Social Stream | Chris Aldrich

🔖 Want to listen: Jenny Lawson is Very Fond of Creepy Smiling Dead Animals and Worries Quite a Bit | The Hilarious World of Depression | APM Podcasts

Bookmarked Jenny Lawson is Very Fond of Creepy Smiling Dead Animals and Worries Quite a Bit by John Moe (APM Podcasts)

She’s the author of bestselling books and an incredibly popular blog, but Jenny Lawson showed up to our interview wondering, at least a little, if her appearance on this show and her whole career, really, was part of some delusion. It’s not. She’s the real thing: an incredibly funny and honest writer with a legion of fans, a very old decapitated and stuffed boar’s head named James Garfield, anxiety, depression, and a clear-eyed view of the world.

A show about clinical depression...with laughs? Well, yeah. Depression is an incredibly common and isolating disease experienced by millions, yet often stigmatized by society. The Hilarious World of Depression is a series of frank, moving, and, yes, funny conversations with top comedians who have dealt with this disease, hosted by veteran humorist and public radio host John Moe. Join guests such as Maria Bamford, Paul F. Tompkins, Andy Richter, and Jen Kirkman to learn how they’ve dealt with depression and managed to laugh along the way. If you have not met the disease personally, it’s almost certain that someone you know has, whether it’s a friend, family member, colleague, or neighbor. Depression is a vicious cycle of solitude and stigma that leaves people miserable and sometimes dead. Frankly, we’re not going to put up with that anymore.

The Hilarious World of Depression is not medical treatment and should not be seen as a substitute for therapy or medication. But it is a chance to gain some insight, have a few laughs, and realize that people with depression are not alone and that together, we can all feel a bit better.

The Hilarious World of Depression is made possible by a grant from HealthPartners and its Make It OK campaign, which works to reduce the stigma of mental health. Find out more at www.makeitok.org.

h/t Kimberly Hirsch

👓 PopSugar Stole Influencers’ Instagrams — Along With Their Profits | Racked

Read PopSugar Stole Influencers’ Instagrams — Along With Their Profits (Racked)

The lifestyle website stripped bloggers’ affiliate links from their posts and added the site’s own.

h/t Kimberly Hirsch

See also notes at stream.boffosocko.com.

👓 The first step in finding Golden State Killer suspect: Finding his great-great-great-grandparents on genealogy site | LA Times

Read The first step in finding Golden State Killer suspect: Finding his great-great-great-grandparents on genealogy site (latimes.com)

The clue that led investigators this week to the door of the suspected Golden State Killer came from an unexpected source: GEDmatch.com — an amateur genealogy website that’s something like the Wikipedia of DNA.

👓 How a Genealogy Website Led to the Alleged Golden State Killer | The Atlantic

Read How a Genealogy Website Led to the Alleged Golden State Killer (The Atlantic)

Powerful tools are now available to anyone who wants to look for a DNA match, which has troubling privacy implications.

I find this mechanics relating to privacy in this case to be extremely similar to Facebook’s leak of data via Cambridge Analytica. Something crucial to your personal identity can be accidentally leaked out or be made discoverable to others by the actions of your closest family members.

👓 Customer acquisition on social media — with your own data | Marketing Land

Read Customer acquisition on social media - with your own data (Marketing Land)

Marketing Land is a daily, must-read site for CMOs, digital marketing executives and advertising campaign managers.

👓 Navigating Campus For The ‘Not Rich’: Students Launch A Crowdsourced Guide | NPR

Read Navigating Campus For The 'Not Rich': Students Launch A Crowdsourced Guide by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

University of Michigan students Griffin St. Onge and Lauren Schandevel have published an online guide that anybody can edit called "Being Not Rich at UM." It's a Google Doc about navigating the costs of college that has grown to more than 80 pages.

The two juniors were inspired to create the guidebook after their student government published its own guide about "cost-effective" living at the university, which St. Onge, a first generation college student, found out-of-touch. Its suggestions included skipping weekly manicures and opting to do your own laundry instead of using a service.

"I didn't really realize the culture of Michigan before coming here," she says. "I had been warned about it a little bit, but I had never met the kind of wealth that some of the students have here by the time I came to university."

Schandevel and St. Onge decided to take matters into their own hands.

This is the first kind of financial aid that schools should be providing… It’s not that difficult and is a simple resource to open source and advertise widely. For first generation and low income students I imagine that it’s the type of resource that they should put into acceptance packages to improve their yields. In fact, honestly, it’s the type of resource that students of all income levels should be given to help make them better and more rounded students and people.

🔖 Identifying Modes of User Engagement with Online News and Their Relationship to Information Gain in Text by Nir Grinberg

Bookmarked Identifying Modes of User Engagement with Online News and Their Relationship to Information Gain in Text by

Nir Grinberg (dl.acm.org)

Prior work established the benefits of server-recorded user engagement measures (e.g. clickthrough rates) for improving the results of search engines and recommendation systems. Client-side measures of post-click behavior received relatively little attention despite the fact that publishers have now the ability to measure how millions of people interact with their content at a fine resolution using client-side logging. In this study, we examine patterns of user engagement in a large, client-side log dataset of over 7.7 million page views (including both mobile and non-mobile devices) of 66,821 news articles from seven popular news publishers. For each page view we use three summary statistics: dwell time, the furthest position the user reached on the page, and the amount of interaction with the page through any form of input (touch, mouse move, etc.). We show that simple transformations on these summary statistics reveal six prototypical modes of reading that range from scanning to extensive reading and persist across sites. Furthermore, we develop a novel measure of information gain in text to capture the development of ideas within the body of articles and investigate how information gain relates to the engagement with articles. Finally, we show that our new measure of information gain is particularly useful for predicting reading of news articles before publication, and that the measure captures unique information not available otherwise.

Bookmarked to read as result of reading The five ways we read online (and what publishers can do to encourage the “good” ones).

[.pdf] copy available on author’s site.

👓 The five ways we read online (and what publishers can do to encourage the “good” ones) | Nieman Lab

Read The five ways we read online (and what publishers can do to encourage the “good” ones) by Laura Hazard Owen (Nieman Lab)

New metrics specifically for news articles.

I love that there’s research¹ going on in this area and it portends some potentially great things for reading, but the devil’s advocate in me can also see a lot of adtech people salivating over the potential dark patterns lurking in such research. I can almost guarantee that Facebook is salivating over this, though to be honest, they’ve really pioneered the field haven’t they, just in a much smaller area of use. Of course I’m also curious if they did or are planning any research in how people read content on social media?

I wonder what it would look/feel like to take each of these modalities and apply them individually for long periods of time to everything one read? Or to use them in rotation regardless of the subject being read? Or other permutations? I suppose in general I like to read how I like to read, but now I’m going to be more conscious of what and how I’m doing it all.

References

Grinberg N. Identifying Modes of User Engagement with Online News and Their Relationship to Information Gain in Text. WWW ’18 Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3186180. Published April 23, 2018. Accessed April 27, 2018.

👓 It’s Time to Unlock The Web | Julien Genestoux – Medium

Read It’s Time to Unlock The Web by Julien Genestoux (Medium)

The web needs a better business model — and we believe the technology is finally here to do it.

I like the general idea behind this and Julien Genestoux is certainly someone to take seriously… but blockchain?! really?? I can’t wait to see what comes of it.