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Being naturally an Eeyore type of personality, I’m not sure that I can deal with the findings in this article… But I guess they’re bang-on, and the conclusions are thought-provoking
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Emotion = distributionI can tell you, anecdotally, that for our Twitter feed, @niemanlab, one of the best predictors of how much a tweet will get retweeted is the degree to which it expresses positive emotion. If we tweet with wonderment and excitement (“Wow, this new WordPress levitation plugin is amazing!”), it’ll get more clicks and more retweets than if we play it straight (“New WordPress plugin allows user levitation”).
For harder data, check out some work done by Anatoliy Gruzd and colleagues at Dalhousie University, presented at a conference last month. Their study looked at a sample of 46,000 tweets during the Vancouver Winter Olympics and judged them on whether they expressed a positive, negative, or neutral emotion. They found that positive tweets were retweeted an average of 6.6 times, versus 2.6 times for negative tweets and 2.2 times for neutral ones. That’s two and a half times as many acts of sharing for positive tweets.
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And from the conclusion:
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on the whole, figuring out how to make people want to share your work with their friends generates a healthier set of incentives than figuring out how to manipulate Google’s algorithm. Providing pleasure — pleasure that someone wants to share — is not an inappropriate goal. And when you broaden out beyond “positive emotions” to the idea of driving arousal or stimulation — positive or negative — the idea starts to fall a little more neatly into what news organizations consider their job to be.
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Technology Will Make Collaboration Your Next Competitive Advantage – Technology Review
Intro, after which the author summarizes 7 trends relating to collaboration:
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Since the dawn of managerial capitalism, collaboration and work have almost always been synonymous. People need other people to realize their greatest impact, and innovation, perhaps the most valuable activity in business, depends critically on the kind of cross-pollination of ideas that collaboration enables.
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1.Consumerize everything.
2. It’s all about the culture.
3. Cherish your experts, not your documents.
4. Build the 24-hour knowledge factory.
5. Mandate structure within the social cacophony.
6. Tap the wisdom of your crowd, and any crowd.
7. Keep it real. -
Publishers Look Beyond Bookstores to Help Sales – NYTimes.com
Another indication that authors have to think entrepreneurially themselves, perhaps figuring out (ahead of their publishers or distributors) where their books might go, aside from the traditional bookstore…
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Publishers have stocked books in nonbook retailers for decades — a coffee-table book in the home department, a novelty book in Urban Outfitters. In the last year, though, some publishers have increased their efforts as the two largest bookstore chains have changed course.Barnes & Noble has been devoting more floor space for displays of e-readers, games and educational toys. Borders, after filing for bankruptcy protection in February, has begun liquidating some 200 of its superstores.
“The national bookstore chain has peaked as a sales channel, and the growth is not going to come from there,” said David Steinberger, chief executive of the Perseus Books Group. “But it doesn’t mean that all brick-and-mortar retailers are cutting back.”
A wide range of stores better known for their apparel, food and fishing reels have been adding books. The fashion designer Marc Jacobs opened Bookmarc in Manhattan in the fall. Anthropologie has increased the number of titles it carries to 125, up from 25 in 2003. Coldwater Creek, Lowe’s, Bass Pro Shops and even Cracker Barrel are adding new books. Some mass retailers, too, are diversifying — Target, for instance, is moving away from male-centered best sellers and adding more women’s and children’s titles this year.
Having a physical outlet for books is extraordinarily important, publishers say. While online and e-book sales are huge channels, lesser-known books can get lost in that world if they do not have a physical presence to spur interest. The ability to catch a shopper’s eye in a store is almost impossible to mimic online.
So publishers are approaching just about anyone with a shelf.
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Zombie subdivisions and post-bust detritus – This Land’s blog – Boston.com
Fascinating. Valuable land being squatted by plats (as it were) that will never be built, vs. being occupied by humans or wildlife or flora and fauna. Meanwhile, I’d say places like Victoria are on to something when they allow for legal secondary suites in traditionally single-family homes. How else to make sense of 6K-sq.ft. McMansions that will sit idle?
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…recognize the changing market for housing that is steadily turning away from the purchase of single-family homes, said Arthur C. “Chris” Nelson, professor at the University of Utah. In the coming years, households with children will drop, and the market will be dominated by aging baby boomers — but millions of them will be trying to sell their own homes, creating oversupply, and more interested in multifamily and renting. “We’re overbuilt by about 28 million homes on large lots considering demand by 2020,” Nelson said.
The bottom line, said Holway, who is leading research on what is also known as obsolete or premature subdivisions: “It’s not just a crash. It’s going to be different when (the market) comes back.”
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