Linked List: October 11, 2013

Friday, 11 October 2013

New York Comic Con Sends Spam Tweets From Attendees’ Accounts Without Permission ★

Unbelievable that anyone thought this was OK.

Google Sets Plan to Sell Users’ Endorsements ★

Claire Cain Miller and Vindu Goel, reporting for the NYT:

On Friday, Google announced an update to its terms of service that allows the company to include adult users’ names, photos and comments in ads shown across the Web, based on ratings, reviews and posts they have made on Google Plus and other Google services like YouTube.

When the new ad policy goes live Nov. 11, Google will be able to show what the company calls shared endorsements on Google sites and across the Web, on the more than two million sites in Google’s display advertising network, which are viewed by an estimated one billion people.

Looking forward to hearing from Google fans how this is acceptable.

John Moltz on That Piper Jaffray Survey on Teens and iOS Devices ★

Three solid grains of salt to take with that survey. I linked to it simply as refutation of the silly “teens don’t want Apple products any more” claims.

Are Operations Like Flipboard Scams Against Publishers? ★

Josh Marshall:

You can’t eat ‘reach’ and we can’t pay salaries with ‘brand awareness’. I don’t pretend to know other people’s business models or strategies. But successful business practices are always about having a close understanding of the costs of what you produce and the origins and mechanics of your revenues and more than anything else the interaction between the two.

“Scam” might be too harsh a word, but Josh raises a good point. In some ways isn’t Flipboard just a magazine that doesn’t pay for the content it displays? (And don’t get me wrong, I like Flipboard.)