Yesterday, hot on the heels of its recent spate of acquisitions, Yahoo! picked up an interesting little app started by a 15-year-old kid in his family’s London home. The app, Summly, was rumored to be picked up by the search company for a cool $30 million, and it stands to change the way Yahoo! looks at news generation.

More importantly, Summly has the potential to revolutionize how digital news is ingested, both online and on mobile.

The impetus for Summly came to teenage Nick D’Aloisio when he realized that the physical activity of sorting through and reading his daily online news was just exhausting. Founded in 2011, Summly cut down news articles by distilling their words into simple, 400-character summaries and displaying them on a mobile interface that catered to the user’s specific tastes.

Check out Summly’s concise description, with Stephen Fry, below: Read more

Brandon Holley held editor positions at Time Out and GQ, helped launch Elle Girl and headed Yahoo! Shine before taking the helm at Lucky in 2011. And, she says, if you want to snag a top spot on a magazine masthead, you need to be a vocal and proactive voice for the brand.

“I think people make a mistake when they wanna climb the masthead, and they assume the editor-in-chief should pay attention to them. And, now that I’m on the other side of the desk, I love people who come to me,” Holley said in our Media Beat interview.

Holley explained that she succeeded at GQ by giving “steady input without being annoying” to editor-in-chief Art Cooper. “I wasn’t kissing ass, but I would write memos to him and say, ‘I think this section could use this,’ and ‘I think we should start a new section that’s this’… I’m a huge fan of memo writing.”

Part 2: Brandon Holley Calls Fashion Blogging ‘Most Exciting Thing to Happen in Publishing in Decades’
Part 3: Lucky’s Brandon Holley Talks Photoshop and Fashion

A just-released Yahoo study, The Like Log Study, uncovers trends about how news is shared via social media.

The study crowns the New York Times the king of social engagement, with 2.3 million Facebook likes each month and 400 likes for an average story.

But during the study, which was conducted from October 2010 to January 2011, the Wall Street Journal had the top story: Why Chinese Moms are Superior, by Amy Chua.

In fact, opinion stories like Chua’s were by far the most popular on social networks. Also popular: “lifestyle, photo galleries, interactives, humor and odd news,” writes Yury Lifshits. Not so popular: political and celebrity news. Stories about Apple: Popular. Stories about Microsoft: Not so much.

Lifshits also writes, quite bluntly, that “Twitter is geeky.” Content from news websites like the Times, Yahoo News, CNN and The Washington Post were shared far more on Facebook than Twitter. But content from technology blogs like TechCrunch and Mashable generated more retweets on Twitter than Facebook likes.

Another finding is that stories have about a 24-hour lifespan. Less than 20 percent of a story’s likes come after its first day.

Among the takeaways from the study, Lifshits writes, is to invest in your big stories. “According to our study, most websites can capture 30% of their total enagement [sic] by publishing only ONE story per week!” he writes. “One story per day can capture 70-80% of your audience reactions.”

Also recommended in the study is for news organizations to invest in social media optimization. If a site has less than 5-20 retweets and likes per 1,000 pageviews, there’s a problem. Social media optimization can mean changing around a site’s social media sharing tools as well as ensuring that stories are appearing at only one URL.

A PDF of Lifshits’ study is available here. Embedded below is an introductory video.

The Like Log Study from Yury Lifshits on Vimeo.