Digiday AI-Powered Planning Strategies:

Join us on July 30 in NYC for a breakfast & panel

APPLY TO ATTEND

The Feed: FarmVille and a Real Farm

 

Farmville in Real Life: Depending on your point of view, the ascent of FarmVille is either a great story of our digital era or a sign of our societal problems. Just take the fact that more virtual tractors are sold in the U.S. than real ones. Remarkable, sure, but also a disturbing comment on the state of the U.S. economy’s propensity to, you know, do real things. Over in the UK, though, there’s a pretty cool melding of the virtual and real worlds. This clever idea: one of the UK’s largest farms, National Trust’s 2,500-acre Wimpole Estate farm, is allowing web users to vote on how to run the farm. This online farming experiment is called MyFarm. People can vote on decisions like what crops to plant, which cow to buy, which fields to use for what, etc. Cute idea, but I don’t know about give web users this much say. Usually that formula doesn’t work out so well. PSFK

 

Facebook Evil:This is so disgusting and sad and terrible. It really makes me sick. This is oversharing taken to the worst possible extreme: a 24-year-old Australian man Ramazan Acar used his Facebook status to announce that he was murdering his only daughter. He posted ““bout 2 kill ma kid,” and later texted the child’s mother, “It’s ova I did it.” What a sick and stupid individual. He should not have been allowed to have a Facebook account, let alone a child. Social media sites have truly become a mirror and magnifying glass for modern society, and unfortunately a lot of what is reflected and magnified is not so flattering. Techland

 

Get Directions To: Google Maps has added a pinpoint for “Osama Bin Laden’s Compound.” Hmm, not sure if that is such a good idea, but it is interesting to see through Google satellite view and photos what kind of area the world’s most wanted terrorist was hiding out in for so long. Mashable

 

Tumblr of the Day: Cheapskates beware! This tumblr will make it be known that you are a stingy tipper. It also offers helpful tipping etiquette advice for anyone who is confused. ³ 15%

Video of the Day: The Bieberster teams up with Casey Heynes (remember? Zangeif kid?) to talk about bullying.

More in Media

Publisher ad supply fell by up to 40% in Q2 as AI search choked the open web

Publisher ad supply fell by up to 40% in Q2 of 2026 as AI‑era, zero‑click search choked the flow of traffic to news and other open‑web sites, per U.S. and U.K. benchmarking data from Ozone, shared exclusively with Digiday. 

Inside the newsroom push to turn print reporters into video talent

As reporter-led video becomes a priority, publishers are investing in newsroom training to help journalists deepen audience relationships.

WTF is SPUR’s publisher-run Content Telemetry Framework?

SPUR is publisher‑run and fixated on one thing: turning AI’s use of their content from opaque scraping into a transparent, usage‑based licensing system they control.