Freemasons on Facebook: Forget about cloaks and secret signals and handshakes: Freemasons are on Facebook, and they want you to like them. As this Wall Street Journal article put it, “No self-respecting secret society can get by without a Facebook fan page anymore.” It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s kind of true. By the late 1950s Freemasonry membership was up to about 4 million in the U.S. Membership numbers, however, took a hit from the 60s’ anti-establishmentarianism, and by 2000 there were fewer than 2 million Freemasons. Freemasonry’s embrace of social media is part of an effort to open up the secret society a bit more to the public and to encourage others to join the Freemason community. WSJ
App of the Day: IKEA has a new app that designs a bedroom for you based on your Facebook page. It’s an interactive app that pops up on IKEA’s YouTube page. Once you provide access to your Facebook account, the app creates a 3-D tour of your personalized IKEA bedroom, complete with framed pictures of photos from your Facebook page. I tried it and was a little weirded out by the kind of whispering voiceover narration (something about wiggling toes?), and the picture of my friends dancing that was framed and put on a dresser — not exactly the picture I would choose to frame. It’s kind of creepy, kind of cool, pretty much like Facebook. It’s also fairly similar to Intel’s Museum of Me app or Facebook’s own Timeline. psfk
The Zuck’s Timeline: Speaking of Timeline, take a look at the mastermind’s own Timeline. Social media moguls are real people too! Business Insider
Tumblr of the Day: Some entertaining tidbits that men in relationships may want to take note of. To My Future Husband
Video of the Day: You have to look out for traffic even on the planes of South Africa. A cyclist in a race across the Albert Falls Dam Nature Reserve lost some time when he got bulldozed by a red hartebeest. The Daily What
More in Media
Media Briefing: Step by step, publishers are building toward an agent-led ad business
Agentic AI-driven media trading could wipe out a lot of the problems caused by its programmatic predecessor. Namely, ad tech middlemen.
In Graphic Detail: How AI search is changing publisher visibility
AI platforms like ChatGPT and Google AI Mode are driving more search activity. Some publishers are gaining visibility — but not traffic.
AI royalties for small and midsize publishers: collective licensing’s next big play
Don’t credit OpenAI’s ChatGPT, credit corporate LLMs – enterprise RAG is what’s creating royalty revenue for publishers.