When the keyboard loses its connection every few minutes, the screen flips upside down and you can’t enter anything into online form. Eventually they refunded me... after seeing this video.

"the likes of Deloitte and Accenture are spreading their tentacles even further and making a grab for the domain of digital agencies, pitching for global digital marketing briefs. Not only are they taking on the likes of DigitasLBi in digital pitches, they are also quietly building up their creative arsenal as they look to expand their footprint …

For all in the #BxlsBbl whose 1st question is “What’s your Grade?”.

"“In the old days, the few big newspapers were so profitable they could run desks on most of the most important issues in the world. Now, as the news landscape fragments, investigative journalism often takes place in nonprofits... " - Upworthy partners with ProPublica and advocacy media groups on original content » Nieman Journalism Lab

@Poynter's piece seems fair. While it's true that "rebundling of news is booming. New aggregation sites with a social media twist, led by BuzzFeed, are working ingenious variations on the first wave like The Huffington Post..." ... and that if everyone in the world had a smart phone and an iPad, the global news market will grow rather than shri…

Applies equally to projects, where for step 1 (quoted below) the focus should be the project's USP: "Define what exactly your company is, its motto and the sole purpose of its existence. Write down everything that you think your company/website is about. Is it about marketing tips, social media, mobile apps, etc.? Define the existence of your com…

I Just Love This: "For the love of Christ, please let the poor schmuck who is charged with the incredibly demeaning task of hitting the space bar to change the screen just do his one measly job with some dignity. He can figure out if you've finished talking about the slide or not on his own, you don’t need to manually tell him to go on each time.…

Well, plus ca change - absolutely none of the things some BloggingPortal editors said we'd do after our meeting in January have been done, apart from our own posts and what Stefan did, which is ironic given that he told us he had no time to do anything.

"a new model for digital-first audio programming ... a collective, helping to market one another, providing guidance on technical issues, and sharing lessons on growing audiences. Radiotopia will provide the framework for raising money..." - Welcome to Radiotopia, a podcast network with the aesthetics of story-driven public radio » Nieman Journal…

FalseA German journalist and camera crew have fun with the EP gravy train in “Scandale au Parlement Européen : Argent facile, champagne à gogo et autres privilèges. This sort of film iseasy to make and so becoming commonplace. And people in the Brussels Bubble wonder why they are not so widely loved elsewhere?

"PEDAL is neither for everyone nor for everything. Yes, we are there to make a profit — not from you, though, but with you! PEDAL does not charge anything unless you win a tender or project proposal. " - PEDAL - Get your business spinning! - Pedal

"fantasies dull the will to succeed: Imagining a positive outcome conveys the sense that you’re approaching your goals, which takes the edge off" - The Powerlessness of Positive Thinking : The New Yorker

Something I have to check out

Particularly true when you work in a unique environment (e.g., 24-language online communities...): "when I am asked if I know of companies who are doing really well with social tools I say "Less than you might expect, those who you know of were less successful than they claim, and why not become the one that really makes it work?" ... ... if I t…

"some of the BBC’s most experienced investigative reporters explain how they find and tell their stories." Access to the BBC Academy's College of Journalism website is free to everyone in the UK and commercially available overseas

"Here are seven great solutions to help you quickly and cost-effectively develop a mobile version of your site."

Interesting perspective on the rash of new tech-content hybrids emerging in the media space. Back in the day, companies could be either tech or content, but not both: "What were you going to be really good at? Engineering or “content”? You couldn’t do both, because that would mean that one would be subordinate to the other. And if you were going…

"We don’t write articles. We tell stories and those stories persist over time... Each story is comprised of fragments ... stitched together to create a story. In many ways circa represents the next step in the atomization of news ... allows people to read stories and identify new developments faster ... and makes it possible to dig deeper by lin…

"The way we evolved ... is really not the way we have to operate today ... this attempt at hyperproductivity is making us much less productive.'" A podcast worth every minute. I have a few of these techniques down pat, most days, as long as I can work from home, but the whole mindfulness thing is still over my horizon. - 4 Ways to Make Your …

5 brief points on how leaders can get everyone thinking strategically, and not just reacting. I personally like point 4: "4. Create a philosophy. ... communicate a well-articulated philosophy, a mission statement, and achievable goals throughout your company. Individuals and groups need to understand the broader organizational strategy in orde…

This is worth a read, regularly: "I have spent almost my whole life– 31 years– caring far too much about offending people, worrying if I’m cool enough for them, or asking myself if they are judging me.... It’s stupid, and it’s not good for my well being. ... worse than that, it has made me someone who doesn’t take a stand for anything. It has ma…

worth repeating for everyone who thinks that the path to democracy in the EU is measured in column inches...

The Content Marketing Institute’s Joe Pulizzi took a deeper look at the recent CMI/MarketingProfs B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks study. Of the many interesting points here, this is what resonated with me the most:“Implementing content marketing in larger enterprises can be a political nightmare — not to mention the added complications caused by …

This post started out as a comment to Blogging, content discovery and the European public sphere, Kosmopolito's post marking Bloggingportal's 5th birthday (all posts and more). However Kosmo, one of the old guard of EU bloggers (and currently jobhunting, btw) raised more than a couple of good questions, so my comment needed a larger home…

"“Fished out of the shadows, old news coverage in China’s media can provide clues to the family connections of government officials as reporters investigate their financial dealings.”"

I used to be better at listening. I used to really try, humbly believing (rightly) that the other person's perspective and experience were at least as interesting and useful for me to understand as mine were to project. Something happened a few years ago, I seemed to drop out of that habit. Perhaps because I found myself among people who talk…

Oh dear. "Andreessen mentions the “Chinese wall” that many media entities maintain between the business side and the editorial side. This approach is flawed, he says: “No other non-monopoly industry lets product creators off the hook on how the business works.” Many businesses, Andreessen argues, manage to balance incentives and conflicts and ca…

Nice animation about the uncertainty principle, although it’s not mentioned by name, confirmngi the theory that chemistry is what’s left when the physicists have figured everything interesting out ;)

Original linkTonight I'll be toddling along to Grilling Kippers, a UKIP-focused anti-Eurosceptic campaign from deep within the Brussels Bubble.

Les Echos looks to be doing what I have long dreamed to do for the bloggingportal reboot - deploy semantic analysis to aid content discovery and to underpin a new wave of media and comment. But do we have to call it an 'aggrefilter'? "Les Echos launches its business news aggrefilter ... to gain critical working knowledge of the semantic web." …