Does what it says on the box.

"The core innovation of Bitcoin is not going away, and it is deeper than currency. What has been introduced to the world is a method to create decentralised peer-validated time-stamped ledgers. That is a fancy way of saying it is a method for bypassing the use of centralised officials in recording stuff. Such officials are pervasive in society..…

"even if we still need human beings to perform certain specialized tasks, can we remove the management from the equation instead?... ... encode the mission statement into code... an inviolable contract that generates revenue, pays people to perform some function, and finds hardware for itself to run on, all without any need for top-down human di…

"At the moment, it looks like the feature is experimental " Just in case the world didn't have enough cat gifs... - YouTube Now Lets You Make GIFs From Videos

"We made the transition from dark web to daylight, venture capitalists started their stampede into digital currency businesses, governments worldwide gave the industry’s start-ups tacit approval, A+ executives joined the fray to build more of Bitcoin’s core infrastructure, we collectively answered some of the critics’ most pressing questions ... a…

"An image is the gateway to your emotional memory... And on the visual web an image is the gateway to accessing almost all content and information... we are adapting to a different kind of a web, one that will be increasingly visual... [but] the only available methods to surface and categorize photos are beyond basic; we need something intuitive…

"POLITICO and Axel Springer, the owners of the POLITICO joint venture in Europe, announced today that they have acquired EUROPEAN VOICE and will rebrand the respected Brussels publication as POLITICO in the spring of 2015." - POLITICO & Axel Springer Announce Joint Acquisition of European Voice - POLITICO Press Release

"... renamed European Voice ... a series of subscription-based newsletters à la Washington and a web site with free content. ... “Our subscriptions are with individuals, companies, trade associations, lobbyists, they’ve got a lot of money ... This is not news for your mother, unless you’re mother’s a lobbyist. Or your father, unless your father’s…

"The new publication, with a mission of "covering the politics, policies and personalities in the EU and the continent's most powerful nations," according to POLITICO C.E.O. Jim VandeHei, will take the flagship's model of high-volume politics and policy news and tailor it to a European audience through a combination of free digital content, a subs…

As long as they remain so, journalism's screwed. A good @Guardian overview, if another is still needed, promoted by the latest dustup across the pond (New Republic). "we do still need institutions that take seriously the mission of informing and debating, of reporting events and exchanging ideas – and we need them to be integrated into the way …

Interesting research: "Seventy different political posts were randomly either left to their own wild devices, engaged by an unidentified staffer from the station, or engaged by a prominent political reporter. When the reporter showed up, “incivility decreased by 17 percent and people were 15 percent more likely to use evidence in their comments on…

"But American Weltschmerz has extended far beyond millennials. It has become the dominant zeitgeist. The country is currently experiencing social, economic, and technological “disruption” similar to what sparked the 19th-century Romantic backlash—and its later incarnations." - The Era of Our Discontent: Power of American Angst - Pacific Standard…

"With Hive, a developer can create assignments for users, define what they need to do, and keep track of their progress in helping to solve problems. " - The New York Times R&D Lab releases Hive, an open-source crowdsourcing tool » Nieman Journalism Lab

Great article on improving intranet UX, and useful inspiration for any website manager: "During the online cardsorting sessions I covered over 1000 content items and got nearly 36,000 individual responses. The first batch ... designed to elicit our main navigation labels. Subsequent tests then checked that the chosen names would suit all the intr…

"we’ve applied econometric principles to the results of over 200 intranet surveys and… statistically pinpointed which intranet attributes most impact a user’s perception of their intranet. This first post... showing what employees prefer to look and find when they view their company’s intranet." Some surprising results, For example, although I'…

" What was simply needed was to tweak the ‘rules of the game’ and to incentivize the right people so as to drive the right behaviors. In other words, by turning a predictable work process that had always led to the corresponding predictable sub-optimal outcomes into something fresh that talked to people’s EQ, we managed to make ‘work as natural as…

"There’s no learning without mistakes." Pin this one on the wall. Seriously! - The 5 Most Common Mistakes in Design — The Year of the Looking Glass — Medium

How much more could Google News be? See "... a presentation that a German designer came up with that involved a wholesale redesign and re-thinking of what Google News is and does." Lots of good stuff here. Particularly like how 'smart personalisation' is used to help penetrate the filter bubble: "automatically suggest related stories on a news t…

A fun interactive setting out the 'ideal team & process' required for building interactives. Rarely seen in real life, sadly. - One Approach Leading Interactive Expeditions: Eric Cade Schoenborn | Creative Director | Knight Foundation

Is primetime TV advertising the right way to connect citizens to the EU?

"Ethereum is a platform and a programming language that makes it possible for any developer to build and publish next-generation distributed applications.... Ethereum can be used to codify, decentralize, secure and trade just about anything: voting, domain names, financial exchanges, crowdfunding, company governance, contracts and agreements of …

"companies that subscribe to the Plus plan will be able to request every message that employees have sent on the service from that point forward, including direct messages to coworkers and a history of any changes you made to your messages." - Slack alters privacy policy to let bosses read your messages | The Verge

"Hughes will be establishing a health and science desk that will consist of approximately five reporters, according to an email from BuzzFeed. A science staff of that size will catapult BuzzFeed News into the top tier of science news sites by sheer size alone. It won't have the largest staff of science reporters, but it will be among the largest. …

"The diagram below is an early concept illustration of the Independent Digital Music Market which now forms the basis of the Bittunes platform & Android application currently in Open Beta in the Bittunes Google+ community. This project, which had been put on ice in late 2006, was restarted in April 2013 when Bitcoin began to ‘cross the chasm’,"

"From Bitcoin Blockchain technologies to advances in mesh networks connecting devices together to create new people powered communication systems... to new understandings of 'emergent semantics' processes at work in folksonomies and massive user generated data sets powering new forms of search and discovery systems... 'Edge Principles' are driving…

"businesses ... can, without realizing it, generate an environment hostile to innovation... frontline business units... are optimized to relatively short-term goals that are anchored in what they are currently doing or selling rather than in what they could be doing differently. As a result, line managers instinctively reject innovations that won…

"Metaphors can help by tapping what learning theorists call prior knowledge to make a connection between what people already understand through experience and what they have yet to discover." Some good brainstorming techniques here. - Finding the Right Metaphor for Your Presentation

"The report uncovered an uncomfortable truth: that there are few civic society organisations that are capable of participating in shaping the national positions at a stage when the European Commission has already come up with a draft.... it is usually a challenge to find a list of EU issues where the national government is elaborating its nati…

"Here is the science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions every day" - The Science of Storytelling: Why Telling a Story is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our Brains

"On the surface, no single factor seems to set Slack apart from a plethora of other collaboration tools. However, a closer look using the model described the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Product, reveals the user psychology behind the company's success." - The Psychology of a Billion-Dollar Enterprise App: Why Is Slack So Habit-Formi…