"Cell phones and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are playing an increasingly prominent role in how voters get political information and follow election news, according to a new national survey by the Pew Research Center." Interesting that Republicans are more suspicious of "traditional media filters", given Fox News. - Cell Phon…

"boasted as twice the industry ... Click-through rates after open are about twice the industry average of 16 percent... The following lessons might not all apply to your newsletter strategy, but here are some things to think about:" - How Time’s email newsletter achieves a 40 percent open rate | Poynter.

"recent scientific work is putting a much finer point on just how stories change our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors... to motivate a desire to help others, a story must first ... develop tension during the narrative... it is likely that attentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters in it and continue mimicking t…

Tackling corporate memory loss and innovation failure requires a different paradigm than that offered by social media.

"By submitting your content and your keyword through nTopic we determine statistically how relevant your content is to the keyword and make recommendations on how to improve it. Getting your nTopic score is completely free, but you must upgrade to get access to keyword recommendations. "

"Search engines, especially Google, have gotten remarkably good at understanding searchers' intent—what we mean to search for, even if that's not exactly what we search for. How in the world do they do this? It's incredibly complex, but in today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the basics—what we all need to know about how entities are connected i…

"Through applying semantic markup to our site, we've embedded an incredibly rich layer of meaningful data in our code.... but don't let the search engines have all the fun; we can use that data, too. By looking at the semantic markup on any given page, we can see what type of "entity" we're looking at ... and its attributes or properties. If we c…

"this is a slippery slope at best: once you have made the decision to alter the flow ... based on abstract criteria programmed into an algorithm, then at some point you are going to decide ... to hide or remove certain things ... to improve the signal-to-noise ratio ... The whole point of having a social network in the first place is that the peo…

"One of the standout features of the recent resurgence of email newsletters from news outlets has been a focus on providing an aggregated experience that encompasses what other publications produce.... the idea is to pick the best and most relevant content, whether it comes from their own stable or someone else's... by producing the highest qual…

"BBC will begin maintaining a list of its articles that have disappeared from Google under a controversial law granting European citizens the “right to be forgotten” by search engines." - BBC Hits Back at 'Right to Be Forgotten' Requests | TheBlot

"Copy Followers is one of our awesomest and greatest feature ever! You can follow any twitter users followers. Just enter the twitter username and we will fetch the followers of that user and display them to you. Though this seems simple, behind the scenes a lot of things happen. We will pull the followers of the twitter account you mention and a…

The basic reasons we launched I-Labs are all here: "The most powerful way of learning is ...  to have conversation... the best examples of great insight nearly always come from cases where people shared knowledge or experience.... every organisation is sitting on a wealth of information that potentially contains insight... This information is ly…

"We've created a place for you to save articles you've found useful and organize them into reading lists you can share with your colleagues and contacts. You'll be able to choose topics and industries ... we'll create a feed of all the content you've told us you're interested in.... To make homepage more useful ... we've given you four differen…

"a lot of great content was getting lost in the shuffle, because there weren't enough discovery tools... when a user pulls up the topic picker, each choice reveals other sub-topics that might be of interest. Flipboard used to offer 30 topics, but now it offers a total of 34,000 ... it's deep topic analysis - we use it to surface what other p…

Perhaps a glimpse of Axel Springer's plans for @politicoEU? "Publishers set the prices for how much each of their articles cost, and keep 70 percent of the revenue generated from those stories. Blendle takes the other 30 percent. " - The New York Times Co. and Axel Springer are investing €3 million in Dutch startup Blendle » Nieman Journalism Lab

"Traditional intranets required someone at the helm with a broad perspective and variety of skills. Newer social intranets, with their greater ability to influence company culture and productivity, have only added to the pile of needed skills. In this article we explain what the core skills are for successful intranet managers, common gaps in exp…

"Ideas represent possibilities for alternate futures. But, ideas are a commodity ... concepts until they’re brought to life. And that takes ... courage, passion, and resilience... Ideapod creates a creative community where people and ideas come together. And by together, I mean we invest in and build an active community where ideas and engagemen…

"it’s still possible to live in a political bubble of your own choosing, the best evidence suggests that very few people are getting their news only from like-minded outlets. " One of many recent reports that the fear of filter bubbles may have bee overstated. - Americans Don’t Live in Information Cocoons - NYTimes.com

" the basic news story was invented in a different time –when story telling was limited by platform — and it has inherent limitations that you can overcome when trying to tell stories digitally." Don't just assume that what you should be doing is creating 'articles'. Some really useful tricks to free your mind when developing a content strategy h…

"Swarmize enables journalists to tell new, collaborative stories by making use of real-time data collection and visualisation" Just the tests they've already done are awesome. The code's on GitHub. Think to use in surveys, real-time social media monitoring, live blogs ... anything where real-time is useful and/or you might want a second bite at t…

"calling people out.. comes from a place of ego or reaction. The intent ... is to make the other person wrong... of making them lose face. The tone is adversarial... the burden of change is on the other person... Calling people forth, in contrast, comes from a place of service and an open heart. ... It feels more like coaching than scolding." - …

While aimed at news organisation leaders, a lot of these insights apply to any organisation in the content creation business today: "When your mother lectured you that “actions speak louder than words,” she was giving important advice for culture change... if the leaders aren’t setting an example of change, don’t be surprised if change is slow or…

"we are kicking off the relaunch of The Lede with a three-part series on content strategy... we begin with an element of content strategy that often gets overlooked … but that is crucial to understanding your audience intimately enough to influence it." Hint: it's AUDIENCE. And it's a podcast, so grab it and give it a listen tomorrow morning on y…

Great overview of product design and development documentation in a world of agile development: "Documentation is instrumental for concepting, designing, creating and measuring the performance of products. But ... there’s nothing about a thick stack of paperwork which resembles the experience of your real product. ... thick deliverables created …

"Facebook say that the more time users spend at its site, the more likely there will be a robust exchange of diverse viewpoints and ideas shared online. Others fear that users will create their own echo chambers, and filter out coverage they do not agree with. ... [that] “is when you get conspiracy theories.” - How Facebook Is Changing the Way It…

"publishers [could] simply send pages to Facebook ... hosted by its servers ... with ads that Facebook sells. The revenue would be shared. That kind of wholesale transfer of content sends a cold, dark chill down the collective spine of publishers... Media companies would essentially be serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns." - Facebook Offers Li…

An organisation which cannot remember cannot learn; an organisation which cannot learn cannot improve.

Another alternative to Big Internet? "By placing our online personas in a few centralized locations, we make them vulnerable to single points of failure... We designed Known to be a focal point for your content. You control where it’s hosted (whether it’s on our service or somewhere else); you decide what it looks like; you choose what you post a…

Nothing here about geolocation, augmented reality ... but good points anyway. Via @nosemonkey ""In a world where notifications are full experiences in and of themselves, the screen of app icons makes less and less sense... Why open the Facebook app when you can get the content as a notification and take action... right there at the notification o…

You have to hand it to an article which manages to bring Ancient Greek philosophy to bear on why MSWord is both simultaneously high-powered and utterly useless for productive, creative work, while providing practical help on some if its most intractable problems. "Word, it seems, obeys the following rule: when a “style” is applied to text that is…