Every Monday Zebra Eclipse updates with a new Herd. The Herd is a digest of related links to stories appropriate to the blog. The goal is to show the common evolution of agency and publisher and to highlight the influence of creators, curators and community moderators.
- Native advertising: the business of eroding user trust? | Econsultancy
Econsultancy writer Muhammad Saleem makes the case that current current native advertising is successful but likely to be deceptive and dangerous. Worse case scenario is that native advertising is harms the entire industry by amortizing readers’ trust. However, he argues that we’re yet to see really native advertising so it may all yet change around. Do you agree?
- CNN announces partnership with Twitter to ‘revolutionize’ news gathering
Twitter’s head of news (they have one; showing the importance the news has to Twitter) has announced her first project. Dataminr is a New York start up that helps Journalists cover breaking news by chunking through the firehouse to surface the most important tweets. Some call Dataminr a startup but it’s five years old and has already raised nearly $50m in investors. The first Twitter sponsored partner is CNN.
- Here’s How Facebook Rewards Celebrities Who Post About the Super Bowl
The new re/code blog has an interesting expose/story on Facebook rewarding celebrities to write about the Super Bowl. It’s a deal designed to encourage more celebs to post in public (likely part of Facebook’s Twitter envy) and interesting to see how Facebook promises extra exposure and amplification as a reward.
- Blogging Platform Medium Closes $25M Round Led By Greylock
Evan Williams’ blogging platform Medium has raised 25$m from Greylock. Medium’s a cool place to publish these days and allows for non-linear commentary – but it’s unclear to this blogger what the advantage writing on Medium has over a platform (or domain) you control.
- Patch Hit With Sweeping Layoffs As New Owner Hale Global Restructures
What’s happened to the much vaunted hyperlocal boom? It seems to make sense; people want local news. In fact, I have personal experience with this with Edinburgh Reviews. The challenge is scale. It’s hard to do both local and scale. AOL haven’t made Patch work. The layoff at the site are hitting hard.
- Publishing Platform Issuu Hires Jeremy LaCroix, Formerly Of AOL, To Lead Design
Issuu is having a busy time. They’ve published a reader and also hired former AOL guy Jeremy LaCroix. What Issuu need to do is break out of being a speciality publishing solution to become mainstream. That’ll happen once they solve everyday problems with a wonderful user experience.
- How Google Ruined ‘What Time is the Super Bowl?’
Mashable digs into the original “What time is the Super Bowl?” post on Huffington Post. While the post explores one of the important steps that took publishing and digital marketing together down the same evolutionary path I suspect it also a similar SEO play in itself. Does the technique work as well today? Not so much. Google’s Knowledge Graph and card format now answers the question.
- Considering Native: What BuzzFeed, The NY Times And Content Shops Say About (True) Scale
BuzzFeed, the ultrapopular purveyor of listicles and viral content, began with a question: “What does it take for something to spread on traditional media without the cost structure associated with traditional media?”
- Facebook Paper
On the 3rd Facebook will launch an iPhone only app called Paper. It looks very similar to Flipboard in that it creates a visually stunning way to explore content and uses similar flipping navigation styles. They’re hiring human editors for the project too. It seems like that publishers will appear in the platform through three ways; big names on a whitelist/recommended list, through social sharing/News Feed and through possible native advertising options. Unlike Flipboard it doesn’t allow you to create your own curated magazine. It seems odd they don’t have an Android app in place.
