Review: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford

by | 28 Sep, 2014 | Narratives & Meanings

3/5 stars

Interesting, but frustratingly messy in places.

Bookended by the author’s personal experiences hunting for Genghis’ final resting place, and explaining the persecutions the Mongol people have experienced in the last century or so along the way, the majority of the book is a fairly straight narrative of the rise and fall of the Mongol Empire, constantly at pains to point out that they weren’t a bunch of bloodthirsty barbarians.

As someone new to the subject, this was all interesting enough – but a) I was reading this to understand the post-Mongol impact on the world (as promised by the title) , not how they achieved power, and b) there was consistently far more emphasis on the eastern branch of the Empire in China than on the Middle Eastern, Indian or Russian wings.

This seems especially odd considering that:

  1. the author emphasises how much of the Mongols’ innovations in China were deliberately suppressed after their fall,
  2. the Indian branch lasted the longest,
  3. the Middle Eastern angle could have surely been tied in to the instabilities and rivalries in that region that have lasted to the present day, and
  4. that he starts and ends with personal accounts of Soviet repression of Mongol memory, implying that there remains some deep Russian connection.

None of these things are elaborated on at any length, which is a real shame, as the author is mostly good on his supposedly central thesis of how important the Mongols were on the creation of the modern world (although he is decidedly shaky on specifics in some areas).

I ended up left with the distinct impression that the book the author wanted to write was about the life, culture and history of the Mongol people, but his publisher insisted on something a bit more sellable, so tacked on the modern world pitch. The two parts may well have worked better as separate books.

What I’ve been working on for the past year

by | 9 Sep, 2014 | Systems & Technology

Here it is. The new, multiplatform MSN.

The new MSN - customisable

Engadget has a solid overview piece.

The content proposition is fairly straightforward – a customisable mix of useful tools and the best content from many of the world’s biggest publishing brands across a bunch of key topic areas or verticals, curated by teams of in-market editors.

The aim on a technical level is actually the most interesting part of it – we’ve been developing a cloud-hosted CMS that enables single-publish across all devices and platforms, for both web and apps, running across 55 markets in 27 languages, with a coherent look and feel no matter your screen size or operating system. That’s properly ambitious.

Most of my input has been procedural (improving multimarket and multiplatform publishing processes) and hidden in the back end (I was part of the CMS superuser group that’s been working on back-end UX and workflow). I’ve not had as much involvement in the front-end design, architecture, or overall content strategy as I’d like, but still – a most definite improvement on one of the web’s longest-running major publishers (20 years old this year, and still doing a good 22 billion pageviews every month).

Please keep Twitter pure

by | 6 Sep, 2014 | Systems & Technology

The filtered feeds of Facebook (and LinkedIn) are the things I dislike most about them, the unfiltered most recent first approach of Twitter what I love about it, so this possibility that Twitter’s going down the algorithmic-filter route worries me – and not just because of recent concerns voiced over how algorithms can affect net neutrality and news reporting.

I very much hope Twitter at least retains the option of turning on the firehose, though I fully get the need to tame the chaos with some kind of algo or filter to pull in new users. Not everyone can get to grips with lists and Tweetdeck – too confusing for the newcomer.

Now don’t get me wrong: algorithmic filtering has its place. One of my favourite apps is Zite, and I was an early adoptor of StumbleUpon (well over a decade ago) – precisely because of their ability to get to know my interests and serve me up interesting content from sources I’d usually not discover by myself. For Facebook to offer up this kind of service, with its vast databases of its users’ Likes, makes perfect sense (though I’d still prefer a raw feed, or category feeds, so I can split off news about the world from news about my actual friends – a new baby or a wedding is not the same as a terrorist attack).

This is why I love Twitter – it is raw, unfiltered. And at 140 characters a pop, it’s (more or less) manageable. Especially if these old stats are still accurate, suggesting the majority of Twitter users only follow around 50 other accounts. If you end up following a few hundred, you’re already a power user, and likely know order them via lists. If you end up following a few thousand, then frankly you no longer care if you miss a few things.

Could Twitter be improved with a bit of algo? For sure. Why am I only ever shown three related accounts when I follow a new one? Why isn’t MagicRecs built in?

But the fact is we’ve already got this option on Twitter – it’s called the Discover tab. And I never use it, because it somehow manages to feel even more random than the raw feed. The problem isn’t a lack of algorithms, it’s a lack of intelligent algorithms, intelligently integrated.

The “Netflix of News” and the death of the publishing brand

by | 4 Sep, 2014 | Marginalia

I loved the concept when I first heard about it, and love that it seems to be working. Proof of concept done – now it’s time to take that concept and expand. Preferably globally.

In short, it’s a cunning system that allows you to pay for individual articles from publications, thus avoiding the constant fustration of not being able to read that great piece from the likes of the FT, Times or Economist because it’s hiding behind a paywall.

If this sort of thing takes off, it could be a whole new business-model – making paywalls more viable, while allowing monetisable ways around them.

But there’s also an interesting quote from Blendle’s founder:

“People want to read articles or want to follow specific journalists but aren’t particularly interested in the newspaper that it comes from anymore.”

This is especially true in the age of social, where URL-shorteners are so endemic that half the time you have no idea which site you’ll end up on.

I’ve got used to reading content that’s been de-branded via a hefty RSS addiction. That’s been replaced in recent years with an addiction to aggregation apps like Zite, Flipboard and Feedly, where what matters is the content itself, not the packaging, or where it’s from.

If the content is good enough, it will stand on its own – it won’t need to hide behind the brand. In fact, the brand can sometimes be a disadvantage, because it leads to preconceptions that can skew the reader’s opinion before they’ve even started to read a piece. There are some publications I avoid simply because I assume that they have nothing to offer me, for reasons of politics, prejudices, or whatever – and I know I’m far from being alone in this.

Remove the publication’s branding and present me with their content as is, would my preconceptions be different? Of course. And if I like the content, this could win them a new long-term reader.

Numbers are our friends

by | 2 Sep, 2014 | Marginalia

Useful look at how detailed, adaptable, *tailored* performance data (and people who know how to analyse and explain it) is essential if you want to be successful in modern media. As so often, Buzzfeed seems to be ahead of the curve.

It never ceases to amaze how often online publishers get het up about the wrong metrics. Tools like Omniture are obscenely powerful, yet all we tend to use them for is to find PVs, UUs, occasionally time spent, and sometimes how particular headlines are performing. Used properly, web analytics can help us keep our sites in a state of constant evolution, adapting to the tiniest shifts in user behaviour through minor design/code tweaks.

This isn’t about becoming Keanu Reeves and learning how to read the Matrix – it’s just knowing how to use the tools that are available to us.

Journalistic quality vs the money men

by | 29 Aug, 2014 | Marginalia

Useful study on metrics vs journalistic pride, but leaves out a key aspect: the sales guys – because this is how the money is made and the metrics are ultimately determined.

Time was, quality audiences would be worth more to advertisers than quantity. Why hasn’t online ad selling (and buying) caught up yet? Only when it does will there be incentive to move beyond page views and unique users as the key metric. Programmatic ad sales could be the answer, or could worsen the situation further – too early to tell.

Anyway, worth a read:

“Online media is made of clicks.

Readers click from one article to the next. Advertising revenue is based on the number of unique visitors for each site. Editors always keep in mind their traffic targets to secure the survival of their publications. Writers and bloggers interpret clicks as a signal of popularity.

The economic realities underpinning the click-based web are well documented. Yet much work remains to be done on the cultural consequences of the growing importance of Internet metrics.

I conducted two years of ethnographic research (observing newsrooms and interviewing journalists, editors, and bloggers) exploring whether web analytics are changing newsroom cultures. The answer is a qualified yes, but in ways that differ from the ones we might expect.”

Twitter launches analytics

by | 27 Aug, 2014 | Marginalia

Twitter Analytics will be fun and useful, but why no ability to sort by best/worst performers? How can we tell what does/doesn’t work if we can’t see what does/doesn’t work? Intro here. Analytics themselves here (you need to activate before you’ll start seeing stats).

Vox to open their CMS up to everyone?

by | 26 Aug, 2014 | Marginalia

Oh yes please!

I’m a massive CMS geek, yet in well over a decade and a half of online publishing, I still haven’t found one I truly adore. Mid-period WordPress came close, but now it’s too complex and chunky. Buzzfeed’s seems decent, from what I’ve seen. The one they have at ITV News looks great, from the screenshots. But I hear truly great things about the Vox Chorus CMS.

Want!

A golden age for journalism

by | 25 Aug, 2014 | Marginalia

Lots to agree with here:

“by some measures, journalism has never been healthier. And there’s every reason to believe that it is actually getting stronger because of the web, not weaker — regardless of what’s happening to print”

Are jobs being lost? Yep. Are publications shutting down? Yep. But are readers getting more of what they want? Yep.

My only worry with this optimistic take on the current situation is that, despite years of worrying about it, and over a decade of confident assertions that hyperlocal “citizen journalism” will fill the void left as uneconomic newspapers shut down, there is still a major risk that many communities will be left without a reliable source of local news coverage.

I’m based in London, so there are any number of hyperlocal Twitter accounts and small blogs covering the area, but none of these are comprehensive, even combined, and few have the skills or abilities to dig deeper into what’s going on in the local council. Local newspapers were never especially economically worthwhile, but they did (well, sometimes) provide a valuable public service in holding local government to account – something they were only really able to do because of the level of access they were afforded by their permanent, professional position.

On a local level, as local papers shut, the most common publication to fill the void isn’t a blogger, it’s an official local government publication – we’re replacing public service for propaganda.

This is the most important thing about clickbait you’ll read today*

by | 24 Aug, 2014 | Marginalia

* assuming you don’t read anything else about clickbait today

This article focuses on content produced by content marketers, but applies just as much to regular publishers who are constantly trying to ride the latest wave of social media fads to suck in a few unsuspecting punters with low-rent, instantly-forgettable clickbait. Short, cheap, trend-driven / fast-turnaround content may well help you hit short-term engagement metrics, but will long-term kill audience retention:

“The internet is ballooning with fluff, and bad content marketing is to blame. In our obsession with ‘engaging’ our ‘audience’ in ‘real-time’ with ‘targeted content’ that goes ‘viral,’ we are driving people insane… When a publishing agenda is too ambitious, people can’t afford to shoot anything down… They’re under too much pressure to fill… slots”

I particularly like the concept of “click-flu” – the sense of annoyance and disappointment you get (both with the content and, more importantly, with yourself) when you click on a clickbaity link, and the page you end up on fails to deliver on its hyperbolic promise. The resentment builds and builds – and over time, leads to hatred of the people who lured you in time and again.

If you make a big promise, as so many of these “This is the most important thing you will see today” clickbaity headlines do, you’d damned well better live up to it.

Who’s the competition in the future of news?

by | 21 Aug, 2014 | Marginalia

People are starting to fully wake up to this now – in the mobile-first age, competitors are no longer just other publishers, it’s *everything*, so we all need to start thinking bigger. Good piece as ever from Mathew Ingram on Gigaom:

“very few news apps take advantage of the qualities of a smartphone — things like GPS geo-targeting, which could use the location of a reader to augment the information they are getting, the way the Breaking News app does. Or the brain inside the phone itself, which could compute how long it took a reader to get through a story, how many times they returned to it, what other news they’ve been consuming, and so on”

A number of sites and apps have started to do *some* of this, but very few have managed to pull it all together. Give it a couple of years, and we may finally have a *properly* disruptive news delivery system that combines the best of everything. Combined with increasingly intelligent algorithms and reams of data on individual user preferences, this could get rid of the need for editor selecting stories altogether. But despite ongoing experiments in code-written stories, to do this really well will still take humans producing the copy and vetting the info. The journalist isn’t obsolete yet.

Algorithms and the news agenda

by | 17 Aug, 2014 | Systems & Technology

Well worth a read on the Ferguson riots, and how different social media sites (notably Twitter vs Facebook) served up news about them:

“Now, we expect documentation, live-feeds, streaming video, real time Tweets… [Ferguson] unfolded in real time on my social media feed which was pretty soon taken over by the topic…

And then I switched to non net-neutral Internet to see what was up. I mostly have a similar a composition of friends on Facebook as I do on Twitter.

Nada, zip, nada.

This morning, though, my Facebook feed is also very heavily dominated by discussion of Ferguson. Many of those posts seem to have been written last night, but I didn’t see them then. Overnight, “edgerank” –or whatever Facebook’s filtering algorithm is called now?—?seems to have bubbled them up, probably as people engaged them more.

But I wonder: what if Ferguson had started to bubble, but there was no Twitter to catch on nationally? Would it ever make it through the algorithmic filtering on Facebook? Maybe, but with no transparency to the decisions, I cannot be sure.

Would Ferguson be buried in algorithmic censorship?

Would we even have a chance to see her?

This isn’t about Facebook per se—maybe it will do a good job, maybe not—but the fact that algorithmic filtering, as a layer, controls what you see on the Internet. Net neutrality (or lack thereof) will be yet another layer determining this. This will come on top of existing inequalities in attention, coverage and control.”

It’s a continual worry – how to ensure we see what’s important? Though, of course, the concept is nothing new – the algorithm is just an editor or an editorial policy in a different form. It’s something I’ve written about before when it relates to the EU, focusing on a BBC editorial policy that fails to cover EU affairs in mainstream news most of the time, and then serves up extremes.

This kind of human editorial determination of the appropriate news agenda based on perceived audience interests is arguably no massive degree different from a Facebook algorithm determining what is important based on how it interprets user interests. If anything, there’s a strong argument to be made that Facebook knows its audience better than any editor on any publication or TV show ever, due to the sheer quantities of data it possesses on its userbase.

But then what of *importance* – who determines this? Who overrides the algorithmic or standard editorial policy assumption? Is there a chance that an important story will get buried because a bit of code doesn’t see it as significant? Yes. But the same is true of any number of important news stories that human editors don’t pick up on, or choose to bury on page 23 because they don’t think their readers will be that interested.

As so often, the web may be a bit different, but there’s nothing that *new* here.

Web writing, hate reading, and the decline of quality

by | 16 Aug, 2014 | Systems & Technology

Nothing new, but this is worth a read on web writing and hate-reading – that old trick of being as controversial as possible in order to get an extreme response, purely because extremes get more attention, and in a pageview-driven business model, controversy is seen as good purely because, based on the metrics, it’s the controversial stuff that’s driving engagement.

This infantile attitude of provocation to get attention is increasingly being combined with ream upon ream of cheap content, because the more content you’ve got, the more potential PVs you can attract. We end up with the most depressing (and false) equation of online publishing:

Cheap content + Controversy = Clicks = Cash

It’s an attitude that’s lazy *and* massively short-termist in thinking – over the long term, quality can and should trump quantity. But even if it doesn’t, cheap, crappy content is a turn-off for audiences. The more sites that start to rely on hastily-produced, poorly-checked copy, or lazy semi-plagiarisms of things that desperate teams of poorly-paid hacks with deadlines and quotas to hit have found elsewhere, the less distinctive sites get, and the fewer returning visitors you’ll get. As that linked article puts it:

“With a business model based on a ton of cheap content, Web publishers can rely too heavily on acid-reflux-style aggregation, in which young writers destroy the savor of interesting stories and an interesting world by constantly regurgitating the news with added bile.”

There’s also an interesting point made from John Waters in the Irish Times (now behind a paywall), on the impact of comment sections under online articles:

“Because everything written specifically for online consumption is written in the expectation of addressing a hostile community, the writing process demands, as a prerequisite, either a defensive or antagonistic demeanor.”

Having learned my online publishing trade in the realm of message boards, chatrooms and blogs, I’m incredibly aware of the vast levels of bile that exist in comment sections. But it doesn’t have to be this way. With careful community management, it’s perfectly possible to build online communities that are supportive, friendly, and constructive, rather than the supposed default of objectionable and offensive. Check out the likes of b3ta, imgur and Metafilter for some prime examples of sites with vast *positive* communities of commenters. And then contrast those with the comments sections of pretty much any national newspaper site – packed with trolls and maniacs.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Odd numbered lists are good, says science

by | 5 Jul, 2014 | Marginalia

We still don’t know why, though…

“There are many more listicles of length 10 published compared to other numbers. This is primarily because BuzzFeed is selling the 10-length listicle to partner brands, such as the Michael J. Fox Show, Nordstrom Topman, and Buick. The second most popular length is 15, followed by 12. Listicle length drops off quite rapidly in the 20’s, although surprisingly, lengths 11-21 are far more popular than those under 10…

“If we look the bar chart by audience score we see a completely different picture — odd number length listicles… tend to have a higher audience score on average, where in our dataset, the number 29 tends to have an advantage over the rest.”

How to write clearly

by | 28 Jun, 2014 | Marginalia

I usually hate tips for writers – writing, to me, should be a natural thing. But having seen a lot of very bad writing, more concerned with showing off the writer’s linguistic skill or subject-matter expertise than enlightening the reader, this approach strikes me as vital to keep in mind at all times:

Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone else’s attention to something visible. Imagine stopping during a hike to point out a distant church to your hiking companion: look, over there, in the gap between those trees – that patch of yellow stone? Now can you see the spire? “When you write,” Pinker says, “you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that’s interesting, and that you’re directing the attention of your reader to that thing.”

Perhaps this seems stupidly obvious. How else could anyone write? Yet much bad writing happens when people abandon this approach. Academics can be more concerned with showcasing their knowledge; bureaucrats can be more concerned with covering their backsides; journalists can be more concerned with breaking the news first, or making their readers angry. All interfere with “joint attention”, making writing less transparent.

This isn’t a “rule for writers”; it’s a perspective shift. It’s also an answer to an old question: should you write for yourself or for an audience? The answer is “for an audience”. But not to impress them. The idea is to help them discern something you know they’d be able to see, if only they were looking in the right place.