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Engagement in intimate social interactions and relationships has an important influence on well-being. However, recent advances in Internet and mobile…

Nature - The explosion in open-access publishing has fuelled the rise of questionable operators.

We live in a society that is increasingly Internet-centric, and this shift in the way that we communicate, connect, share, and do business with each other has deeply impacted scientific research an...

Software testing, as a major verification and validation activity which revolves around quality tests, is a knowledge-intensive activity. Hence, it is…

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research.

(2019). Facebook’s evolution: development of a platform-as-infrastructure. Internet Histories: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 123-146.

The rise of digital intermediaries such as search engines and social media is profoundly changing our media environment. Here, we analyze how news media organiz...

Since our last report was published in June 2018, the shift in the journalism landscape has been seismic. Advertising revenues have continued to plummet and newsrooms across the country have experienced mass layoffs. In turn, publishers have scrambled to adapt their business models and priorities in an ever-changing and volatile media ecosystem—one still dominated by platforms despite the large-scale public reckoning with their effects on society and democracy. There is no telling how publishers will fare in the coming years as platforms undergo perhaps their most dramatic transformations since their foray into publishing products in 2015. However, one thing is certain: Despite facing increasing antitrust scrutiny and calls for regulation, platforms are more powerful than ever. Over time, they have come to control the online information ecosystem and, increasingly, in the case of Facebook and Google, are among the news industry’s top funders. It is in this context that many of the publishing executives and employees we interviewed described the “end of an era.” But as is clear in the report, this does not mean the end of their cooperation with platforms. It refers, rather, to the end of optimism that scale and ad-based platform products will bring about meaningful revenue and audience growth. From the rise of paywalls and reader revenue initiatives to the diversification of revenue streams through live events and podcasts, publishers are attempting to regain control over the future of their businesses.

Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture

In the last week of April, nearly 23 percent of all traffic to news sites tracked by web analytics firm Parse.ly came from search engines. Google alone accounts for nearly half of external referral traffic—traffic, that is, that comes from platforms, apps, and other outside sources— to news sites. Together with the fact that Facebook […]

Krishna Bharat In the view of some traditional media execs, Google is a digital vampire or a parasite or tech tapeworm using someone else’s content to profit.

Instead of links, Google wants to carry articles from news agencies like The Associated Press to promote "the definitive original copy and give credit to the original journalist."

Google to begin paying News publishers located in Brazil, Germany, and Australia. Other countries are expected to get the same facility soon enough.

The so-called "Google tax" requires aggregators to pay a fee for posting links and excerpts of news articles. Google says it can't afford the expense.

Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager There are more than 25,000 publishers from around the world in Google News today. Th...

Originally posted at my blog: http://wethegoverati.wordpress.com Rocket scientists, software developers, systems engineers, and all the other people that work at Goddard helping us better understand the earth and space are smart. That’s a given. But how do they improve their practice, learn from each other, and continue to improve on overwhelmingly complex tasks? In aRead... Read more »

In December of 2018, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, was asked a set of questions by the United States Congress. His responses left… a lot… to be desired. Thankfully, when I told friends from clickstream data provider Jumpshot about this, they were able to send me numbers that give far better answers to Congress and the American people […]

Responding to the unannounced spiritual mysticism surrounding contemporary technologies, a religiosity present in the prayer-like devotion of social media piety to the cultish intensity surrounding each iPhone launch, this paper aims to dispel presumptions of the spiritual in opposition to the technological by surveying a range of media devices specifically developed for religious purposes. More than connecting scholarship in technology, media and religion, this survey recommends a new arc in the cultural examination of technology. As curious media artefacts, religious devices are independently worthy of study but they also offer a material past to the so-called “religion of Silicon Valley” as well as providing insight to the rituals, superstitions and beliefs of technology users. While recent shifts in religious studies have propelled the field toward computer-mediated communication, this study moves beyond sociological and anthropological concerns to examine the hardware and software of spiritual technologies, thereby connecting the media turn in religious studies with the material turn in media studies.

The dominant word processing program for personal computers in the 1980s was DOS-based WordPerfect. Microsoft Word for DOS, which had been released in 1983, was an also-ran.

Rather than using IBM proprietary components developed for their many other computers, the IBM PC used industry standard commercial parts. That included adopting the Intel 8088 microprocessor as the heart of the computer.

Today is the 30th birthday of MS-DOS. From the archives of PC Magazine, this is the original interview with Bill Gates on the piece of software that would become the foundation of Microsoft.

Due to the increasing amount of scientific work and the typical delays in publication, promptly assessing the impact of scholarly work is a huge challenge. To meet this challenge, one solution may be to create and discover innovative indicators. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether Facebook likes for unpublished manuscripts that are uploaded to the Internet could be used as an early indicator of the future impact of the scientific work. To address our research question, we compared Facebook likes for manuscripts uploaded to the Harvard Business School website (Study 1) and the bioRxiv website (Study 2) with traditional impact indicators (journal article citations, Impact Factor, Immediacy Index) for those manuscripts that have been published as a journal article. Although based on our full sample of Study 1 (N = 170), Facebook likes do not predict traditional impact indicators, for manuscripts with one or more Facebook likes (n = 95), our results indicate that the more Facebook likes a manuscript receives, the more journal article citations the manuscript receives. In additional analyses (for which we categorized the manuscripts as psychological and non-psychological manuscripts), we found that the significant prediction of citations stems from the psychological and not the non-psychological manuscripts. In Study 2, we observed that Facebook likes (N = 270) and non-zero Facebook likes (n = 84) do not predict traditional impact indicators. Taken together, our findings indicate an interdisciplinary difference in the predictive value of Facebook likes, according to which Facebook likes only predict citations in the psychological area but not in the non-psychological area of business or in the field of life sciences. Our paper contributes to understanding the possibilities and limits of the use of social media indicators as potential early indicators of the impact of scientific work.

The present study investigated the relationship between flow experienced when using Facebook (Facebook flow; i.e., experience of intensive enjoyment and pleasure generated by Facebook use due to which the Facebook activity is continued even at high costs of this behavior) and Facebook Addiction Disorder (FAD). In a sample of 398 Facebook users (age: M (SD) = 33.01 (11.23), range: 18–64), the significant positive association between Facebook flow and FAD was positively moderated by the intensity of Facebook use. Exploratory factor analysis revealed that all six items assessing FAD loaded on the same factor as two items belonging to the subscale telepresence of Facebook flow. Therefore, the close link between Facebook flow and FAD may in particular result from the immersion in an attractive online world created by Facebook, where users escape to forget their everyday obligations and problems. Present results provide first evidence that Facebook flow may be an anteceded of FAD and indicate the mechanisms that may contribute to its development and maintenance. Practical applications for future studies and limitations of present results are discussed.

In this study we modelled possible causes and consequences of student burnout and engagement on academic efficacy and dropout intention in university students. Further we asked, can student engagement protect against the effects of burnout? In total 4,061 university students from Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Finland, Serbia, and Macao SAR, Taiwan participated in this study. With the data collected we analyzed the influence of Social Support, Coping Strategies, and school/course related variables on student engagement and burnout using structural equation modeling. We also analyzed the effect of student engagement, student burnout, and their interaction, on Academic Performance and Dropout Intention. We found that both student engagement and burnout are good predictors of subjective academic performance and dropout intention. However, student burnout suppresses the effect of student engagement on these variables. This result has strong implications for practitioners and administrators. To prevent student dropout, it is not enough to promote student engagement—additionally, and importantly, levels of student burnout must be kept low. Other variables such as social support and coping strategies are also relevant predictors of student engagement and burnout and should be considered when implementing preventive actions, self-help and guided intervention programs for college students.