Remember sweating over your Klout score? Seven years ago, Klout arrived, and suddenly, there was a way to measure your social media influence across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and more with a simple score. Must read: How has Google dodged data privacy issue? It’s the ROI In 2011 and 2012, we were obsessed with Klout. If you had a high Klout score — 77 here at its high, which was nothing to sneeze at — life was great. If it was low, you felt blue, and you tried hard to get your score back up. When Klout hiccuped and dropped everyone’s social influence score to…
Author: Loknath Das
Protests over land or services – what researchers have dubbed “a rebellion of the poor” – usually enter mainstream media as a traffic problem. If the protest is significant, like the one in the Siqalo informal settlement in Mitchells Plain, it might enter the evening television news bulletins or the next day’s newspaper. Then it is usually reported as an orgy of violence with images of burning, looting and barricading. Until recently, mainstream media would have largely set the agenda for the public understanding of these events. One characteristic of such coverage was that the voices of poor people would…
Pre-internet, the extent to which we knew about each other was the extent to which we volunteered information about ourselves. We generally kept our business to ourselves, and we were happy in our ignorance. We had a work life and, at the end of a long day, we went home to a personal life. Today we’re exposed to abundant details about our friends and family, including hundreds or thousands of “friends” we don’t even know. It’s the largest personal soapbox the world has ever known and we welcome anyone who’ll listen. We snap selfies over breakfast, film ourselves feeding the dog and host…
\ Not long ago, workers were personnel. Then, sometime in ‘80s, they became human resources. Today employees are often referred to as human capital. And it’s not just a semantics difference. The term human capital signifies that an employee’s value can be measured and increased through investments in training, benefits, compensation and so on. (For example, the Society of Human Resources Management offers reports benchmarking human capital.). And, of course, as the value an organization places on its workers grows, the software to manage HR functions and human capital has evolved as well. HRIS vs. HCM Today, you’ll see both human resource…
Something for the Weekend, Sir? “I want you to kill Barbra Streisand.” Yup, no problem, I’ll enjoy doing that. Anyone else? “Kylie Minogue. And bloody Madonna, I can’t stand her any more.” Consider them bumped off. It’s sounding a little misogynistic, though. Are you sure? “Leave Chaka Khan alone.” Fine, Chaka survives to sing another day. Anyone else you want wiped out? “Bros.” Now you’re talking. As you might have guessed, faithful reader, I have been tasked by The In-No-Way-Radioactive One with pruning an improbable list of some 563 MP3s that have been generically tagged Hits from the Eighties. The source material is sitting…
Just who is in-charge of updating the Social media accounts of one of the key ministries? This is the question people are asking after information that was deemed not related to the docket was recently posted on the ministry’s official Twitter handle. Interestingly, the CS and PS were both tagged in the post. See Also: Ask your mother! Sabina Chege responds to a man who asked about Wazir Chacha On noticing the gaffe after the tweet was widely shared by other users, whoever is in charge of the account deleted the embarrassing Tweet. See Also: Sonko asks what he should do about blogger who insulted him-…
Each day, hundreds of millions of people document and share their experiences on social media, from packed parties to the most intimate family moments. Social platforms let us stay in touch with friends and forge new relationships like never before, but those increases in communication and social connection may come at a cost. In a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers showed that those who documented and shared their experiences on social media formed less precise memories of those events. In a series of three studies led by Diana Tamir of Princeton University, researchers explored how taking…
FATHER of the bride Thomas Markle does some royal revision online as he prepares for daughter Meghan’s wedding day. The silver surfer searched for the latest on the 36-year-old actress and groom Prince Harry. Thomas, 73, viewed pictures of the pair and read news items about them during 20 minutes at an internet café in the town where he lives. He could have been seeking last-minute material for his wedding speech — a tradition for the father of the bride. A source said: “Thomas lives in a fairly remote spot and his internet regularly goes down. He can find himself cut off from…
Broken internet companies would seem to have a leg up on other kinds of struggling firms. They don’t have the high fixed costs and stodgy culture of broken companies in conventional industries like General Electric. Being nimble and responsive to change is what internet companies do. You know where this is going. It turns out it’s incredibly tough to nurse an internet company back to health. A classic example is Yahoo Inc., about which former CEO Marissa Mayer recently said, “All we really managed to do was offset the declines” of the Yahoo web hangouts that lost relevance with people and advertisers.…
Hearing Nikolaj Ehlers describe one of his winding end-to-end, 200-foot turbo bursts is nearly as joyous as witnessing one live. “I love getting the puck and gathering some speed and just skate it up. Using my speed is my biggest asset. It’s a good feeling. You have that puck and you’re skating fast … it’s pretty open,” Ehlers says. “You hear the crowd and it gives you some extra energy, extra motivation.” When the fastest Dane on blades gets wheeling and weaving through the neutral zone, an audible gasp inhales the True North. “A rush like that, it’s exciting hearing the crowd…