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Social Network

Baratunde Thurston on Content Curation, Real-Time Search, and "Analytics Porn"

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In New York City, on the 16th floor of the Roger Smith Hotel, we caught up with social media superhero Baratunde Thurston, web editor for The Onion.

Thurston ongoing getting into this whole “Internet” thing in simpler era when the social web was called Usenet. He now carves out his niche at the overlap of the Venn diagram of comedy, politics, and tech. As an official Internet oldtimer who makes it his business to stay relevant, he has particularly helpful insights on the business of curating applicable content with fantastic efficiency and timeliness.

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“I remember,” he said, “back in 1996 or 1997, when you could end the Internet… You could stay up until two or three in the morning and go to sleep and know, ‘I read the Internet today.’” Simpler era, indeed.

So, with the mind-boggling multiplicity of blogs, news sites, and social networks, how does a professional netizen maintain cultural and technological relevance? And what tools does the modern, socially cognizant webmaster use to track and optimize traffic in real time? Call us cruel, but we prefer you watch the video and hear it all firsthand.

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