The wildly successful web publication “I F*cking Love Science” currently has over 18 million likes on Facebook. For context, Popular Science has 2.8 million likes, and Scientific American magazine has about 2 million. The publication’s founder, 25-year-old Elise Andrew, has never been affiliated with any mainstream media outlet. She launched her page in 2012, filling it with beautiful scientific images, web comics, and even original articles about the latest scientific news. “IFLS declared, with no hint of irony, that science was amazing,” wrote Alexis Sobel Fitts in a recent profile in the Columbia Journalism Review,” and in desperate need of a digital-age evangelist to spread the word.” Andrew describes her role in a lower-key way: “I’m just telling people things I think are cool.”

A tug of war between Google and German publishers over how online news content is displayed in search results has ended in surrender (for now) for the publishers — who have grudgingly agreed the search giant can display snippets of their content without paying them for the privilege of doing so.

The backstory here is that the German publishing industry lobbied for a copyright law extension at the start of last year to cover so-called news snippets — as they were unhappy that Google’s business was benefiting from free use of their content.

That ancillary copyright law, catchily known as ‘Leistungsschutzrecht für Presseverleger‘ in German, ended up being watered down to excuse Google from a requirement to pay for using snippets.

When the ancillary copyright law came into force in Germany in summer 2013 several major German publishers initially opted not to pull their snippets from Google, presumably fearing the impact of doing so on their traffic — given that other publishers’ snippets would inevitably become more visible in search results.

Change broadens sources of news but also means unexpected surprises, such as today’s F-bomb appearing in Google Search

Google has confirmed that new “In The News” box appearing in some of its search results now lists content from more than just the traditional news sites. Discussions at Reddit, blog posts, videos and more from non-news sites may turn up.

Earlier, Search Engine Land reported how content from Reddit was showing up in the “In The News” box. A Google spokesperson has now told us that it’s not just Reddit that’s being included. Virtually any content might show up in the box, if it’s deemed newsworthy

Reddit, the social news site with a big Web footprint, is raising a big funding round — with help from some of the people who helped launch the site nine years ago, including co-founder Alexis Ohanian and other people associated closely with startup incubator Y Combinator.

Sources said the almost-anything-goes site has reached a preliminary agreement to sell less than 10 percent of the company for more than $50 million. That could give the company a valuation of upwards of $500 million.

Given investors’ new-found appetite for content companies — see: BuzzFeed, Twitch — Reddit’s valuation may swell significantly by the time the deal is done, well above the $400 million it was looking for in 2013.

new information provided by a hawk-eyed backer reveals that the video has more to it than just crappy camera cuts.

Unable to produce a better video, Scribble ditches Kickstarter entirely for Crowdtilt
http://drop-kicker.com/2014/08/unable-to-produce-a-better-video-scribble-ditches-kickstarter-entirely-for-crowdtilt/

After a bizarre decision to completely shut down their Kickstarter campaign rather than simply produce a better product video, the team behind the Scribble Pen went virtually radio silent for over a week despite repeatedly broken promises to relaunch their campaign. They finally broke that silence today revealing some unsettling changes to their project.

The team seems to have abandoned the Kickstarter platform entirely opting instead for CrowdTilt. Considering the huge mass of enthusiastic backers eagerly awaiting the return of the campaign to Kickstarter, this decision can only be explained by the team’s inability to satisfy Kickstarter’s demands.

The Scribble Pen, you may remember, is a project by bay area startup Scribble Technology that puts a color sensor and multiple ink reservoirs in a pen. We’ve talked about it before, right after they cancelled their Kickstarter campaign after netting 366% of their original goal.

Yes, they cancelled their campaign after being successfully funded. To Kickstarter’s credit, the Scribble team was asked to provide a better video of the pen demonstrating its capabilities. The team pulled the plug on the campaign

Here is the new campaign. The attentive reader will notice the new campaign is not a Kickstarter project; instead, it is a Tilt campaign.

With more than $200,000 in the bank, you would think the questions asked in many comments on the old Kickstarter would be answered.

We know what happened with the Scribble pen, but very little about the who, why, and how this huge, glaringly obvious fraud occurred.

From the outside, Scribble appears to be a finely tuned corporate organism; official statements are only made through the Scribble Facebook account, Twitter account, and as comments on the now defunct Kickstarter. It’s an honestly stunning display of staying on message, but something that does not lead to any points of contact within Scribble.

The People
In all the media coverage Scribble has gotten from dozens of tech blogs, we know of only three people who are officially part of the Scribble team.

A Registered Company
Not being able to identify the founders and employees of a company is one thing, but not being able to identify the company itself is another matter entirely.

Trademarks
With any sort of business that is developing something new and novel, it’s a good idea to have a trademark for your business and your product.

The failings of tech journalism

The last time we mentioned the Scribble pen, I noticed something strange about their campaign. They used the Hackaday logo when the only thing ever published here was a single paragraph in a links post calling the entire project ridiculous.

Like many Kickstarters, they had a few logos of blogs and other media outlets below the fold, put there a statement of legitimacy. “These are trusted members of the fourth estate,” the creators of Scribble must have told themselves, “surely telling the world we have the approval of these fine upstanding establishments will lend us an air of credibility and legitimacy.”

There’s a problem with this. When the only thing tech bloggers and journalists have to go on are a few videos, a media kit, and a Kickstarter campaign, the only information available comes directly from the project creators. This inevitably leads to a deafening echo chamber where the same facts are repeated ad nauseam.

The idea of a color picking pen has been around for years, with thousands of people ready to throw their money into a hole in the hopes of getting their hands on one. It makes for great blog fodder and grabs eyeballs, but plugging a Kickstarter simply by repeating what a press release says does the public a grave disservice. Even the more respectable media outlets failed in this regard; the longest articles on Scribble added a little to their page length simply by interviewing the inventors who I’m not sure actually exist.

Given the vast number of tech and design blogs in the last month reporting on the Scribble pen, someone must be held responsible for correcting these grave errors. This responsibility falls on us and other excellent blogs like Drop Kicker.

Newsroom ethnographer Angèle Christin studied digital publications in France and the U.S. in order to compare how performance metrics influence culture.

Online media is made of clicks.

Readers click from one article to the next. Advertising revenue is based on the number of unique visitors for each site. Editors always keep in mind their traffic targets to secure the survival of their publications. Writers and bloggers interpret clicks as a signal of popularity.

The economic realities underpinning the click-based web are well documented. Yet much work remains to be done on the cultural consequences of the growing importance of Internet metrics.

A fascinating and troubling story about a wounded Army veteran has been circulating on the Web this week.

A U.S. Army staff sergeant named Ben Eberle lost his right hand and two legs when he was hit by a makeshift explosive in Afghanistan a few years ago. Through one of the miracles of modern technology, he was able to regain dexterity with a prosthetic hand, which he controlled with the help of an iPod Touch app called i-Limb. But in another terrible misfortune, Eberle lost control of that hand again on Aug. 22 when a thief broke into his pickup and swiped his iPod.

The story, if true, would be galling and poignant on a personal level—a careless thief robbing a brave veteran of his hand for a second time. But it would be even more troubling on a technological level, which is why the story has circulated far beyond San Antonio to outlets like Fox News, the Daily Mail, the Houston Chronicle, Military.com, and the influential tech-news hub Slashdot.

Why on Earth would Touch Bionics’ $75,000 prosthetic limb be locked to a single mobile device?

Somehow, it seems that hardly any of the dozens of national and international outlets that have run with this story bothered to confirm it with Touch Bionics.

“We offer the my i-Limb app for free on the App Store, which can be downloaded to several compatible devices to help program and change settings within the hand’s firmware”

While he can keep the same hand, it’s possible that he’ll have to reprogram some specific settings on his new device

How did almost everyone get this story wrong?

“ecollection was that it was Eberle who thought at the time of the crime that he would need a new prosthetic. Perhaps Eberle himself misunderstood the ramifications of losing his device or was understandably caught up in the frustration of the theft”

Facebook has declared war on “click-baiting headlines”, slamming them as “spammy”.

The social network has noticed that lazy, poorly written headlines that lure in readers with an ultimately unfilled promise are almost universally hated

BuzzFeed and Upworthy-style ‘you won’t believe this’ garbage is drowning out posts on people’s news feeds

Facebook will measure how much time you spend reading a story

“A small set of publishers who are frequently posting links with click-bait headlines that many people don’t spend time reading after they click through may see their distribution decrease in the next few months,”

At The Onion, a fake news website and one of the great satirical outposts of the past 50 years, nearly every image is original: either a graphic created in-house, a photograph taken in-house, or an image so manipulated by Photoshop as to not represent any real event that has ever happened. The tiny graphics team at The Onion pumps out about 50 original pieces of art per week at a time when your average Internet publication arts stories as quickly as possible: with images the subject provided, or photographs from stock agencies and wire services. Nobody sits down and creates original art for a two-sentence post. Yet The Onion does, over and over again. Why bother?

As Stephen Colbert or any great satirist will tell you, a key to satire is to always stay in character. In The Onion’s case, that “character” is an absurd, alternative world invented to comment on the real one. Every aspect of the fake world has to ring true for the trick to work. That includes the visuals. When nothing you publish is real, every single image has to be made from scratch.

There is a real history of The Onion–started by two college students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1988, eventually moved to New York and then, recently, back west to Chicago–but there’s also a fake history created by the writers of The Onion itself.

The Onion’s strange editorial approach–a combination of fake New York Times and fake cheeseball local paper–along with a few other publications taking on other media types.

Today, The Onion has, according to its press site, about 11 million unique visitors a month, and Alexa, the moderately reliable site ranking system, puts it in the top 600 sites in America.

Everything at The Onion starts with the headline.

there are plenty of stories where the image is the entirety of the story: All you see are a headline and an image.

What The Onion does is more difficult than it seems; just look at less successful copycats