Sling Digital takes the Moneyball approach to Twitter advertising

Targeting an audience on Twitter when you have a lot of money is not so hard. Just buy a lot of the obvious keywords related to the audience you’re trying to engage and wait for the advertising results. But what if you don’t want to — or can’t — spend a lot of money?

That’s the hole that Sling Digital is trying to fill with a new product that is being framed as the Moneyball for Twitter ads. Moneyball, if you don’t recall, is the approach popularized by the low-budget Oakland Athletics, which bought players cheaply in order to obtain wins. Sling Digital’s Audience Intelligence tool works by monitoring Twitter users’ conversations and breaking down who they are interested in, what affiliations they have, and what sites they visit and share from. The goal is not to buy keywords but to use a lot of data to buy audiences cheaply.

From the information it gathers, Sling can figure out cost-effective keywords to buy that allow an advertiser to find the right audience but at a much lower price than buying a traditional keyword. For example, if a beer company wanted to target soccer fans, it could buy the words “soccer” or “football” for a promoted tweet, but that would be expensive. But if it uses Sling to listen to the millions of conversations a particular set of users is having, it can find out that buying a particular name of a footballer or a soccer club could have just the same effect, because that’s what people are chatting about on Twitter.
MTV has been testing out Sling Digital and found it could advertise to fans of Snooki at a much cheaper rate than usual. During a recent campaign, Sling looked at the tweets of Snooki’s fans and found the keywords and articles they were sharing and using, which categories they were engaging in, and which other celebrities influenced them. Choosing new keywords suggested by Sling, MTV was able to get its cost per engagement with its target audience down to $1.93, compared with $4.95 with its original keywords.

Sling is primarily focused on helping customers advertise on Twitter. But it can also help them buy display ads on other sites using the same model. So if an advertiser wants to reach a sports audience, it could pay a lot to hit ESPN.com. Or it could use Sling to buy cheaper ads on smaller sites that users are currently visiting and sharing articles from. The system works on a rolling basis, looking at the last two weeks of tweets and conversations, but it can be narrowed to look at a narrower time frame.

Saif Ajani, the founder of Visibli, the Toronto company behind Sling Digital, said services like bit.ly already show what links are being shared. And tools like Radian6 analyze and monitor social media conversations. But, he says, there’s still a need for a tool that pulls it all together and uses the collective data to help guide advertising decisions. 


Visibli, which was originally founded in 2009, has raised $365,000 from Extreme Venture Partners and angel investors including LocalResponse founder Nihal Mehta. The service reminds me a little of SocialFlow, a New York–based company that helps advertisers time their update and ads to hit users when they are most receptive to a message. LocalResponse also analyzes tweets and social updates to let advertisers act on real-time consumer intent. All of these companies spend a lot of time understanding users’ conversations to optimize engagement with them.

It takes a lot of work and smart algorithms to understand what people are saying and how it can be used to target ads and updates. But if done well, it can be a big opportunity as more advertisers look to tap social as a way to reach consumers.

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Twitter Founders Launch Medium, a New Site that Democratizes Online Publishing

Twitter Founders Launch Medium, a New Site that Democratizes Online Publishing:

Obvious Corp, the company that spawned Twitter, has unveiled a new project called Medium. It’s a site that attempts to revolutionize how online publishing is done.
Instead of content being centralized around individual people, it features photographs and text grouped into themed collections. Content within collections can be sorted by how “interesting” viewers rated it to be.

Here’s how Twitter co-founder Evan Williams describes the service:

Medium is designed to allow people to choose the level of contribution they prefer. We know that most people, most of the time, will simply read and view content, which is fine. If they choose, they can click to indicate whether they think something is good, giving feedback to the creator and increasing the likelihood others will see it.
Posting on Medium (not yet open to everyone) is elegant and easy, and you can do so without the burden of becoming a blogger or worrying about developing an audience. All posts are organized into “collections,” which are defined by a theme and a template.
[...] Collections give people context and structure to publish their own stories, photos, and ideas. By default, the highest-rated posts show up at the top, helping people get the most out of their time in this world of infinite information.

The service is currently read-only for the general public, and invite-only for people who wish to publish.
Contributing a photograph is as easy as uploading it to a collection and adding a brief caption.
Here’s a brief tour of various layers. The basic grouping for content is the collection based around a theme:

Inside the collection are photos or articles based on the theme:

Opening up one of the posts shows either a photograph in high-res glory or a neatly formatted article:

The idea is actually quite smart. It gives people a voice by allowing them to publish anything without having an established website or following.
Content is gauged by its own merit rather than how influential the creator is. Think of it as a Reddit for entire pages of content rather than simple links. That’s a pretty powerful idea.
Medium (via Laughing Squid)

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This is What You Get When You Stack Photos of a Meteor Shower

This is What You Get When You Stack Photos of a Meteor Shower:

Capturing a single shooting star can make for a brilliant photograph, but what does it look like if you composite multiple meteors into a single image? Fort Collins, Colorado-based nature photographer David Kingham decided to find out recently during the ongoing Perseid meteor shower. The amazing photo seen above is what resulted.

Here’s his description of how the image was created:

Last night I went out to Snowy Range in Wyoming in search of dark skies for the Perseid meteor shower. I wanted something special for the foreground and I knew the Snowies faced in the perfect direction to get this shot. I started shooting at 10pm and didn’t stop until 5 am, I had to change my battery every 2 hours which made for a long night. The moon rose around 1am to light up the mountain range.
This is a composite of 23 images, 22 for the meteors/stars and 1 taken at sunrise for the foreground which was lightly blended in. I also corrected the orientation of the meteors to account for the rotation of the earth (this took forever!)

The fact that the stars move in the night sky makes the compositing a bit tricky. To combine the images in Photoshop, he took a base photo and overlaid each shot he had that contained a meteor. For each layer, he lowered the opacity to 50%, matched up the stars with the base layer by rotating around Polaris, and then erased everything in the layer except the shooting star.
He says that the benefit of this technique is that the elements can be exposed in a way that maximizes quality. The base shot containing the stars can be shot at low ISO and longer exposure times, while the meteors can be shot using high ISO (maximizing the intensity of the meteor without having to worry about the rest of the sky being too noisy).
(via kottke.org)

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Image credit: Snowy Range Perseids Meteor Shower by David Kingham

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New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Now on Flickr, Reportedly Doubles Team

New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Now on Flickr, Reportedly Doubles Team:
Update: The account has mysteriously vanished from Flickr. This suggests that it was either fake, or something that wasn’t meant to be as big of a news story as it was.

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If you’re a fan of Flickr, then you’ll be happy to know that new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has apparently created an account on the photo sharing service. Granted, the page only features a single portrait of Mayer from her days as a Google exec, but it’s an important first step. Neither of Mayer’s two predecessors (Scott Thompson or Carol Bartz) bothered to join the service.

It doesn’t end there: according to Robert Scoble, Mayer has doubled the size of the Flickr team in just the past week. Apparently the Internet attempts to get Mayer’s attention is working, and Yahoo’s humorous response wasn’t simply a clever PR stunt.
Earlier this year, Yahoo was criticized for handing pink slips to “the highest level of Flickr’s customer support” — people who “loved the site the most”, so it’s awesome to see that the company is now hiring instead of firing, and devoting attention and resources to ensure that the service thrives.
Hopefully Mayer will start sharing some of her photographs as well!
(via Thomas Hawk)

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Print Instagram Photos on Edible Organic Chocolate

Print Instagram Photos on Edible Organic Chocolate:
Digital photography has made us lose the wretched chemicals and excess paper of the Polaroid era. So if you want to save a summer memory, you can do it in organic chocolate.

Ed says! What a tasty way to treat your pictures and save the environment at the same time!  


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How To Make A Mark on Art; by acclaimed art blogger Katherine Tyrrell...

How To Make A Mark on Art; by acclaimed art blogger Katherine Tyrrell...:

The strapline of my blog Making A Mark says that Artist and writer Katherine Tyrrell writes about art for artists and art lovers.  

I’ve been writing about art rather a lot since I went public in January 2006.  I’ve posted to Making A Mark nearly every day generating well over 2k published posts read by more than 1.5 million visitors. It now has nearly 4k subscribers and, as an art blog, is currently rated#3 art blog in the UK and #11 in the world.  Traffic is on an exponential and upward trajectory.

I’ve had a wonderful time blogging about art and made lots of friends as a result.

Highlights of my blogging over the last six and half years have also included:

• Promoting artwork I like and helping great artists get a better profile online
• Predicting winners of major art competitions online - and getting it right about 75% of the time!
• Artists telling me they’ve won an award - but  only entered after they read about the art competition on my blog
• Matching up artists with galleries and going to their solo or group shows
• Getting to video an exhibition before it opens and sharing that video on YouTube
• Interviewing artists who’ve won a major prize
• Photographing and filming artwork in museums that some people will never ever get to see except via my blog
• Demystifying open exhibitions for artists who want to submit work - by showing them online what an exhibition looks like, what size the work is and how it’s framed
• Being able to open people’s eyes to what it’s possible to see and do
• Feedback from artists telling me that their website/blog traffic has rocketed after getting a mention on my blog
• Informal consultations with artists about ‘the best way forward’ - leading to improved sales, recognition and awards
• Being invited to awards ceremonies and awards dinners!

It can however be quite unnerving at times when introducing myself to artists only to find out that they all know about my blog and what I do!

So what do I write about which generates so many visitors?  

Simple - in short I write about what interests me for people like me - all the time.

Essentially I’m very much focused on writing for my peers - who are pretty similar to me. These are people around the world who are serious about art - and 

• Produce drawings, painting and sculpture grounded in more traditional skills 
• Lean towards the figurative rather than the totally abstract
• Exhibit and sell their art
• Aim to develop their artistic knowledge and skills, 
• Love going to see art plus a not insignificant group who
• Earn a living from their art 
• Enter art competitions and major open exhibitions

I also have distinct maven-like qualities and know a lot about a lot of different aspects of art - or know somebody who does.  I’ve become the “go to” person for a lot of artists wanting to find out about a topic.

Having made a deliberate decision to have a “sensible career” when I was young, means I’ve now got a lots of scope to round out my art education and learn a lot more about art.  For my readers that means they get to share in my approach to tackling key topics within art education - and share in my learning online.

While I’ve taken classes at art schools and workshops with tutors, my degrees and work experience are actually in education, business and government.  As a result, I guess I tend to look at the art world from the perspective of somebody who has spent many years having to unpick organisations to work out what made them tick and whether they were functioning well and how they might best learn to do better.  

I like understanding what makes somebody or something excellent and sharing the lessons learned.  One of the ‘added value’ aspects of my blog is I tend to ask questions other people might not ask - and apply my analytical background in finance and business management to art business issues which crop up from time to time.  Hence I’m not in the least bit averse to trying to analyse what’s going on within eg the art economy.  Plus I crunch the numbers on anything and everything - eg the % chance of getting selected for an exhibition - at every available opportunity!  It does tend to provide for an alternative perspective and so far as I’m aware there is very little competition!

Over time Making A Mark has become more structured and more magazine like.  More than a few of my regular readers have commented that they much prefer my weekly round-up each Sunday to the Sunday papers!  

Weekly, monthly and annual routines provide a backbone to Making A Mark:  

• Every week I do a round up of things which have caught my eye (“who’s made a mark this week?”).  
• Every month I run an opinion poll on a topic of interest to artists 
• Every year, for the last five years, I’ve run an awards scheme.  This aims to highlight all those artists who have ‘added value’ in some way during the course of the year.  
• I promote and review all the major open exhibitions (in London) and each year produce a timetable for all the major art competitions in the UK and all the open exhibitions of the national art societies 
• Plus I’ve created a portfolio of topic-specific websites for every aspect that I’ve researched online - from individual artists to how to ship your artwork or write an artist statement
• Plus I’ve floated off specific interests and specialised activities into three additional blogs - such as my sketchbook blog Travels with a Sketchbook which has been recommended by The Times

Much of what I do only happens because I “had a go” and then developed a track record of being somebody who provides good coverage. That gave me the credibility when I started to expand and helped enormously in terms of getting permission to attend press views and restricted access events.  Which is how I am able to photograph major exhibitions before they open and get to meet the prizewinning artists.

My tip for those who want to make a mark writing about art is pursue your interests and write about what you know about or what you’re learning about.

I’ve personally never had a problem working out what to write about.  If anything the problem is sorting through the hundreds of ideas I’ve got stacked up as draft posts ready to go any time I need them!

Aleah Chapin - Winner of the BP Portrait Award 2012
(left to right: Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery,
Bob Dudley, CEO of BP, Aleah Chapin and Sir Michael Parkinson)

Katherine Tyrrell is based in London and has been blogging about art since January 2006 as well as making and exhibiting drawings in dry media.

Portfolio Hub: http://www.makingamark.co.uk/

Making A Mark: http://makingamark.blogspot.co.uk/ 

Making A Mark reviews

Travels with a Sketchbook

The Art of the Landscape

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Dr Weblove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and just love Reddit... by uber blogger Rudhraigh McGrath...

Dr Weblove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and just love Reddit... by uber blogger Rudhraigh McGrath...:

The process of pursuing happiness almost always makes you sad, the process of avoiding sadness doesn't always make you happy. You still want to be happy, but the confusing lack of efficacy of the available options has made you increasingly neurotic about your prospects.

All too soon life becomes a montage of moments of infinite stress over finite problems, you become dried up and twisted, full of bile and regret. In the days of yore, you'd have to take up crocheting, pipe smoking or looking wistfully out frosted windows onto misty moors just to be able to get out of bed in the morning.

Thankfully, mankind's peerless intellect has produced a new way of engaging with happiness. These days there's this thing new thing called the "Internet" that was invented to allow you to achieve the same goal but you don't even have to get out of bed for it. 

On the internet, things make sense. You have options. 

This is because on the internet there are things that actually make you reliably happy for short periods of time. You have small moments of human honesty such as a watching a stoned child babble existential truisms while whacked out of his head on post-dental feel-good drugs. For a minute or two, you can feel truly alive reading an article about an 80 year old semi-comatose Alzheimer's patient who immediately does the Lindy Hop whenever she hears this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFd5Cci_pE4, and if you don't at least smile when you watch a video of Barack Obama singing the lyrics to Call me Maybe - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX1YVzdnpEc, you should seek professional help.

Yes, on a very visceral level the internet is made of smiles (Or cats, depending on who you ask - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi8VTeDHjcM)

The only problem is the more you smile, the more you find you NEED to smile. The more links you click, the more you find you NEED to click, and once you realize that you only feel happy when you're experiencing new and original digital content that the pursuit of happiness has an entirely new requirement.

I call them "Inficlicks". 

An Inficlick is a website that empowers the new denizens of The Age of Cyberhappy by making the continuous pursuit of digital happiness as efficient as humanly possible. An Inficlick provides a uniform platform for individual contributors to add to the common good by posting links of interest. This results in page after page of new content streaming in from all over the world at a rate that actually exceeds your ability to browse it. Other, less conceptually evolved people call them Content Aggregators, but I think "Inficlicks" is catchier. 

The most efficient Inficlick is of course Reddit. (Reddit.com)

I remember the dark days before I knew about Reddit.  Having to trawl around in agony, going to three or even FOUR sites to find an amusing video entitled "Puppy Assault Course Fail". Not knowing anything about upvotes, not caring about Karma, not understanding the importance of a snappy TLDR. When you hear about the "they" in the internet, they are talking about Reddit.

With infinite forums to post about your specific area of interest, Reddit's tagline is "The Front page of the Internet", so if until now you've been trawling around looking at other sites thinking that they're full of interesting and original content, a few weeks spent on Reddit will make you realize that Reddit is like the Rome of the internet, as eventually all links lead to Reddit.

If you want something, it's on Reddit. Want to ask real-time questions of an ex-Nazi Crossdresser? Go to Reddit. Want to swap stone-aged Faux-Vegan lentil pudding recipes? Go to Reddit. Want to argue over the existence of God in the Star Wars universe? Reddit's the place to be. 

I encourage you to spend an hour on Reddit, getting to know the ins and outs of the site, understanding the simple genius of the upvoting system.

I warn you however, if you have children or any kind of actual real life responsibility, give it a miss. You may never again be happy, but at least you won't go to jail for child neglect.

Meanwhile, I'm just going to check and see what's going on in r/videos/ (http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/)  

See you in seven hours.

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Rudhraigh McGrath

rudhraigh.com

www.twitter.com/tweetlikeaman

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