Author Nicholas Carr wrote a controversial post recently about the use of hyperlinks in online content, in which he argued that links were a distraction for readers , and were likely to lead to less comprehension rather than more. This idea was an offshoot of Carr’s latest book, The Shallows, which makes the claim that the Internet — and digital media in general — are making society dumber rather than smarter . Now Scott Rosenberg,... 

As expected , Facebook has started integrating social activity from around the web into the search results on its site, by showing how many people “liked” or shared a specific news story or blog post, as shown in the screenshot below (first noticed by All Facebook ). The results are powered by the social-graph plugins embedded in hundreds of thousands of websites, which Facebook launched earlier this year at its F8 conference. The... 

Updated: As a number of readers have pointed out, I read this chart incorrectly. I read absolute numbers of visitors into it, whereas the chart is actually meant to show percentages of traffic. I’ve tried to correct my mis-impressions below — although the chart does still show that Stumbleupon drives a lot of traffic, so my conclusions are not completely wrong. In a chart of the traffic it gets from a variety of social networks (posted... 

Mobile use of Twitter has climbed by more than 60 percent since April, when the company introduced its official iPhone client, Twitter CEO Ev Williams said in a status update posted to the company’s blog . The Twitter founder also said that the microblogging service has 145 million registered users, up almost 40 percent from the number it had four months ago. Williams said that 16 percent of all new users to Twitter start using the service... 

Google has had its share of social media flops , and many smart analysts think the search giant just doesn’t have “social” in its nature. As I discuss in my column at GigaOM Pro, Google needs to play in social, because search and advertising must tap into the data generated by social media activities to improve relevance and targeting. The company announced its real-time search last week, with its focus on Twitter and Facebook content,... 

Hard-core Digg users and fans of the link-sharing site — the so-called “Digg Nation” — spend a lot of their time trying to push their favorite links to the front page, competing with each other for the number of “diggs” their links get, and debating why certain links made it and others didn’t. Now, a 17-year-old programmer has come up with an algorithm he says can predict which links will make it to... 

As it has so often in the past, Facebook has again become a lightning rod for online privacy concerns, this time surrounding its launch of Facebook Places , a location-based service that allows users to “check in” to a specific place or event and share that information with their friends. It also allows others to “tag” or check you in at…  Read More →

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and the author of such books as “Free” and “The Long Tail,” has written a piece for the magazine with the provocative — make that inflammatory — headline: “The Web Is Dead: Long Live the Internet.” His point seems to be that the web as we have come to know it is going away, to be replaced by an ecosystem of discrete applications for specific purposes,... 

Anyone who produces content for the web — whether they’re playing the guitar in their dorm room and uploading it to YouTube, or crafting elaborate hoaxes like the Dry Erase Board Girl , or marketing campaigns like the Old Spice Guy — wants to see their content “go viral.” So how does that happen? Jonah Peretti knows a little about what it takes to make a piece of web content catch fire: he’s CEO of the viral-media... 

Digg CEO Kevin Rose Digg will soon announce a new CEO, according to co-founder and current chief executive Kevin Rose, who admits he’s not really a good fit for the job, calling the task of managing the startup’s 80-person staff “a nightmare” in a video interview with All Things Digital (full version embedded below). Rose — who took the top job when CEO Jay Adelson left the company earlier this year — also... 

Years from now, when I tell the grandkids about this thing called print books, I’ll reference the past few days as the week e-books won the war. Momentum is rapidly pushing the dominant industry focus in book publishing and selling toward digital. In my weekly analysis over at GigaOM Pro, I highlight three major milestones from this week that point to the beginning of the end…  Read More →

The reason time exists, Albert Einstein once said , is to prevent everything from happening all at once. In an age of Twitter and blogs and instant publishing of all kinds, it often feels like everything is happening all at once — events occur and are described and interpreted and then the information is distributed to the far corners of the globe instantaneously. In some cases those descriptions and interpretations are very true, but... 

Hi5, a former up-and-coming social network that shifted focus last year and is now trying to become a social-gaming hub, today launched a portal for game developers , and President and CTO Alex St. John says the company is prepared to take on Facebook in a head-to-head battle for the gaming space. St. John, the former CEO of gaming site WildTangent, told TechFlash that Facebook accidentally discovered “a fantastic gaming opportunity”... 

The media industry may be in upheaval as a result of the web, but having the government step in isn’t the right response, Google has told the Federal Trade Commission . The search company’s comments are a response to the FTC’s draft proposal on policy changes to support the media business and journalism in particular, which it released last month. The draft document includes proposed changes to intellectual property …  Read More →

The New York Times has written a somewhat sensationalistic piece about the frenzied pace of journalism online — primarily at the political news outlet Politico, but also at blog networks such as Nick Denton’s Gawker Media. In the writer’s view, both are filled with sleep-deprived writers who are shackled to their computers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and enslaved by computer readouts of the posts and stories that have...