Jamie Beckland

Why the future of #music is brighter than ever. Hint: a smaller industry is better for the art formMany hands have been wrung about the future of music. The music industry has seen year over year of increasingly steep declines for a decade. Think about that for a minute: in 2001, the business fell by [...]

Why we must solve the #contentstrategy challenge to move the web forward #ux #contentThe magazine industry is running a new campaign that declares that people surf online, but “swim in magazines.” On the one hand, it’s a rather obvious way to distinguish the (in some circles) questionable future of magazines. On the other hand, the [...]

As e-commerce growth flattens, online video differentiates in a crowded space. #vcsummit recapE-commerce is hitting a wall. The growth in e-commerce is slowing, and it’s slowing fast (yes, that is a pun). From 2008 to 2013, the rate of e-commerce growth is projected to slow from 13% to 8%. Now, please don’t think me a Chicken [...]

In-depth review of 10 social media management platforms – plus needs checklist for marketers #SoMe #SoMeMaAfter working with the social media management space for a number of months, and watching a new industry being born, I thought it was about time for a comprehensive review of the products and tools that are out there. You [...]

Mo data, mo problems: the perils and promise of massively huge data setsThe era of big data is upon us. Over the past 20 years, we have seen a huge increase in the amount of data that the world produces. And it continues to grow. IDC estimates (PDF) that the world will have 988 exabytes [...]

Do you Turk? How to jumpstart semantic and social sites with original contentOne of the big challenges with social websites is getting them off the ground in the first place. It’s not Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams – just because you built it, does not necessarily mean they will come. And, there’s nothing sadder than [...]

Use game mechanics to improve online interactionsTotal read time: 5 minutes Games have been around for thousands of years. But while Go and Chess are complicated (and have even been proven to correlate with intelligence), for most of history, games have not been taken seriously. Until video games came along. In the span of 30 years, [...]

Why Web3D – the hottest tech trend of 2008 – has failed (hint: it's a cost-benefit analysis)With recent developer conferences from Facebook and Twitter, and the forthcoming Google I/O conference, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the breathless excitement of possibility. It gives tech blogs many millions of pageviews to chronicle each minor announcement as [...]

How @thecadmus filters Twitter to show what's actually importantSpend any time on Twitter, and you quickly learn that looking at the unfiltered feed of tweets is like drinking from a firehose. There are a number of human ways of getting around this problem: setting a “Twitter check” appointment, or only reviewing certain Twitter lists. But, [...]

The four ways to build resonance with Twitter's Promoted TweetsToday Twitter announced their advertising platform, called Promoted Tweets. Twitter’s focus on message resonance is a large step forward in content marketing because it uses algorithms to determine valuable content within advertising units. This convergence of paid and earned media tactics raises the importance of effective content marketing [...]