Gilbane Conference 2015 call for papers
Share and network with your peers as a speaker at our next conference. Fairmont Copley Plaza, Boston. December 1-3. Learn more
How to Launch Your Digital Platform
…I draw from this research to offer a framework to help aspiring entrepreneurs make the right strategic decisions as they build their own platforms…
This is also for intrapreneurs. Read more
A Few Questions for Publishers Contemplating Facebook as a Platform
John Battelle…
Well, it’s happening. According to no less authoritative source than The New York Times, The New York Times is preparing to plant a taproot right inside the highly walled garden that is Facebook. … But as testing beings, here are a few questions any publisher should ask before dipping a taproot into Facebook’s carefully cultivated soils… Read more
Does it matter?…
Facebook hosting doesn’t change things, the world already changed
A bit of a contrary view. Long but lots to chew on.
All this sound and fury, signifying nothing. … Let’s just list all the conditions that exist and won’t change one bit whether or not you let Facebook host your content… Read more
The Facebook Reckoning
And then there’s Ben Thompson’s analysis on why at least some publishers may not have a choice.
The problem is that online ads are inherently deflationary: just as content has zero marginal cost, so does ad inventory, which means it’s trivial to make more. A limited amount of total advertising dollars spread over more inventory, though, means any individual ad is worth less and less.
This resulted in a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma: the optimal action for any individual publication, particularly in the absence of differentiated ad placements or targeting capability, is to maximize ad placement opportunity (more content) and page views (more eyeballs), even though this action taken collectively only hastens the decline in the value of those ads. Perversely, the resultant cheaper ads only intensify the push to create more content and capture more eyeballs; quality is very quickly a casualty.
What is interesting is the particular impact that mobile has had on this dynamic… Read more
But who actually trusts Facebook, or any single walled garden for all their news? Many of course, but they are not necessarily the demographic you want. And then there’s the fact that…
Many Facebook users still don’t know that their news feeds are filtered by an algorithm
In the extreme case, it may be that whenever a software developer in Menlo Park adjusts a parameter, someone somewhere wrongly starts to believe themselves to be unloved
Accidental or intentional. This could be you, or it could be the New York Times. Read more
Ok, enough about Facebook…
How storytelling can enhance the effectiveness of your visualizations
What a great framework for marketer and data expert collaboration.
As the volume and complexity of data collection and storage scale exponentially, creating clear, communicative, and approachable visual representations of that data is an increasing challenge… Leveraging a story structure can help introduce complex visualizations to various audiences. Read more
News Media Should Drop Native Apps
One of the most shared statistics on mobile use is this one: Applications account for 86% of the time spend by users. This leaves a mere 14% for browser-based activities, i.e. sites designed for mobile, either especially coded for nomad consumption, built using responsive design techniques that adapt look and feel to screen size, or special WebApp designs such as FT.com.
This 86/14 split is completely misleading for two reasons: the weight of mobile gaming, and the importance of Facebook. Take a look at this chart … Read more
More on the 86/14…
Apple Watch Doesn’t Have Safari and You Didn’t Even Notice
Web lives, browser dies? The fact that there is no browser on the Apple watch does not mean the end of the web. It does raise the question of exactly what this means to hybrid or web content heavy iOS apps and watch integration though. Read more
I want to invest in your Apple watch app. Here’s why.
I agree, and also still agree with myself. However my initial investment will be in the watch rather than an app. Read more
Android taxonomies and users
Thinking about mobile platforms and demographics?
For reference, and, perhaps, discussion: ‘Android’ means lots of different things, and there’s a lot of confusion about forks, Xiaomi, China and AOSP, as well as ‘the next billion’. So this is how I try to think about this. First, there are actually (at least) six types of ‘Android’ in the market today… In parallel, it’s worth breaking down Android users in a similar way… Read more
Is a Mobile Deep Linking Standard Necessary?
This is not a useful question. It is reasonable to ask whether a successful standard will ever be developed. Standards don’t get created just because they are a good idea, but because they are forced by the market. And that takes time and painful politicking and negotiation between the big players, some influential small players, and more interested parties you would think possible.
We can also ask whether it will continue to be a reasonable expectation for developers to accommodate all the individual “guidelines” from Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Bitly, GE, and whoever else emerges with a reach large or unique enough to make their traffic worth adding to the list of APIs a developer needs to support. Read more
Links
Online vs IRL Retail: Content, Content, Content and… Retail Is NOT All About Selling Product via Medium
A Data-Driven Look at the Open Source E-Commerce Market via CMSWire
22 tips for better data science including helpful suggestion from the pointy haired boss and Dilbert via Data Science Central
And here is some useful advice for dealing with more political challenges… Overcome Your Company’s Resistance to Data via hbr.org
Web geeks: Uncle Sam made a tool that downloads Google Analytics reports & transforms data into JSON… U.S. government launches online traffic analytics dashboard for federal websites via E Pluribus Unum
About
The Gilbane Advisor curates content for our conference community of content, computing, and digital experience professionals throughout the year.
