Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 90
August 29, 2017
Facebook says Pages that regularly share false news won’t be able to buy ads
Facebook says it’s taking another step against Pages that share fabricated news stories.
The company has already been working with outside fact-checkers like Snopes and the AP to flag inaccurate news stories. (These aren’t supposed to be stories that are disputed for reasons of opinion or partisanship, but rather outright hoaxes and lies.) It also says that when a story is marked as disputed, the link can can no longer be promoted through Facebook ads.
The next step, which the company is announcing today, involves stopping Pages that regularly share these stories from buying any Facebook ads at all, regardless of whether or not the ad includes a disputed link.
Facebook was criticized last year for its role in helping to spread of fake/false news. (The company is using the term “false news” for now — “fake news” has become heavily politicized and almost meaningless.) Product Director Rob Leathern said the company has been trying to fight back in three ways — ending the economic incentive to post false news stories, slowing the spread of those stories and helping people make more informed decisions when they see a false story.
In this case, Leathern said blocking ad-buying is meant to change the economic incentives. Facebook is concerned that “there are Pages posting this information that are using Facebook Ads to build audiences” to spread false news. By changing the ad policy, Facebook makes it harder for companies to attract that audience.
Facebook isn’t specifying the exact numbers of disputed links a Page can share before it gets blocked — after all, the company doesn’t want people to try to game the system — but Leathern said, “Obviously, it’s not a single instance. It’s a repeated pattern of misinformation.”
He also noted that the ban on buying ads isn’t necessarily permanent. If a Page stops sharing false stories, it should eventually be able to buy ads again.
Source:
Facebook says Pages that regularly share false news won’t be able to buy ads
August 27, 2017
August 24, 2017
The Battle Continues Between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash
The less than one-month-old digital currency Bitcoin Cash recently experienced a significant reduction in its mining difficulty following a difficulty adjustment. The code specifies that if not enough blocks are found in a certain period of time, a difficulty adjustment will occur.
As a result of this 60% reduction in difficulty, the cryptocurrency temporarily became more profitable than Bitcoin to mine. Bitcoin Cash, for a time, attracted nearly 40% of Bitcoin’s miners.
Because of the huge surge in hash power and the low difficulty, Bitcoin Cash’s network produced the requisite 2016 blocks very quickly, and now another difficulty adjustment has occurred. Bitcoin Cash is now much harder to mine and is less profitable than mining Bitcoin. Miners have now abandoned Bitcoin Cash in droves, causing block times on the network to exceed six hours.
Bitcoin Cash, was created in early August by developers who were unhappy with Bitcoin’s adoption of SegWit and its shunning of larger block sizes. Since both Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin use the same proof-of-work to safeguard their transaction histories, both networks are now effectively competing for hash power as miners continue to mine the more profitable chain.
Bigger question looming
In November, the Bitcoin network is set to once again decide on an upgrade. At that time, the 2 MB blocksize of the SegWit2x agreement will be implemented. While the vast majority of miners and exchanges are apparently supporters of this, Bitcoin’s core development team is strongly opposed.
Since the 2 MB blocksize increase will be a hard fork, there’s a chance that Bitcoin’s core team and their supporters will continue mining the legacy chain after the upgrade occurs. That could result in two different networks competing for the “Bitcoin” name.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin Cash’s price has dropped to slightly below $600 from a high of $1,000. The price of Bitcoin, has maintained stability in the $4,000 to $4,500 range for several days.
Source:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/the-battle-continues-between-bitcoin-and-bitcoin-cash
Ways You Can Attract the Traffic You Want to Your Affiliate Site
Keep in mind that even if your content is already generating traffic, the traffic you’re generating may not be the right kind. Your goal should be to attract shoppers. And, to do that, you need to optimize your website for shoppers. Here are four steps you can take to begin attracting more targeted traffic to your website.
1. Optimize for keywords with commercial intent.
At first, your content strategy may revolve around choosing keywords that are easy to rank for, or those that will drive a lot of traffic.
While traffic volume is an important metric overall, driving a lot of traffic to your site may not do much to earn you affiliate commissions. And that may mean your conversion rate isn’t very high.
This might result because the keywords you’re using lack commercial intent. This means keywords that buyers are using to search for products they’re interested in. It stands to reason that if you target keywords buyers are using, you’ll have a better chance at converting them.
Your keywords, in fact, may be way off base: Words like “really,” “hilarious,” “actually,” “accidentally” — and others you’re likely to find in BuzzFeed titles — will drive a certain kind of traffic. But that may not be the type to help you generate a high number of sales.
Instead, look for opportunities in words like “discount,” “sale,” “best” and so on. These words often align with buying intent.
Naturally, you’ll want to do your own keyword research for best results. So, optimize keywords for commercial intent instead of traffic, and you should begin to see your conversions improve.
2. Avoid competitive keywords.
Much has been said about long-tail keywords. Today, ranking for keywords that are too competitive is an uphill battle at best. There are major contenders in every significant market.
You’ll find it valuable to trim down and target keywords that are dense and more specific to your niche, as opposed to general terms like “Amazon,” “guitar,” “music,” “insurance” and so on.
On his blog, Neil Patel discusses various long-tail keyword case studies. He offers insights into terms like “call to action examples,” “problems with Fiberglass pools,” “how to write email subject lines” and why these terms have worked.
Again, you’ll want to tailor your approach to the specific products you’re promoting. Bluetick offers follow-up email services, which can be an incredibly valuable way of capitalizing on your niche by retargeting visitors who have an initial intent to purchase.You will also need to combine what you now know about keywords with commercial intent to make this all work. There’s a difference between traffic and highly targeted traffic.
Still, discovering where the opportunities are for you is a process that may not yield quick results. Fortunately, there are many ways to conduct your keyword research and even reverse-engineer what your competition is up to.
3. Understand your analytics and track your primary keywords.
If you aren’t tracking and measuring how your site is performing, you’re essentially going at this blind and likely missing several opportunities.
You need to keep an eye on the keywords you consider most important in your market. After all, you’re working hard to rank and maintain your rank with these terms. You don’t want your competition swooping in and siphoning off your traffic and sales, especially if this is preventable. You can create a free account with Moz to begin tracking five keywords per day. This is a great way to start, and to focus on your most important keywords.
Beyond that, also install the Google Analytics tracking code on your site so you can conduct a more in-depth analysis on traffic numbers and sources. You’ll find many opportunities with a bit of digging. Another helpful resource for affiliate marketers is HumanProofDesigns. The site is dedicated to helping marketers get to revenue quicker, and has a myriad of tools to help you succeed in your online venture.
4. Monetize international visitors.
Developing content that capitalizes only on an American audience can cause you to miss out on international sales. If you have the ability to talk to international buyers, or at least send them to the right places with your links, you could boost your affiliate commissions in a significant way.
This is where a tool like geni.us comes in. You may have had issues with your links not directing your visitors to the right places, particularly with buyers worldwide. Geni.us makes it easy for you to create links that work in any country, for any store and for any device or OS. You can rest assured knowing you’re capitalizing on every opportunity by implementing this tool.
Ultimately, your content may be reaching more people than you’re aware of, and that’s something you will uncover from your analytics. Getting your content ready for international buyers could help you boost your commissions, leading to an increase in revenue.
Final thoughts
Succeeding in affiliate marketing may require considerable effort, but it does work. Just look at Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income or John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneurs on Fire. They earn a lot of money from affiliate marketing alone — never mind their other income sources — and even publish monthly income statements that can show you what’s possible. If they can do it, so can you.
Source:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/298433
Amazon: We’re lowering Whole Foods prices on Monday
The tech giant said Thursday that its takeover of Whole Foods will close on Monday. The first order of business will be to make some items more affordable, according to a release.
“Whole Foods Market will offer lower prices starting Monday on a selection of best-selling grocery staples across its stores, with more to come,” the company said in a statement.
That’s good news for Whole Foods critics, who have long bemoaned the grocery store’s high prices.
Amazon is also planning to bring some of its tech savvy into the Whole Foods business model — specifically by allowing Amazon Prime members to use their memberships at Whole Foods checkout and get special discounts.
“Everybody should be able to eat Whole Foods Market quality — we will lower prices without compromising Whole Foods Market’s long-held commitment to the highest standards,” Jeff Wilke, CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consume, said in a statement.
Source:
http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/24/news/companies/amazon-whole-foods/index.html
Tanzania Gears Up To Become A Nation Of Medical Drones
Eight-year-old boy bitten by dog. Two-year-old child with severe anemia. Mother, age 24, bleeding severely at childbirth.
Entries like these popped up as Keller Rinaudo browsed a database of health emergencies during a 2014 visit to Tanzania. It was “a lightbulb moment,” says the CEO and co-founder of the California drone startup Zipline.
Rinaudo was visiting a scientist at Ifakara Health Institute who had created the database to track nationwide medical emergencies. Using cell phones, health workers would send a text message whenever a patient needed blood or other critical supplies. Trouble is, while the system collected real-time information about dying patients, the east African country’s rough terrain and poor supply chain often kept them from getting timely help. “We were essentially looking at a database of death,” Rinaudo says.
That Tanzania trip motivated his company to spend the next three years building what they envisioned as “the other half of that system — where you know a patient is having a medical emergency and can immediately send the product needed to save that person’s life,” Rinaudo says.
Today the story comes full circle as Tanzania’s government makes a special announcement: In early 2018 the nation will start using Zipline drones for on-demand delivery of blood, vaccines, medications and other supplies such as sutures and IV tubes.
Last fall, Zipline deployed 15 drones serving 21 clinics from a single base in a smaller neighboring country, Rwanda. The delivery operation planned for Tanzania would be the world’s largest — 120 drones at four bases serving more than 10 million people at 1,000 clinics across the country. Zipline’s 30-pound electric drones fly 68 mph to health centers up to 50 miles away. The drone service costs about the same amount as delivery using traditional road vehicles, says Rinaudo, a Harvard graduate who built DNA computers inside human cells and constructed a rock-climbing wall in a dorm basement before setting his focus on drones.
Tanzania’s drone delivery service, in partnership with the country’s ministry of health, is set to launch in its capital city, Dodoma, in January. Three more distribution centers will be added in the country’s northwestern corner and Southern Highlands later in the year.
Other countries, even the U.S., are taking note. In addition to its Africa initiatives, Zipline is trying to bring drone delivery service to rural U.S. communities and Native American reservations.
“Most people think of new, advanced technology starting in the U.S. and trickling down to Africa,” he says. “This is a total overturning of that paradigm.”
Source:
Barnes and Noble Nook Press is Purging Erotica Titles
Barnes and Noble Nook Press is a self-publishing solution for indie authors. The bookseller has changed their policy agreement and has begun to suspend accounts and purge all erotica titles from their system. 50,000 titles have been removed in the last 24 hours, some of them are written by best selling romance authors.
The Nook Press Policy Agreement was recently amended to make hardcore erotica titles a violation. On August 21st 2017 the following email was sent out to a few hundred authors “Your NOOK Press account has been placed on hold and all of your NOOK Books are currently unavailable for sale from the NOOK Bookstore because there is a business concern with your account. Please email us using this form for information on why your account has been placed on hold and to discuss any necessary next steps to reactivate your account.”
On August 26th another email was sent out to not only the authors who received the first one, but many who published romance books. “We have determined that many of your titles available for sale are in violation of our Content Policy. Accordingly, the offending titles have been removed from sale and your account is being terminated. We will pay out any and all outstanding royalties during the next payment period. If you attempt to publish similar content under a different account, we will terminate that account as well and withhold royalties from those sales.”
A number of authors who’ve received the notices have taken to social media to vent their frustrations. In a blog post about the situation author Georgette St. Clair said she would have acted to conform to the content policy, had she known it was needed. She writes: “I have never gotten a single warning or complaint from B&N about any of these titles; if I had, I would have taken it down immediately.”
Selena Kitt, another author who complained publicly about the situation, said B&N acted “without warning” in canceling her account, and the accounts of other authors. She added that B&N’s claims that she and others had violated Nook’s content guidelines rung hollow as those guidelines were “non-existent until August 16 or so. We’ve had the same content published on their site for years.”
The new terms are very subjective and one erotica tiltle can have your entire account suspended or terminated. This is wide scale.
Source:
https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/barnes-and-noble-nook-press-is-purging-erotica-titles
The Joker Origin Story On Deck
I’m told that the intention is to make an origin story that isn’t part of any other iteration. The Joker has memorably been part of two Batman movies in the form of Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, and was most recently played by Jared Leto in the first Suicide Squad film. He will reprise in the Suicide Squad sequel and the Harley Quinn spinoff, but this new film will launch the character with a different actor, possibly younger.
An intriguing part is the setting. The intention is to make a gritty and grounded hard-boiled crime film set in early-’80s Gotham City that isn’t meant to feel like a DC movie as much as one of Scorsese’s films from that era, like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull or The King Of Comedy. I’m told that Phillips and Silver are writing already, but there is nothing firm on where this will fit into the DC schedule.
Phillips most recently directed War Dogs with Jonah Hill and Miles Teller. Silver’s recent script credits include The Fighter.
Phillips and Silver are repped by CAA, and Scorsese is repped by WME and LBI Entertainment’s Rick Yorn.
Source:
The Joker Origin Story On Deck: Todd Phillips, Scott Silver, Martin Scorsese Aboard WB/DC Film
Facebook will livestream 15 upcoming college football games
Facebook secured exclusive rights to livestream college football games during the upcoming season, starting with a pair of games on September 2nd. Users worldwide need only visit the sports network Stadium’s Facebook page to watch the matches, or they can view them on the social network’s recently-launched Watch platform.
Facebook’s been pushing hard to snag athletic events it can livestream, but it’s not alone, tussling with Snapchat and Twitter for the rights to upload clips of the 2018 World Cup. Facebook did make a deal with Major League Baseball to start broadcasting games every week back in May, but college football has its own rabid fanbase.
Fans will get a few extras if they tune to the Stadium page on game day, including a curated chat with football personalities. It’s a good deal for folks following these particular teams, but it’s still an incremental victory in the perpetual tug-of-war between all the top social platforms jockeying for more sports content.
Here’s the full schedule of games, per TechCrunch:
Saturday, Sept. 2: Miami (OH) at Marshall, 6:30 p.m. ET
Saturday, Sept. 2: UC Davis at San Diego State, 8:30 p.m. ET
Thursday, Sept. 7: Idaho State at Utah State, 8:00 p.m. ET
Saturday, Sept. 9: New Mexico State at New Mexico, 8:00 p.m. ET
Saturday, Sept. 23: FIU at Rice, 7:30 p.m. ET
Saturday, Sept. 23: Utah State at San Jose State, 7:30 p.m. ET
Saturday, Sept. 30: Texas State at Wyoming, 4:00 p.m. ET
Saturday, Oct. 7: Southern Miss at UTSA, 7:00 p.m. ET
Saturday, Oct. 14: Wyoming at Utah State, 4:30 p.m. ET
Saturday, Oct. 21: Rice at UTSA, 7:00 p.m. ET
Saturday, Oct. 28: FIU at Marshall, 2:30 p.m. ET
Saturday, Nov. 4: North Texas at Louisiana Tech, 3:30 p.m. ET
Saturday, Nov. 11: Southern Miss at Rice, 3:30 p.m. ET
Saturday, Nov. 18: Marshall at UTSA, 7:00 p.m. ET
Saturday, Nov. 25: FAU at Charlotte, 2:00 p.m. ET
Source:
https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/23/facebook-will-livestream-15-upcoming-college-football-games/
Facebook now lets you shoot 360-degree photos inside its app
Facebook has allowed users to upload and view 360-degree photos for a little over a year now, but the social media platform is also adding the ability to capture them, too. Starting today, both the iOS and Android versions of the Facebook app will allow users to create 360-degree photos without requiring a third-party app or camera.
Of course, since phones don’t have 360-degree cameras built in (yet, at least), the process resembles how you create panoramas in your phone’s camera app. To create 360-degree photos inside the Facebook app, scroll to the top of the News Feed and tap the “360 Photo” button. Then slowly spin around for a full turn, all while keeping the the graphic centered in the middle. When it’s finished, you can pick the “starting point” for the photo and publish it. You can even set it as your cover photo.
Since that capture process isn’t instantaneous, the update only applies to 360-degree photos for now. While Facebook supports 360-degree videos, you’ll still need to shoot those with a camera like the Samsung Gear 360, Insta360, or Nikon KeyMission 360, and upload them separately.
Source:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/23/16190584/facebook-360-degree-photos-app-camera
