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Former Swedish Pirate Party leader and Internet activist Rick Falkvinge launched a new venture yesterday. Intended to rival established media, Falconwings provisions quality news bulletins that are easily shared via the project's automated image creation process. A total of 600 writers are being recruited, with the sole criteria being the ability to consistently author summaries of 450 characters, split into three principle sentences: Fact, Background and Satire.
Initial signs have been promising, with the various tweets from candidates exceeding expectations in terms of quality and audience.
Are there any budding Soylentils interested in giving this a try?
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Rick Falvinge Launches News Bulletin Service
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Either I'm dead or my watch has stopped.
-- Groucho Marx's last words
(Score: 4, Interesting) by skullz on Tuesday June 16 2015, @10:06PM
Okidoki, a few things.
They list 30,000 impressions as their tipping point. I'm assuming these are impressions of the little "advertisement" in the upper right, but you have to manually type that URL (with a crappy font) in to have it counted as an impression. So he got over 30,000 impressions from people looking at a link describing what the tweeted image was about. Because they wanted to learn more. How will this work with a link to burma-shave?
Assuming that some trick can be done to get people to actually click on a link to a hosted site with the full image (and ads) the whole 400-ish char limit is basically a glorified tweet. You have a biting story about government this or that, and your manifesto says you value facts, but you don't have enough space to actually link to sources? Are we supposed to just take what you are saying as fact? You are only left with the reporter's reputation for a measure as to the validity of the story.
It's an interesting idea but I just don't see how it can get beyond the initial tweet.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday June 16 2015, @10:38PM
With the image format they're also asking for misrepresentation, especially since the big font in their example linked to in the summary uses that font in 4chan image macros.
So a competitor or a horde of bored punk kids can create fakes ones that are credible enough to be believable but unsavory enough to cause others to lose interest. Then the real authentic ones would be like getting a post from a chan, except without all those things that make chan posts great -- the most significant being the honesty that can come with political incorrectness. Then the fakes will be more amusing to read than the real ones.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 17 2015, @11:53AM
impressions
My guess is this implies no click thru. So no "click here to punch the monkey and infect windows PCs with god knows what" but they will have an interesting time trying to sell "major accounts" like Pepsi or Ford.
An honest critique would be financial news would probably be easier to sell ad space. Not serious real news like zerohedge but the infotainment stuff like CNBC. Those tv channels are clogged with brand awareness advertisements, so surround them with fluff and collect the dough. The problem is nobody finds CNBC and the like very interesting and there's no "signalling" utility like there is with a business putting a financial channel on in a public place.