 700 people in India.
In a company memo that has leaked out to a number of news organizations, chief executive Tim Armstrong tries to paint the move as a positive and necessary step towards turning the company around, saying it will “significantly improve AOL’s ability to focus on growth.” And despite the layoffs, Armstrong said AOL will be a “net importer of journalists.” (Translation: We’re hiring more than we’re firing.) The layoffs also seem a little less severe than the 400 to 500 US layoffs that were reported yesterday.
Still, there are reasons to be skeptical. It’s not just how many people got laid off but who. AOL’s own senior vice president of news Jonathan Dube posted on Twitter that the layoffs included “dozens of the most talented journalists & product folks I know.” Wired’s Sam Gustin, himself a former AOL employee, described it as a “bloodbath” and said the cuts included a number of veteran journalists, including PoliticsDaily’s Editor in Chief Melinda Henneberger.
Why would AOL target some of its most experienced writers and editors while it’s also hiring new people? Most likely because experience is expensive. It’s cheaper to bring on young writers who ask for less money, are willing to crank out lots of blog posts, and will go along with AOL’s aggressive new traffic strategy called “the AOL Way.” (When Engadget Editor Paul J. Miller left the AOL-owned gadget blog last month, he pointed to the AOL Way as evidence that the company “has its heart in the wrong place.”)
Former AOL employees aren’t the only ones with doubts about what Armstrong claims is an “enhanced focus on quality journalism.” New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller published a column today called “All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate”. While it was almost certainly written before the layoffs were announced, it’s still relevant. Keller takes aim at The Huffington Post, which AOL recently acquired, and which will take a prominent role in the company’s editorial structure. Keller’s arguments are pretty familiar, but they’re stated eloquently and amusingly:
“Aggregation” can mean smart people sharing their reading lists, plugging one another into the bounty of the information universe. It kind of describes what I do as an editor. But too often it amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. …
Last month, when AOL bought The Huffington Post for $315 million, it was portrayed as a sign that AOL is moving into the business of creating stuff — what we used to call writing or reporting or journalism but we now call “content.” Buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is a little like a company’s announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter.
Naturally, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington has responded.
Curation is a hot topic and it’s a topic that is being enthusiastically adopted by many in social media — so much so that curation and social media seem to be beginning to be used interchangeably.
Take a look at this post on the BBC College of Journalism blog:
Social media: what’s the difference between curation and journalism?
With no fewer than seven pieces of legislation circulating in Congress, the issue of online privacy is back in the news, and hot on Capitol Hill. The latest bills center on the most contentious topics, creation of a ‘Do Not Track’ mechanism that would allow consumers to ‘opt-out’ of targeted online advertising, and mobile privacy. What are the proposals, and what do they mean for you?
First on the docket is proposed legislation from Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and John Kerry (D-Mass) that would create an “online privacy bill of rights,” the most significant sign yet of bipartisan support for efforts to curb the Internet-tracking industry.
Politico’s “Morning Tech” was the first to obtain a copy of the working draft, and described it as such:
“It allows for an opt-out standard on personally identifiable information that’s not sensitive, and an opt-in feature when the data is especially sensitive. It’s an opt-in requirement also governing data transfer to third parties, unless companies are part of a self-harbor set up with the approval of the FTC – then, it’s an opt out standard. It further includes provisions that would allow AGs and fed regulators to seek civil penalties when companies do serious wrong, but doesn’t include a private right of action.”
As proposed, the Kerry-McCain bill would create the nation’s first comprehensive privacy law, covering data across all industries. Current laws cover only certain types of personal data, such as financial and medical information.
The bill is expected to be introduced ahead of a Senate Commerce Committee hearing next Wednesday on online privacy.
Over the past few weeks, many worries about the death of journalism have, well, died. Despite shrinking newsrooms and overworked reporters, journalism is in fact thriving. The art of information gathering, analysis and dissemination has arguably been strengthened over the last several years, and given rise and importance to a new role: the journalistic curator.
The concept of curating news is not new. One can look to the supply-chain process of a news organization to see that several roles (editor, managing editor, etc.) have curation as a core competency; that is, the organizing of information filed by reporters into a deliverable packages for readers.
But with the push of social media and advancements in communications technology, the curator has become a journalist by proxy. They are not on the front lines, covering a particular beat or industry, or filing a story themselves, but they are responding to a reader need. With a torrent of content emanating from innumerable sources (blogs, mainstream media, social networks), a vacuum has been created between reporter and reader — or information gatherer and information seeker — where having a trusted human editor to help sort out all this information has become as necessary as those who file the initial report.
“Curation,” says Sayid Ali, owner of Newsflick.net, “gathers all these fragmented pieces of information to one location, allowing people to get access to more specialized content.”
Mobile printing company Breezy is announcing its first angel round today with a roster of investors that include Accel's Rich Wong, Felcis Ventures' Aydin Senkut, Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, Eniac Ventures and others. The financing closed at $750K.
Serving the mobile printing niche also occupied by products like AirPrint, Breezy lets users who download its software print or fax a document via mobile from a series of compatible printer options in its network (Printers have to be connected to the the service to be compatible). The app currently works with Blackberry, Android, and Windows Phone 7 and an iPhone app is currently in the pipeline. The app is free to download, but the Breezy premium printing service costs $5 a month or $30 a year if you'd like to print out stuff without the Breezy watermark.
Last week, a flurry of announcements about IM, chat and group messaging services preceded the coming showdown at SXSW next week. Startups like GroupMe and Yobongo will try to make their name there, just like Foursquare and Twitter did in years past. Synchronous communications (such as mobile group chat) are the latest battleground in the war over unified communications, but no matter how clever and fun those apps are, they’re not the real contenders. Rather, technology platform players like Google, Microsoft and Facebook are fighting to see what company supplies a user’s communications control panel — and a scrappy Skype can’t be ignored either.
The winner will gain an application that its users access constantly. A unified communications hub offers potential customer lock-in through habit and the effort required to switch both to and from the service. Om wrote that by controlling a user’s synchronous interactions –- sharing experiences that replicate reality –- Google could fix its social media flops and beat Facebook. A unified communications hub could be the launchpad to do just that.
A successful communications control panel will integrate three key components:
Universal communications channels. It should handle communications both real-time and asynchronous, one to one and multi-party, and across different channels: voice, email, text, video. IMs should convert to SMS messages if the receiver is away from his computer or smartphone. Email and messaging from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are good at this already.
Contact management. Besides just storing contacts and their various addresses, a universal communications hub increasingly needs to manage groups. It’s even better if that doesn’t require a user to work too hard. Facebook is attempting to get users to tag group members rather than make lists and Google’s Gmail prioritization learns from behavior. Location-based services and social graphs about a user’s relationships and preferences will play a big role here.
Presence management. People need better control over managing their availability. With chat and IM, you’re either available to all or not, and you have to manually screen your phone calls. Integrating contact groups and presence, a person could make himself available in real time for family in the evening, but available to co-workers only via email.
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has just launched craigconnects, which he says is a long-term initiative to “connect and protect organizations that are doing good stuff”.
Newmark on the site’s homepage says craigconnects is “the biggest thing” of his life, and that he’s committing 20 years to the project, which will initially focus on non-profits and public service organizations that “get stuff done on a sustainable basis”.
To be clear, craigconnects isn’t a fundraising or grant-making organization, but an entirely different beast with a big bold vision (getting everyone in the world together for the common good via the Internet). The overall purpose of the project is explained here.
It’s all a bit hazy if you ask me (the welcome message video, embedded below, didn’t quite help either) but who would like to bet against Newmark to turn something rather basic into something enormous using the power of the Internet?
European laws are being brought in to make it illegal for websites to use cookies without a users explicit consent after 25th May this year.
There are no specific guidelines in place on how websites are supposed to gain this consent but the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive laws will be enforceable after this date although it’s unlikely anybody will actually take action.
I don’t think that the people who drew up the laws have thought about how websites will get this permission. If you use a popup window then it will require some clever coding to load the popup window and then set the cookie for something like Google Analytics after the user has accepted the T&C’s. Most browsers have tools to either block, accept or prompt for cookies however these are controlled by the browser rather than the site owner.
Also, how the government intends to police this is beyond me. There is no way in the world that small businesses will change their websites to meet these guidelines.
The exact steps that businesses have to go through to comply with the law and gain consent from customers and users are being drawn up by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
A spokesman for the DCMS said that work on the regulations was “ongoing” but would not be complete by 25 May.
In a statement, Ed Vaizey, minister for Culture, Communications and the Creative Industries, said he recognised that the delay would “cause uncertainty for businesses and consumers”.
Pour comprendre ce qu’est la curation, il faut se reporter à un autre néologisme : l’infobésité (ou information overload), autrement dit la surabondance d’informations, cette accumulation considérable du volume de données disponibles en temps réel sur Internet. Ce « festin gratuit et délicieux », selon l’expression de Brian Solis, a tendance à devenir indigeste pour beaucoup d’internautes et de décideurs. Le PDG de Google rappelait récemment que l’humanité produit plus d’informations en deux jours que depuis le début de la civilisation à aujourd’hui. Chaque minute, 36 heures de vidéos sont postées sur Youtube, 3 000 photos sont envoyées sur Flickr, et 200 000 messages sont tweetés… Le paradoxe c’est qu’on n’est pas mieux informé pour autant car cette situation est source de confusion : trop d’infos tue l’info. Dans ces conditions, comment trier le bon grain de l’ivraie ? Comment discerner la vérité derrière les fausses rumeurs et toutes les déformations possibles ? Comment mettre de l’ordre et produire du sens dans cette masse informationnelle protéiforme ?
DU QUANTI AU QUALI
C’est à ce besoin précis que répond ce nouveau concept de « curation ». Philippe Meyer, universitaire américain spécialiste des médias, le disait déjà il y a quelques années : « Maintenant que l’information est tellement abondante, nous n’avons pas tant besoin de nouvelles informations que d’une aide pour traiter celle qui est déjà disponible. » « Curation » vient du terme anglo-saxon « curator » qui signifie littéralement « conservateur de musée ». La curation c’est avant tout trouver, regrouper, organiser et partager le meilleur et le plus pertinent contenu en ligne sur un usage spécifique. Le « content curator », c’est celui qui, grâce à différents outils, va trier l’information et fournir sur une thématique donnée les liens essentiels sans avoir à se perdre dans le maquis des posts, billets, fils RSS, et newsfeed en tout genre… C’est passer tout simplement du quanti au quali en redonnant tout sa valeur à l’information de qualité !
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