Mediagazer: The Golden Era Of Spam Comments Has Ended (Brendan O'Connor/The Awl)

2:35 PM ET, December 14, 2013

Top News:

Alexis C. Madrigal / The Atlantic Online:

Welcome to the Internet of Thingies: 61.5% of Web Traffic Is Not Human — And here's how to build your own little traffic bot, even though you shouldn't — It happened last year for the first time: bot traffic eclipsed human traffic, according to the bot-trackers at Incapsula.

Discussion: Kirk LaPointe's …, @brandcottage, @digiphile, @fareedzakaria, Business Insider, SocialTimes, Forbes, CNET, VentureBeat and TechCrunch

Ken Doctor / Newsonomics:

New Hollywood Sequel: Aaron Kushner's L.A. Register — Why, I asked, Aaron Kushner, is he announcing the new L.A. Register as we're winding down toward the end of the year? Given that the big questions about it — when will it launch, how will it be staffed — are as yet unannounced, why put the news out now?

Discussion: New York Times, LA Observed, The Wrap, @ocregister, FishbowlNY, Poynter and Hollywood Reporter

Michael Learmonth / AdAge:

Ad Age Survey: What Advertisers Really Think About Twitter — Marketer Attitudes Toward Twitter Are Similar to Facebook In 2012 — There's little question that Twitter's intial public offering in October was a success, but what about its ad business? Still a work in progress, but with plenty of upside, according to Ad Age readers.

Discussion: @jonathanmendez

Brendan O'Connor / The Awl:

The Golden Era Of Spam Comments Has Ended — The search engine optimization community has spent the last two years in a panic. SEO people flood our Internet with spam links and fake Twitter bots and paid traffic, to help bad websites look more popular than they are, to deliver fake viewers to web ads.

Discussion: @therealfitz, @thijs and Boing Boing

Michael Calderone / The Huffington Post:

New York Times Withheld News Of Missing American's CIA Ties For Six Years — NEW YORK — The New York Times revealed Friday that it withheld reporting on missing American Robert Levinson's ties to the CIA for six years, one day after The Associated Press acknowledged withholding that detail for three years.

Discussion: New York Times, ABC News and Capital New York

Dylan Byers / Politico:
W.H.: CIA report ‘highly irresponsible’

Discussion: WebProNews, @jeneps, ABC News, @markknoller, The Daily Pulp, The Huffington Post and Riptide 2.0

Ed O'Keefe / Post Politics:
Sen. Bill Nelson: I told AP not to run Robert Levinson story

Discussion: ABC News, TIME, Talking Points Memo, @lrozen, @mlcalderone, The Huffington Post and The Definitive Source

Matt Pearce / Los Angeles Times:

Online publications see a future in print — While pundits bemoan the death of print, Pitchfork and the L.A. Review of Books are among the online magazines embracing ink on paper — A few digital publications are making the jump from the Web to print, including Jezebel, the L.A. Review of Books and Pitchfork.

Discussion: @stevesilberman, @rachelrosenfelt and @mattdpearce

Marc Graser / Variety:

Microsoft to Launch First Original Shows on Xbox in Early 2014 — At Dealmakers breakfast, Tellem says Xbox isn't Netflix or Amazon but its ‘own animal’ — Developing original series for Microsoft has taken a little longer than veteran TV executive Nancy Tellem had hoped …

Discussion: VG247, Joystiq, Pocket-lint and Engadget

Jason Del Rey / AllThingsD:

Report: Readers who own a Kindle spend $1,233/year on Amazon; those who don't spend $790 — The Amazon Kindle Numbers That Jeff Bezos Must Really Care About — We all know that Amazon's annual touting of its new Kindles as the best-selling Kindles ever has become laughable since the company …

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Twitter Experiments with Push Notifications About TV Talk — Twitter's great, but if you're a regular human, you can't spend all of your time looking at it. So what if someone plops out something interesting, and you miss it? — Twitter has a plan for that.

Discussion: @mikeisaac, Fast Company and Alex Rainert

Bloomberg:

Verizon close to agreement to buy Intel's Internet-based pay-TV start-up OnCue — Verizon Said Near Agreement to Buy Intel's Start-Up TV Service — Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) is near an agreement to purchase Intel Corp. (INTC)'s Internet-based pay-TV start-up, according to people familiar with the deal.

Discussion: Softpedia News, Electronista, Variety and Gigaom

CBC Books / CBC News:

British Library uploads 1 million archival images for free use, wins internet — In an inspired gesture to encourage digital crowdsourcing, the British Library has uploaded one million scans from 17th to 19th century books to Flickr for public domain use. — The library's goal was for anyone to …

Discussion: Digital scholarship blog, @maryakem and The Verge

Peter Elkind / Fortune:

Bloomberg News reaffirms ban on writing about Mike Bloomberg — The news organization owned by Bloomberg LP has an unusual, self-imposed policy preventing itself from writing about its founder. — FORTUNE — When Michael Bloomberg retires as New York's mayor in January after 12 years in office …

Discussion: @dangillmor, The Huffington Post, Hit & Run and Talking Biz News