What were the most popular hashtags, topics, and search queries related to content marketing in 2020? SEMrush analyzed more than 600,000 popular tweets posted in 2020 related to content marketing and hundreds of thousands of Google searches conducted in 2020 related to content marketing. The…
Younger generations are actually better at telling news from opinion than those over age 50
According to a new analysis from the Pew Research Center, Americans ages 18–49 were more likely to accurately categorize factual statements as facts and opinion statements as opinions.
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You can test your own ability here, no matter your age.
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Read “What is Fake News” at https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/fakenewsFake News: Sources that intentionally fabricate information, disseminate deceptive content, or grossly distort actual news reports.
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Fake News: Sources that intentionally fabricate information, disseminate deceptive content, or grossly distort actual news reports.
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Satire: Sources that use humor, irony, exaggeration, ridicule, and false information to comment on current events.
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Bias: Sources that come from a particular point of view and may rely on propaganda, decontextualized information, and opinions distorted as facts.
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Rumor Mill: Sources that traffic in rumors, gossip, innuendo, and unverified claims.
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State News: Sources in repressive states operating under government sanction.
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Junk Science: Sources that promote pseudoscience, naturalistic fallacies, and other scientifically dubious claims.
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Clickbait: A strategically placed hyperlink designed to drive traffic to sources that provide generally credible content, but use exaggerated, misleading, or questionable headlines, social media descriptions, and/or images.
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Consider the source (to understand its mission and purpose)
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Read beyond the headline (to understand the whole story)
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Check the authors (to see if they are real and credible)
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Assess the supporting sources (to ensure they support the claims)
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Check the date of publication (to see if the story is relevant and up to date)
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Ask if it is a joke (to determine if it is meant to be satire)
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Review your own biases (to see if they are affecting your judgement)
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Ask experts (to get confirmation from independent people with knowledge).
Fact-checking The sites below generally review specific news stories and claims.
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Can be used to look up quotes and research authors of articles to see their professional credentials.
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Displays news coverage from “left”, “right”, and “center” sources. Use with caution as the categories are generated by users and reflect public perceptions of each news source rather than any actual bias in the individual articles displayed.
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A product of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, this site is terrific for checking up on political claims.
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Fake news database, tasked with “tracking fabricated news created to mislead”
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The Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact researches the claims of politicians and checks their accuracy.
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One of the oldest debunking sites on the Internet, Snopes.com focuses on widely circulating urban legends, news stories and memes.
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Hoax-Slayer specifically focuses on email hoaxes, identity theft scams and spam.
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Focused primarily on political stories.
With the advent of the Internet and social media, news is distributed at an incredible rate by an unprecedented number of different media outlets. How do we choose which news to consume? Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the opinions and facts (and sometimes non-facts) make their way into the news and how the smart reader can tell them apart
Younger generations are actually better at telling news from opinion than those over age 50
According to a new analysis from the Pew Research Center, Americans ages 18–49 were more likely to accurately categorize factual statements as facts and opinion statements as opinions.
-
You can test your own ability here, no matter your age.
-
Read “What is Fake News” at https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/fakenewsFake News: Sources that intentionally fabricate information, disseminate deceptive content, or grossly distort actual news reports.
-
Fake News: Sources that intentionally fabricate information, disseminate deceptive content, or grossly distort actual news reports.
-
Satire: Sources that use humor, irony, exaggeration, ridicule, and false information to comment on current events.
-
Bias: Sources that come from a particular point of view and may rely on propaganda, decontextualized information, and opinions distorted as facts.
-
Rumor Mill: Sources that traffic in rumors, gossip, innuendo, and unverified claims.
-
State News: Sources in repressive states operating under government sanction.
-
Junk Science: Sources that promote pseudoscience, naturalistic fallacies, and other scientifically dubious claims.
-
Clickbait: A strategically placed hyperlink designed to drive traffic to sources that provide generally credible content, but use exaggerated, misleading, or questionable headlines, social media descriptions, and/or images.
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) published a summary in diagram form to assist people in recognizing fake news.
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Consider the source (to understand its mission and purpose)
-
Read beyond the headline (to understand the whole story)
-
Check the authors (to see if they are real and credible)
-
Assess the supporting sources (to ensure they support the claims)
-
Check the date of publication (to see if the story is relevant and up to date)
-
Ask if it is a joke (to determine if it is meant to be satire)
-
Review your own biases (to see if they are affecting your judgement)
-
Ask experts (to get confirmation from independent people with knowledge).
Fact-checking The sites below generally review specific news stories and claims.
-
Can be used to look up quotes and research authors of articles to see their professional credentials.
-
Displays news coverage from “left”, “right”, and “center” sources. Use with caution as the categories are generated by users and reflect public perceptions of each news source rather than any actual bias in the individual articles displayed.
-
A product of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, this site is terrific for checking up on political claims.
-
Fake news database, tasked with “tracking fabricated news created to mislead”
-
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact researches the claims of politicians and checks their accuracy.
-
One of the oldest debunking sites on the Internet, Snopes.com focuses on widely circulating urban legends, news stories and memes.
-
Hoax-Slayer specifically focuses on email hoaxes, identity theft scams and spam.
-
Focused primarily on political stories.
With the advent of the Internet and social media, news is distributed at an incredible rate by an unprecedented number of different media outlets. How do we choose which news to consume? Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the opinions and facts (and sometimes non-facts) make their way into the news and how the smart reader can tell them apart
The Death of Microsoft’s LinkedIn’s SlideShare
In 2016, SlideShare had over 70 million unique visitors per day, and it was listed by Alexa as one of the top 100 most visited websites in the world. At its peak, it was such a powerhouse that Obama used the network to post his birth certificate. It also stood for years as a premier B2B social channel: In 2015, author and marketing expert Jay Baer referred to it as “content marketing’s secret weapon.”
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Top content creator and SlideShare investor Dave McLure hasn’t posted to the channel in over 11 months.
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HubSpot, the content marketing powerhouse that posted over 60 presentations in 2017 and reached over 500,000 users, has posted only once in 2018, reaching a total of just over 1,000 users.
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So what has caused this exodus of power users and decline in social-media prominence? A perfect storm of shifting parent-company priorities, insufficient revenues, and a user base largely outside of the US.
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Kit Seeborg, author of Present Yourself: Using SlideShare to Grow Your Business, was responsible for most of the content curation the users loved, she stressed how important human curation was to SlideShare.
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The curated content was a huge hit. It was also one of the drivers of SlideShare’s email list, which, at the time of LinkedIn’s acquisition of SlideShare in 2012, was growing by 250,000 new subscribers each week. After the sale to LinkedIn, the curation process remained a critical part of community-building, until 2016, when the program was ended. Since then, the homepage has changed very little, which was a major clue to marketing insiders that LinkedIn was giving up on SlideShare.
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During 2016, the team of editors who had been curators for SlideShare were moved off the product to support other LinkedIn projects, such as Pulse. The SlideShare company page on LinkedIn is now blank, with only a few remaining engineers listed as employees.
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Host your own content. There are new plugins for websites which allow you to host your slides on your own website and allow easy sharing and embedding.
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Microsoft may create a social PowerPoint for 365. That is speculation, but now that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, and with the recent move to put Office in the Cloud, we could potentially see a new social aspect of PowerPoint in the future.
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Use Prezi. It’s an alternative to SlideShare, but it does require you create content in Prezi’s own software rather than in PowerPoint; that requirement can be a pain for some.
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Use Google or Dropbox or ISSUU document sharing with their built-in presentation handling.
- First, traffic to Slideshare has fallen off considerably. This is despite the fact that three-quarters of all content marketers are creating more content than ever, according to the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. To be sure not all of that content is in the form of presentations and ebooks that are found on Slideshare.
- Second, Slideshare has jettisoned their editorial team, for the most part. At its apex, part of Slideshare’s appeal was its curation, including regular promotion of new and interesting presentations to the site’s home page in the “Today’s Top Slideshares,” “Featured Slideshares,” or “Trending in Social Media” sections.
- Third, Slideshare now appears to be making puzzlingly awful customer experience decisions. I have no idea if this is correlation or causation.
We May Be Driving and Living in Alexa’s World
- “We had a spectacular holiday,” Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services, said when I called last month to chat about the assistant’s future.
- Amazon is famously cagey about sales numbers, but Mr. Limp braved a slight disclosure: “We’ve said we’ve sold tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices, but I can assure you that last year we also sold tens of millions of just Echo devices. At that scale, it’s safe to now call this a category.”
- At least 50 devices are now powered by Alexa, and more keep coming. They include dozens of Echo-like smart speakers, home thermostats, light fixtures, dashboard cameras, smartphones, headphones, a smoke alarm and a very strange robot.
- But there are also advantages to Alexa’s model for ubiquity. Imagine if you could gain access to your smartphone on just about any screen you encountered. Move from your phone to your TV to your laptop to your car, and wherever you went, you’d find all your apps, contacts and data just there, accessible through the same interface.
- That model isn’t really possible for phones. But because Alexa runs in the cloud, it allows for a wondrously device-agnostic experience. Alexa on my Echo is the same as Alexa on my TV is the same as Alexa on my Sonos speaker.
- And it’s the same even on devices not in your home. Ford — the first of several carmakers to offer Alexa integration in its vehicles — lent me an F-150 pickup outfitted with Alexa. The experience was joyously boring: I called up Alexa while barreling down the highway, and although she was slower to respond than at home, she worked just the same. She knew my musical tastes, my shopping list, the apps and smart-home services I had installed, and just about everything else.
- It was the best showcase of the possibilities of always-on voice computing. In the future, wherever you go, you can expect to talk to a computer that knows you, one that can get stuff done for you without any hassle.