Reviews on Amazon are becoming attack weapons, intended to sink new books as soon as they are published.

In the biggest, most overt and most successful of these campaigns, a group of Michael Jackson fans used Facebook and Twitter to solicit negative reviews of a new biography of the singer. They bombarded Amazon with dozens of one-star takedowns, succeeded in getting several favorable notices erased and even took credit for Amazon’s briefly removing the book from sale.

“Books used to die by being ignored, but now they can be killed — and perhaps unjustly killed,” said Trevor Pinch, a Cornell sociologist who has studied Amazon reviews. “In theory, a very good book could be killed by a group of people for malicious reasons.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

{ Brazilian site that builds fake girlfriend profiles on Facebook for 3, 7 or 30 days depending on your chosen plan }

{ 1. Kevin Systrom, co-founder and CEO of Instagram | 2 }

{‘Instagram’s suicide note.’ | Instagram is changing its terms of use in January }

{ WTF? Myspace grows 1% as Facebook falls 10% }

A growing number of professionals are using social media to build a personal, public identity—a brand of their own—based on their work. Think of an accountant who writes a widely read blog about auditing, or a sales associate who has attracted a big following online by tweeting out his store’s latest deals.

Co-branded employees may exist largely below the radar now, but that’s changing fast, and employers need to start preparing for the ever-greater challenges they pose for managers, co-workers and companies. Their activities can either complement a company’s own brand image or clash with it. Companies that fail to make room for co-branded employees—or worse yet, embrace them without thinking through the implications—risk alienating or losing their best employees, or confusing or even burning their corporate brand.

Part of this change is generational. Younger employees show up on the job with an existing social-media presence, which they aren’t about to abandon—especially since they see their personal brands lasting longer than any single job or career.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

photo { Anuschka Blommers & Niels Schumm }

A worrying trend has emerged in which a writer’s success has come to be measured by the number of views and comments elicited by his or her writing. Those same writers have, in a matter of a few years, adopted a new publishing ethos in which they post their thoughts, opinions, and writings on the plethora of blogging sites currently available. The generation of bloggers, many of whom started out as newspaper writers and later moved to electronic publishing, didn’t stop there—they expanded their commenting activity to their personal Facebook pages. […]

Facebook users find themselves in the position of a superstar or a prophet, needing to utter profound statements and expecting the cheers of the crowd. As it becomes easier and easier for people to connect, this loop tragically kills conversations and exchanges them for the proclamations of ignorant judges who know nothing of the world but their own personal narratives and verdicts.

{ e-flux | Continue reading }

The sort of person who says “free speech” when they mean “I like doing creepy things to other people without their consent and you can’t stop me so fuck you ha ha ha ha” is pretty clearly a mouth-breathing asshole who in the larger moral landscape deserves a bat across the bridge of the nose and probably knows it. Which is why - unsurprisingly - so many of them choose to be anonymous and/or use pseudonyms on Reddit while they get their creep on.

{ John Scalzi/Gawker | Continue reading }

Bobbi Duncan desperately wanted her father not to know she is lesbian. Facebook told him anyway.

One evening last fall, the president of the Queer Chorus, a choir group she had recently joined, inadvertently exposed Ms. Duncan’s sexuality to her nearly 200 Facebook friends, including her father, by adding her to a Facebook Inc. discussion group. That night, Ms. Duncan’s father left vitriolic messages on her phone, demanding she renounce same-sex relationships, she says, and threatening to sever family ties. […]

Soon, she learned that another choir member, Taylor McCormick, had been outed the very same way, upsetting his world as well.

The president of the chorus, a student organization at the University of Texas campus here, had added Ms. Duncan and Mr. McCormick to the choir’s Facebook group. The president didn’t know the software would automatically tell their Facebook friends that they were now members of the chorus.

The two students were casualties of a privacy loophole on Facebook—the fact that anyone can be added to a group by a friend without their approval. As a result, the two lost control over their secrets, even though both were sophisticated users who had attempted to use Facebook’s privacy settings to shield some of their activities from their parents.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

photo { Ray K. Metzker }

“If we can utilize Twitter and Facebook to integrate our brand with other established players, we stand to boost our profile in all the key demographics,” said the 33-year-old Brooks, who last night lay in bed staring at the ceiling, tears dripping down his face as he realized the thing he puts so much effort into is so vacuous and void of meaning that his younger self would be disgusted by his pursuit of an occupation that ultimately doesn’t need to exist.

{ The Onion | Continue reading | Thanks Rachel }

photos { Stacy Mehrfar and Amy Stein | Janine Antoni }

The rise of social photography means that we are now seeing images all the time, millions of them, billions, many of which are manipulated with the same easy algorithms, the same tiresome vignetting, the same dank green wash. […]

All bad photos are alike, but each good photograph is good in its own way. The bad photos have found their apotheosis on social media, where everybody is a photographer and where we have to suffer through each other’s “photography” the way our forebears endured terrible recitations of poetry after dinner. Behind this dispiriting stream of empty images is what Russians call poshlost: fake emotion, unearned nostalgia. According to Nabokov, poshlost “is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.”

{ Teju Cole | Continue reading }

photo { Nan Goldin }

If you’re unusually insightful and perceptive, like me, you may have noticed that boastfulness is increasingly socially acceptable these days. […]

With so many more channels through which to manipulate one’s public image, it’s not especially surprising that we are tempted to present ourselves as positively as possible. The filters of social media make things worse. A network such as Twitter is designed precisely to connect you with exactly the kinds of people who don’t mind your boasts, while those who might keep you in check won’t follow you in the first place: your audience thus serves as an army of enablers, applauding your self-applause. […]

But, as the Wall Street Journal noted this week, in a worried piece headlined Are We All Braggarts Now?, the causes may be economic, too. In the most competitive job market in recent memory, the pressure to portray yourself as better than everyone else is intense. Predictably, there’s neuroscientific evidence to undergird all this: self-disclosure activates the same brain regions as eating or sex, according to research by Harvard neuroscientists.

{ Oliver Burkeman/Guardian | Continue reading }

photo { Charlie Engman }

What causes some photos, videos, and Twitter posts to spread across the internet like wildfire while others fall by the wayside? The answer may have little to do with the quality of the information. What goes viral may be completely arbitrary, according to a controversial new study of online social networks. […]

The team built a computer simulation designed to mimic Twitter. In the simulation, each tweet or message was assigned the same value and retweets were performed at random. Despite this, some tweets became incredibly popular and were persistently reposted, while others were quickly forgotten.

{ New Scientist | Continue reading }

Researchers have found a way to predict a news story’s popularity — with an astounding 84 percent accuracy.

{ The Atlantic | full story }

images { Twitter Batman | New Twitter bird }

Free services in exchange for personal information. That’s the “privacy bargain” we all strike on the Web. It could be the worst deal ever. […]

Why do we seem to value privacy so little? In part, it’s because we are told to. Facebook has more than once overridden its users’ privacy preferences, replacing them with new default settings. […]

Even if you read the fine print, human beings are awful at pricing out the net present value of a decision whose consequences are far in the future. […] The risks increase as we disclose more, something that the design of our social media conditions us to do. […]

Imagine if your browser loaded only cookies that it thought were useful to you, rather than dozens from ad networks you never intended to interact with. […] There’s a business opportunity for a company that wants to supply arms to the rebels instead of the empire.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

photo { Leonard Freed }

HorrendousRex
No one seems to have mentioned it, so I’ll point out that this looks like an M4 Carbine with iron sights, without any magazine inserted (and I have to imagine no bullet round chambered, either).
It appears to have no attachments besides the iron sights, which I thought is surprising as I thought that the foregrip and picatinny rail and ACOG scope were standard attachments for the IDF. I would imagine this is because she is a new recruit (mentioned elsewhere in the thread). [Edit: Apparently no M4 attachments are standard in the IDF, they are either soldier-purchased or disbursed for relevant combat roles.]
The gun might also be the M4A1 automatic variant of the M4, but without any modifications I don’t really know how to tell. [Apparently it might also be a short-barreled variant of the M16 - but isn’t that what an M4 is?]
The umbrella stands belong to “Carlsberg” pale lager, a product of the Carlsberg Group. Their motto is “Probably the best beer in the world”, but it is not the best beer in the world.
I’m having trouble identifying the bikinis but the girl with the gun seems to be wearing a mismatched set, as is often the fashion.
The ass is good.

voodoopredatordrones
you just Sherlocked that picture…for no apparent reason

lampkyter
If he really Sherlocked it he would have told us something like how many times she’s had sex.

imatosserama
I can’t definitively say how many times, or if, she has had sex. What I can say is that it is unlikely that either of the two had orgasmed earlier that day.
Look at the way they hold their hips. When a woman orgasms, there is an involuntary relaxation of several of the hip muscles. The hips are carried in a way that looks relaxed and comfortable, rather unlike the somewhat stiff postures we see here. This effect usually lasts for several hours.
Of course, they could have had sex. Quite a lot, even. But it seems unlikely that they reached an orgasm that day. I could be wrong. But it seems unlikely. A more definite conclusion could be reached if we had a video of them walking.
Edit for proof: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18637995

{ reddit | Continue reading }

Facebook is just another ad-supported site. Without an earth-changing idea, it will collapse and take down the Web. […]

The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

Human beings are motivated to form and maintain interpersonal relationships. In this context, self-presentation and self-disclosure have been described as strategies to initiate the formation of relationships: Especially in early stages, people have to attract the attention of others by means of self-presentational behavior. Therefore, presenting him- or herself in a positive and elaborated way can be seen as one way to establish new contacts and thereby satisfy the so-called need to belong. The term “impression management” aptly describes this strategy “to convey an impression to others which it is in his interests to convey.” In real-life situations, these impression management behaviors consist of intentional verbal communication (speech, written texts) as well as of possibly unintentional nonverbal expressions.

Nowadays, with the help of social networking sites (SNS) on the Internet such as Facebook, further possibilities are given to present oneself to others: Users can, for instance, upload photographs, join groups, and provide personal information. Thus, each profile owner can make use of these specific features by selecting information which presents him/her in a positive and attractive manner. This online impression management can therefore also be useful to attract potential partners. According to previous studies on Web 2.0, self-presentation is one of the major motives for using these websites, besides communicating with friends and finding new contacts. […]

An analysis of 100 online profiles showed that singles disclosed more photographs of themselves on their profiles than people in relationships. The highest numbers of friends and wall postings were shown by people who did not reveal their relationship status. Singles displayed more groups on their profile and were more likely to join user groups dealing with parties, sexual statements as well as fun and nonsense.

{ Cyberpsychology | Continue reading }

Adscend Media agreed not to spam Facebook users and pay US$100,000 in court and attorney fees, according to the settlement. […] Adscend Media’s spamming generated up to $20 million a year.

{ IT World | Continue reading }

To justify its sky-high valuation, Facebook will have to increase its profit per user at rates that seem unlikely, even by the most generous predictions. Last year, we looked at just how unlikely this is.

The issue that concerns many Facebook users is this. The company is set to profit from selling user data but the users whose data is being traded do not get paid at all. That seems unfair.

Today, Bernardo Huberman and Christina Aperjis at HP Labs in Palo Alto, say there is an alternative. Why not  pay individuals for their data? (…)

If buyers choose only the cheapest data, the sample will be biased in favour of those who price their data cheaply. And if buyers pay everyone the highest price, they will be overpaying.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

drawing { Tracey Emin, Sad Shower in New York, 1995 }