Street Fight Daily: Facebook Moves Against Click Bait, Location Tracking Widespread
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology
Facebook Takes Steps Against ‘Click Bait’ Articles (New York Times)
Facebook announced on Monday that it had adjusted the way users see articles on its site to reduce what it called “click bait” — items that tempt readers with a beguiling headline, but don’t deliver much more. The move is the latest development in a battle between the company and the sites that try to use the Facebook algorithm to rank articles to their advantage.
Why Factual’s Gil Elbaz Sees Renewed Promise in Contextual Computing (Street Fight)
An early pioneer in data analytics who was instrumental in developing one of Google’s most profitable advertising products, Factual CEO Gil Elbaz believes that one of the technological challenges at the heart of that company’s ascent will come back into the spotlight.
For Sale: Systems That Can Secretly Track Where Cellphone Users Go Around The Globe (WashingtonPost)
Makers of surveillance systems are offering governments across the world the ability to track the movements of almost anybody who carries a cellphone, whether they are blocks away or on another continent. Surveillance systems are secretly collecting these records to map people’s travels over days, weeks or longer.
Hyperlocal Chat App Yik Yak Bets Big On Anonymity (Street Fight)
Atlanta-based Yik Yak finds itself at the center of one of the quickest growing and most divisive trends in social media: anonymity. The company, which raised $10 million in June, has developed an app that serves as a local chat room where users can post whatever they want anonymously.
Uber CEO Pounces on DUI Arrest of California Lawmaker (Wall Street Journal)
Uber Chief Executive Travis Kalanick seized on the opportunity Monday to flag what he saw as a bit of ironic news: A California state senator was arrested for driving while under the influence of alcohol, hours after voting for legislation that would further regulate ride-sharing services such as Uber.
Google “Knowledge Vault” To Power Future Of Search (SearchEngineLand)
Greg Sterling: Google’s Knowledge Graph is being used to supply increasing amounts of structured content in PC and mobile search results. Now Google is developing a successor knowledge base of content that will eventually supersede Knowledge Graph and be far more extensive.
One Stop Stores To Launch Beacon Service (Financial Times)
Customers at Tesco-owned convenience stores will soon find their smartphones offering them bespoke discounts, in the first UK-wide rollout of Apple’s beacon technology. A national British commercial campaign using the US technology group’s in-store beacon system will be launched next week by magazine group IPC Media in 740 One Stop stores.
Mobile Accounts For 43 Per Cent Of Travel Website Traffic (Mobile Marketer)
Mobile browsing now accounts for 43 per cent of all traffic to travel websites, up 34 per cent year-on-year, and predicted to pass 50 per cent by early 2015. The figures come from a new survey by digital and IP consultancy Nucleus, which showed that luxury travel sites outpaced mainstream ones, with up to 55.4 per cent of traffic coming from mobile.
How Does Zillow’s CEO Manage? By Learning (Fortune)
What’s fascinating about 38-year-old Rascoff’s approach is how much he recognizes he and his company still have to learn. Starting with a network of personal relationships with other CEOs, man, Rascoff has built out a formal and informal system of sharing ideas and best practices among his peers.
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