I took a business trip recently, and it was a big deal. Even if it was nothing major for anyone else, it was a big deal for me. The trip was full of promise and opportunity. I made sure to capture all its key moments with my phone. When I got back, I didn't want to stick all those photos into a bland, blue Facebook album.
I used Jux, because it lets me design the whole experience out to every edge of every screen. Jux just launched crop control for photos, so the Jux album of my trip looks just right on every device. A Jux isn't a blog. It's more like a portfolio. Each piece stands on its own.
As a PR person, product developer, CEO or whatever, you're probably more interested in getting noticed by the media than developing a relationship with a particular writer.
That's one way to go about it.
Then there's that old-fashioned "building a relationship with a real person not a robot" idea. You know, treating people like people and taking the time to get to know them. Oh right, yeah, forgot about that.
Writers, like artists, are sensitive to ideas and people. But not every writer will get you or your product - and in the tech world as in any world, each writer has their own specialization. If the match is right, I guarantee they will want to get to know you and your ideas.
"The thing about memes is that through repetition, they create a shared language," says Dr. Julie Levin Russo, an adjunct assistant professor at Brown's Modern Culture & Media Program. "If you understand the premise of the meme, you can communicate a lot very easily, with whatever twist you're putting on the meme structure."
On Jan 4, the "Shit Girls Say" meme was radically transformed. New York-based graphic designer & video blogger Franchesca Ramsey a.k.a. Chescaleigh unleashed "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls", and it blew up the Internet. In the video, Ramsey plays her blonde-haired white friend who she portrays as curiously confused, and innocently ignorant. "Why isn't there a white entertainment television? The Jews were slaves too, and you don't hear us complaining all the time," Chescaleigh-as-white-girl asks the camera. Her white friend is completely unaware of fundamental cultural and racial differences between her and her black friend. It's these awkward moments that fuel the humor in this viral video.
Anyone who spends their day on the Internet inevitably wonders this question. Should I start publishing later in the day, to hit the after-work traffic? Should I publish earlier in the morning, to catch commuters while they're on the way to work? Or is everything completely random, driven by the off-chance that a post will end up on StumbleUpon and enjoy a slightly longer tail? Social sharing widget Shareaholic looked at its 2011 data, breaking it down to the top 100 days and times for sharing. See the results in Eastern Standard Time.
This morning, Parse.ly launched Dash, a content management system smart enough to make a blogger weep with joy. It analyzes the Web to show publishers what's hot. It tracks trends within the site, revealing what works for the audience. It points out when old posts are getting popular again. It follows individual authors over time and shows how their coverage performs. It shows where traffic is coming from to improve targeting. In short, it helps publishers plan.
It does all of this by analyzing the billions of page views it tracks anonymously across its whole user base. Parse.ly started as a feed reader for pros in 2009, and Dash expands its capabilities with predictive analytics for one's own site. The software gets a sense of what topics and stories are most important and whether they're trending up or down. That's a great thing for publishers. Is it good for readers? I can't wait to find out.
Mr. E.C. Mendenhall has built a robo-Tumblr called Meme Pool to experiment with the evolution of ideas. Just as a gene pool is the collection of all biological expressions (genes) in a population, a meme pool is the pool of memes, or transmittable ideas. Mendenhall's Meme Pool draws on Tumblr's vast reservoir of image memes, picks the two fittest every day, mates them and posts their offspring.
There's no relation to memepool, the once-great mini-blog of handpicked Internet goodies. That one hasn't evolved since 2008. But armed with a little bit of Python and the surging population of Tumblr, Mendenhall will try to give the primordial ooze of the Web a new life of its own.
People who use pseudonyms - as opposed to remaining anonymous or using their real identity - are more likely to leave high-quality comments on blogs and other Web sites, according to data released by Disqus.
In addition to leaving more comments, people using pseudonyms are more likely to leave comments that get "likes" from other readers, according to Disqus, which operates blog commenting platforms for about one million Web sites, including ReadWriteWeb.
Ever since Google+ arrived on the social scene, Blogger has gone through a few transformations. Surprisingly, the latest update to Blogger has nothing to do with Google+.
Today the Google Buzz blog announced that blogger now supports threaded comments. These comments make it easier for the reader to figure out if a commenter is responding specifically to their comment, or just making a general comment on the thread.
There is a catch, however: Users must go to their Blogger profiles and select embedded comments, and enable a full-text blog feed. This is relatively easy to do.
Tumblr just announced a new private messaging feature called Fan Mail. It's a more personal means that's not email, which requires you to know your favorite blogger's email address (do you?) or the handwritten form of the 20th century, snail mail. That leaves two social network-y means of contact: Facebook private messages and Twitter direct messages. Depending on the blogger's comfort level, however, they may not make Facebook messages on profile pages an option. Similarly, not every blogger follows fans back on Twitter.
Jux just rolled out a new smooth-scrolling, edge-to-edge, touch-driven view for its eye-popping personal publishing platform. After launching on the desktop Web in August and shipping its iPad view in October, Jux has now polished its Web experience for all the key screen sizes.
Optimizing for the phone forced Jux to get smarter. It now uses facial recognition for smart cropping of thumbnail images. Today's update also comes with more optimization, caching and content distribution to help these loud, bold sites load as quickly as possible.
