"At Menlo Innovations, structure and multiple keyboards allows you to split the difference between chaos and bureaucracy". - How One Company Replaced Meetings and Bureaucracy With Pairs, Ceremonies, and Storytelling, from Fast Company

NYTimes' collection: "the common thread is the form of storytelling — an integration of text, video, photography and graphics ... From a ship in the South China Sea to the cost of health care..."

Came out just after my post on applying network theory and the EU online public sphere: "For those of us who are interested in understanding and participating in the EU digital public sphere(s), social network analysis offers a useful way to identify key influencers and map different communities. I can see plenty of practical applications (for e…

An unfortunately accurate corrective to the recent "Facebook is dying" meme. 2013 truly was the year everyone just couldnt be arsed checking the facts: "A British academic studying social media found that young people use lots of new-fangled services, such as Instagram, because their parents are on Facebook. “What we’ve learned from working with …

via @bloggingportal. @poljourno finds no smoking gun: "... the European Union is still seen as a niche topic by the media in most EU member states. Ask the man on the street about the activities of the Brussels Bubble and you will also be met with a shrug and a ‘who cares’, in the majority of cases. But a fascinating documentary The Brussels Busi…

Nothing new, but then it's 2013 review time: "this was the year someone isolated the DNA of the viral story, and the world ... saw for the first time the awesome potential of viral content ... Upworthy had about seventy-five thousand [Facebook] likes per article, twelve times more than fourth-place BuzzFeed. Among them were posts like the one wh…

"Because ideas are like germs: they don't diffuse through populations of people at random; they make their way through networks"

The above image is from Drake Baer's FastCompany article "Why Successful People Have So Many Groups Of Friends", which is all about networking for career success, something I've never done and am very unlikely to start.

Some key points from "The Benefits of Quality Content and Genuine Social Engagement ... to create great, sharable, engaging content and become an active participant on social platforms: - Quality content is what your clients want to read, not what you want to tell them.... - Content that gets highly shared is content with heart. Real stories, re…

Good post from @JamieJBartlett: "Social media wants to turn you into a narcissist. Tell everyone about yourself: you're important! Where are you? What are you eating? Who are you with? What films do you like? The world wants to know! Actually, the world doesn't want to know: it's a marketing ploy. The more you share about yourself, the more …

"Just understanding “what is Big Data” is a challenge for a significant number of people" - ReadWrite, quoting Gartner. "Different industries have different priorities ... Industries that are driving the customer experience priority are retail, insurance, media and communications, and banking, while process efficiency is a top priority for manufa…

Maybe EU hoax stories can be useful ... An interesting take from Nieman Journalism Lab on the value viral hoax stories can bring to conversations on complex topics. The point being that the hoax would not have gone viral in the first place if it did not touch upon a complex, important topic in some way: "Yet at the same time, these strings of …

"For those of you not familiar with native advertising, it refers to a publication serving up paid stories and editorial content the same way. You’ll hear this technique also referred to as sponsored content and branded journalism. With no one clicking on banner ads, publications hope to find economic salvation in native advertising. But here’s …

"We've never had this much access to information ... Making it meaningful, discoverable & accessible is simultaneously the media’s toughest challenge and greatest opportunity... In 2014, we can do a better job of connecting with each other, sharing the tools that are out there and working on the problems yet to be solved in ways that make the mo…

"Semantic web, social network analysis, entity extraction, and news-as-API ... nerd stuff, but it will become important — a few news projects are already working on it. If they can prove these ideas can be good for business, others will follow." Nieman Journalism Lab with a few trenchant views on reinvigorating news in S. America, of which only o…

A good holiday break longread: "As people talk back to organizations, organizations find they have trouble telling their story and listening to their customers at the same time. The forces of change affecting content can test the conventional responsibilities of marketing and IT and customer service. "

The rapid evolution in newsmedia provides a lot of ideas for better content strategies in a less organisational, more networked society. One such concept is ideas-based, or fluid, beats for journalism: "... a way for reporters to be human-centric rather than newsroom- or bureaucracy-centric", according to the latest piece in Niemanlab's Journalis…

#Context emerging as 2014 theme: "...newsrooms are going to reframe our understanding of “responsive design.” We’re going to see content move beyond simply responding to screen size and instead respond to reader context, adapting to behavior." - Nieman Journalism Lab

"The European Endowment for Democracy has been created to promote the European values of freedom and democracy. A joint effort of the Member States and European Union institutions, the European Endowment for Democracy remains an independent private law foundation with its seat in Brussels. Fostering - not exporting - democracy and freedom The Eur…

"If we want a powerful innovative culture in schools which is self-sustaining we have to empower system-aware practitioners, working ever more closely with the service users, to create it. And to avoid simply creating interesting but isolated experiments, we have to design in collaborative ways of learning and enquiry between professionals – a “pu…

Apart from the obvious platitudes ... "If Open Innovation is not seen as a long term capability building exercise then it will fail.... The NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome is a big barrier and should never be underestimated." ... there's some interesting case studies in here - e.g.,: through "TechnoWeb, our internal social media tool, we …

Opera release a new browser, offering users to "Choose your level of corporateness... Use the slider to choose between super-geek and super-suit. If you really like buzzwords, go full corp..." Very clever. Not only do they cater to all tastes, they ensure wider coverage by helping the geeks to laugh at the suits and PR hacks, and making the lat…

How nice to see the Brussels Bubble meme continue to spread ... ;) "In a damning indictment of efforts in Brussels to promote stronger public attachment to the EU through the European Year of Citizens 2013, Emily O’Reilly said the campaign was “not succeeding”. ... the new office holders needed to be courageous enough to address the union’s demo…

Yet another tool. Sigh. Apparently: "Tackk allows anyone, to create anything, and share it anywhere. There is no software to download, no login required, nothing to join + no special design or development skills needed. In fact, those who have used Tackk, literally call it "ridiculously simple." And we agree. Simply visit the Tackk home page and…

The forward of this book, by Brian Solis, made me want to substitute 'citizen' for 'consumer' and 'customer', and 'government' for 'business': "The future of customer engagement requires a more thoughtful and localized approach. Connected customers aren’t complacent, fickle or unfaithful, they’re focused on what’s important to them. As they’re al…

Reason 1: "To many, it just seems like noise. " They discover this only now?

Neat use of Twitter and Storify storytelling, used by 2 different people to tell the same underlying (and inspiring) story in different ways.

"I think companies such as Asana (which I love) will be the future of business consultancy. They will substitute the big consultancies leveraging big data, just like Coursera will displace traditional course providers by leveraging information on how people use training and using this information to design more effective training. Business consult…

"The idea of the stream has become so dominant that it is easy to think it is the natural state of things in a networked media environment. "Of course we have the stream: this is the Internet after all." That's why it's so important to look back at 2009 (just 2009!) and remember that the stream is a creation of particular companies and thinkers. Y…