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Posts Tagged ‘New York’

New York Times Reduces Character Limit of Readers’ Comments by 60%

21 Jun


The New York Times has announced it’s cutting the character limit on site comments from 5,000 to 2,000. In Twitter terms that’s like going from 36 tweets to slightly more than 14 — a 60% drop.

According to a note on the site’s homepage Monday, “The shorter length will allow for an improved experience for commenters and readers alike.”

The statement is good news for readers who roll their eyes when commenters hog the soapbox. But for Internet users who view commenting as an opportunity to see reactions that would have otherwise been limited to personal letter or email, it’s a step in the wrong direction. Though 14 tweets’ worth of discussion is still a fair amount, the change opens the door for further character cutting in the future.

The new limit was inspired by feedback from readers and Times employees, Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news, told The Wrap.

“5,000 [characters] is a lot,” Pilhofer said. “That’s not a comment, that’s an article.”

The shorter character limit will change community behavior. Readers who are used to writing essay-length comments may become more blunt as they aim to get to their point faster. Or they may work around the limit by breaking thoughts into multiple comments. Still, the shorter length will help Times moderators get through comments more quickly, allowing them to quell inappropriate threads with greater speed.

In late May the BBC dropped its limit to 400 characters — 20 characters less than is allowed for a Facebook status update.

The BBC’s character cut inspired Martin Belam, lead user experience and information architect at The Guardian, to survey the comment character counts of a range of U.S. and UK news media sites. Here’s a sample of his findings, updated to include The New York Times‘ recent change:

Website,Comment Character Count
BBC News400
Facebook (status update)420
YouTube500
Daily Mail1,000
The Huffington Post1,800*
The New York Times2,000
The Sun2,000
The Washington Post3,000
The Times (U.K.)3,000
The Guardian5,000
Facebook (comment)8,000
CNN10,000
Al Jazeera10,000
The Telegraph10,000

*The actual limit imposed on Huffington Post is 250 words, which equates to 1,820 characters.

What do you think of The Times‘ comment character cut? Will it truly make for a more inviting commenting space or is the site infringing on commenters’ rights? Sound off in the thread below — we won’t cut you off.

Mashable’s comment character limit: 16,384

More About: commenting, comments, community, new york times

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18 Sites for Finding Startup Jobs

10 Sep

Though it may seem like many of the job opportunities in the United States have dried up as of late, you can find a wealth of job postings on the Web that may be right up your alley. From programmers to promotions, there are many startup companies looking to hire just the right people for the positions they have open.  These 18 services represent a mixture of well-known mainstream sites and companies that focus on nothing more than listings in the Web 2.0/startup market.

Have you had success using these sites? Tell us more in the comments.

General Job Site Startup Listings

AOL.CareerBuilder.com - The nice thing about the AOL.CareerBuilder.com site is that you have the salary range listed on the summary page as opposed to having to go into each listing.

Jobster.com - While they have a startups section, finding Microsoft intermixed in their thousands of listings makes you think it’s more a general technology area.

Monster.com - One of the longest running online job sites has numerous job listings for startups that you can search by company, date, job title or relevance.

Yahoo Hot Jobs - Yahoo’s job listings includes numerous listings for jobs at startups, most of them seem to be centered on the technical side.

Startup Specific

AsiaWired.com - Looking for startups in Asia?  This may be the solution for you.

CoNotes.com - Focusing on nothing but jobs at startups, CoNotes has been around since 2007.

Dice.com - Browse jobs by city or pull up the category that applies to your skill set.

ejob.com - ejob focuses on staffing needs in and around Silicon Valley.

GoBigNetwork.com - A one-stop-shop for startups to form business plans, find funding and locate employees that can fulfill their needs.

HotStartupJobs.com - Aggregates startup listings from a multitude of sites.  You can read a lengthier write up of HotStartupJobs by our own Paul Glazowski here on Mashable.

Jobs.Mashable.com - Our very own marketplace features categories for listing jobs and looking for them also.

NeoHire.com - Lets you look up jobs by category, add them to your basket as you find ones that interest you and then apply to all of the ones you’ve saved.

nPost.com - Besides offering numerous job listings at startups, they have 225+ interviews with people from some of the companies explaining what they are about and what they are looking for in an employee.

StartupAgents.com - Both startups and potential employees can set up profiles to try to find the perfect match for each other.  The service is completely free to potential employees, but will cost employers to contact potential hires.

StartupJobs.biz - A small jobs board with unique listings that you can search by type of job or occupation.

Startuply.com - Covers various industries related to Web 2.0 and startups, lets you also browse by job type.

StartupZone.com - Allows you to search jobs by occupation, location or even what stage of funding they are in.

VentureLoop.com - Provides internship listings for students at certain schools and has job listings you can search by country or occupation.

Image via CoNotes

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Buddy Media Gives Social Marketers Front Row Campaign Access With BuddyBrain

10 Sep

Buddy Media has for some time been acting as a multi-faceted guide to businesses in an online setting that increasingly calls for investment in social integration and social marketing. The company has done everything from managing fairly common-seeming advertising campaigns to developing social applications. Today it unveiled a service called BuddyBrain for “app-vertisers” to more closely observe and manage intel emerging from campaigns conducted in the social realm.

BuddyBrain is segmented into four main quadrants: project center, intelligence center, reference tools, and social wire. A dashboard offering a view of information culled from each sector acts as a sort of welcome screen to one’s account. Naturally, active projects are shown with especial prominence on the page. And beneath the surface, data provided by most every component held within the application is elegantly presented. Details have been well attended to.

The company is issuing this command center as a kind of organizational utility. Better to grasp the workings of the social application space, observe media chatter, maintain focus on the ABCs of project development and execution. And also to, in the words of CEO Michael Lazerow, “entice more brands to make the leap into social advertising and to better service our existing clientele” by keeping to an order of accountability and results. Of course, any reasonable intimation of the marketing space will regard such attentions as crucial. The purpose of BuddyBrain is really to wrap several pieces into one streamlined setup.

In addition to its case-by-case, client-by-client analysis, Buddy Media says the utility’s analysis also makes evident some broad, industry-wide findings. The company provides as an example an aggregate reading of its own most popular “app-vertisement” campaigns:

140,000 installs within 30 days of the start of a campaign;

Those users interacting with said applications spend roughly 2 and 1/2 minutes with each, a time span clearly assessed to be far greater than banner ads and television spots;

85% of users returned for more time spent, and over half returned semi-regularly within 30 days of installation.

We spoke yesterday about media and business and its growing role in the social sphere online - and how various specialists are catering services to the branded world to better connect to citizens of the cloud. Buddy Media is no doubt striving to bring more parties to the table and for those parties present to engage at higher levels still. Its resume includes brands such as Anheuser Busch, Fox, HBO, Microsoft, and Facebook, and ad agencies OmnicomGroup, Universal McCann, JWT and WPP. And it seems safe to presume BuddyBrain, having availed users this palette of applications, will only catalyze growth further.

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Related Articles at Mashable - All That's New on the Web:

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Making Facebook Apps Continues to Pay Off for Buddy Media
Buddy University: Attack of the Facebook Clone
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Sprout Raises $5 Million For Web-Based Flash Creation Tools

 
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