The weekend read

Two lumps of coal and a carrot: That's what's left after you faced the week, communicators. Time to assemble those parts into a jolly snowman called the weekend, using these critical tools: my finds of the week, shared via @dontgetcaught on Twitter and curated here just for you. Snow use pretending you aren't glad it's Friday:

• Don't snow the moguls: In an effort to keep VIP users interested, Twitter has stopped showing some of them advertisements. Not so you and me.
• Snowball fight footage? You can now live-stream GoPro video footage on Periscope.
• Don't spray-tan the snowman: Here's an argument for the greater influence of average folks on social media, compared to, say, the Kardashians.
• Midnight snowman building: New research suggests that if you love social media, you probably don't sleep well.
• Thundersnow: Just in time for speechwriters, pundits, and close observers of the U.S. election: Google will now fact check presidential candidates live during the debates, and share quotes.
• Birth of a snowman: If you weren't convinced that content is still king, Fox Searchlight bought 'The Birth of a Nation' at the Sundance film festival for a record $17.5 million. 
• Snow limit: Just ask Amazon about the value of content: It's spending a record $3 billion on original content, mostly to retain Prime members. That seems to be working, since Prime membership has grown 50% in the last year alone.
• Can snowmen have friends? Dunbar confirms his number applies to your Facebook friends, most of whom couldn't care less about you.
• Re-plow: This week, my Moderating Panels blog shared how technology's changing the moderator's job. On this blog, I looked at public opinion surveys and cellphones, and a major methodology change.
• Where am I next? Yesterday, I led the second of two workshops this month on Creating a TED-quality Talk, in Washington, DC. Today, I'm in Miami ever so briefly to present on public opinion research and messaging to a board committee of the Association for Computing Machinery's special interest group on computer-human interaction.

Pile on the snow: Buy my ebook, The Eloquent Woman's Guide to Moderating Panels; tell your colleagues to put this blog in their feeds; sign up for my free monthly newsletter, or let me know how we can work together in 2016 with an email to eloquentwoman at gmail.com.

(Creative Commons licensed photo by Jason Bolonski)