Mediaboss Marketing

For our project tracking image censorship on Sina Weibo, a popular social networking service in China, ProPublica wrote software to monitor a set of 100 Weibo user accounts to detect censored images.

In collaboration with outside researchers, we began collecting the posts and reposts made by the accounts starting on July 3, 2013. We have assembled a database of nearly 80,000 posts. Of those, 527 contained images that were censored by Sina Weibo during an observation period we established between July 24 and August 4, 2013.

Our goal in assembling our selection of accounts was to increase our chances of observing image deletion. The users and posts were not chosen at random, and you should not generalize our findings to larger populations.

Similar to Twitter, Weibo posts have a 140-character limit, and allow users to attach an image. For our app, ProPublica only analyzed posts that included an image, though we cannot be certain if a post was deleted due to the text, the image, or both.

Like many social media services, Weibo provides an Application Programming Interface, or API, to give programmatic access to Weibo posts to other software, such as mobile apps, websites that include Weibo content, etc. The API returns a JSON object, much as the Twitter API does, containing the message text as well as a host of metadata about the message. This is the API we used to collect data.

The Weibo API changed two weeks after we began our collection period and required that we deploy code fixes to restart our collection scripts.

Starting in July, our scripts checked the Weibo API every six minutes and collected any new posts or reposts from the users we were observing. To determine if a post had been deleted, a separate, hourly script checked whether those posts still existed.

A deleted post resulted in one of two responses from the Weibo API. The first was error code 20101, Target Weibo does not exist!" This was the error our script received after we uploaded a test image using a Weibo account and then manually deleted it. We counted posts that returned error code 20101 as deleted by the user.

The second error code was 20112, with the message "Permission Denied!" Researchers have concluded that this is an error code that cannot be the result of user activity and have used it as an indication of censorship. We counted posts returning error code 20112 as censored.

It is imaginable that some posts returning 20101 are deleted by a censor and not the user. Further research may prove that to be the case. Our choice reflects current research by others and is, we believe, the most straightforward and conservative method available to us.

Read more:
How We Observed Censorship on Sina Weibo

How Does Twitter Make Money?
How Does Twitter Make Money? I have looked but do not see any advertisments. Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables it...

By: MrNewsfromWorld

View post:
How Does Twitter Make Money? - Video

Features listed on the app's iTunes profile include: 'share a selfie', 'browse the real-time feed', 'double-tap selfie that you like', and 'send private messages to friends'.

Shahidi told TechCrunch that the app would take on rival photo-sharing site Instagram, but without mundane pictures of "coffee or salad". He added that people are going to enjoy "seeing their life documented through the app".

Justin Bieber has reportedly invested $1.1 million (689m) in Shots of Me. Other investors include venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar, boxer Floyd Mayweather and angel investor Tom McInerney, according to a report in Fortune magazine.

It is coming increasingly common for cdlebrities to invest in technology companies. Ashton Kutcher, for example, has backed a number of firms, including property rental service AirBnB and Summly, the news aggregation app recently bought out by Yahoo.

This is Bieber's first investment in a social network, and the first time the popstar has made a VC investment independently of his manager Scooter Braun.

Bieber already has a massive teenage social media following. He has 46.5 million Twitter followers making him the second most popular member of the micro-blogging website after fellow singer Katy Perry and his first Instagram picture crashed the sites servers.

Link:
Bieber-backed selfie-sharing app 'Shots of Me' launches on App Store

With tech entrepreneurs trying to disrupt entrenched problems in every field, from dating to transit and education, perhaps its no surprise to see them taking on one of the most vexing problems of all: human happiness.

Happify, founded two years ago by a group of veteran tech entrepreneurs, has created a new website that claims to make its users happier through a series of freemium games with social networking features. Activities include clicking on balloons with positive words on them and writing down encouraging recent events. Happify says it works closely with scientific advisers, and several psychology researchers who looked at the site at my request say it appears to be oriented around sound principles from positive psychology, a relatively new subfield based on bolstering positive thought patterns.

But theres clear tension between the companys desire for scientific credibility and its push for user sharing, microblogging, and networking. Happify encourages its users to be as public as possible. Scientific research shows that social support and positive feedback are key to staying motivated on your happiness journey, the website reads. If youd like to interact more with other Happify members, you can update your privacy settings on the Settings page at any time!

That is a stretchquite a bit of one, actually, says Maria Konnikova, a Columbia University psychology researcher who has examined Facebooks impact on user happiness. Theres conflicting work on the effects of social networking sites on happiness. While some studies do show a positive effect, many show the opposite to be the case.

Happify also hasnt undergone the kind of rigorous testing needed to support its prominently displayed claim that 86% of members get happier in two months. Acacia Parks, a positive psychology researcher and one of the companys advisers, allowed me to review an internal document evaluating early data about Happify, and its findings were much more cautious. According to the document, users reported growing happier over time, but its difficult to know what constitutes a clinically significant increase in Happifys happiness scale, which the company says is adapted from established questionnaires used in clinical psychology. The evaluation included no control group, so its difficult to interpret the results.

Theres a controlled trial in the works, says Parks, with plans to submit the results for publication next year. For now, Happify is asking premium users to pay for a service that hasnt been shown to be more effective than free alternatives. Happify co-founder and President Ofer Leidner says, I think it should pointed out how unusual it is for a company to put its framework through scientific studies so early.

The other big problem with Happify is that it doesnt do enough to steer people in serious need of help to more developed resources. While Leidner says, Were not thinking about this as a service for depressed people, the site doesnt offer concrete alternatives, like crisis phone numbers or links, to users who bomb its happiness test. Happify recommends counseling as an option, then resumes promoting its own features, its disclaimer tucked into terms-and-conditions language.

Even if the sites key audience is healthy people who just want to be happier, the authors need to prepare for what happens when clinically depressed or anxious (or people with eating, substance abuse disorders, etc.) use the site, Sonja Lyubomirsky, a happiness researcher at the University of California, Riverside, wrote in an e-mail. Lyubomirsky says Happify asked her to advise the company, but she declined because shed recently given birth.

Happifys long-term challenge is revenue. Leidner says its currently trying to make money by accumulating paid subscribers, though he wouldnt share subscription figures. The company is also weighing other ways to raise revenue in the longer term, he says, including by targeting services to customers based on what theyve revealed in its happiness exercises. A customer looking to change jobs could be offered employment listings or career coaching.

While its easy to envision the lines between research and profits starting to blur, theres a certain genius to this. Someone who might not broadcast unhappiness with their work or home life on Facebook (FB), where hundreds of friends could see, might do so on Happify. Leidner says the company has no specific plans on this front and that any new revenue model would have to pass robust testing.

See the original post here:
Happify Sells Social Networking Science, for Now

Take a look at the next desktop PC or laptop you come across. Odds are good it won't be running an open-source operating system. Microsoft's closed-source Windows has by far the highest share of the PC client operating system market, followed in a distant second by Apple's Mac OS X. Linux and other wholly open source operating systems have only a tiny market share.

It's not hard to see why. Despite the advances made by distributions such as Ubuntu, desktop Linux is still miles behind Windows and OS X in terms of the look, the feel and the slickness that most office workers have come to expect. The vast majority of companies simply aren't prepared to make office workers use an open source OS - and most office workers aren't prepared to use them, either.

Even if you want to stick with a closed source operating system (or, the case of OS X, partially closed source), your business can still take advantage of a vast amount of open source software. The most attractive benefit of doing so: It's generally available to download and run for nothing. While support usually isn't available for such free software, it's frequently offered at an additional cost by the author or a third party. It may be included in a low-cost commercially licensed version as well.

Is it possible, then, to run a business entirely on software that can be downloaded for free? There certainly are many options that make it possible - and many more that aren't included in this guide.

Report: Open Source Should Come First When Choosing New Enterprise IT

Paul Rubens is a technology journalist based in England. Contact him at paul@rubens.org. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline, Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn.

Open Source Office Productivity Suites

Very few companies using Microsoft Office actually require support from Microsoft, so using an open source alternative can make good financial sense. Open-source suites are compatible with Microsoft Office file formats such as .doc and .xls. Though their feature sets aren't quite as comprehensive as Office, that's unlikely to matter - most people only use a fraction of the available features available anyway.

Here are four open source alternatives to Microsoft Office:

More: 5 Free Open Source Alternatives to Microsoft OfficeThat Said ... Despite Bright, Shiny Rivals, Good Ol' Office Still Rules at Work, Study Says

See the rest here:
How to Run Your Small Business With Free Open Source Software