Free group messagingIt's like a private chat room for your small group. Have as many as you want, and it's always free. Now, you can coordinate with coworkers, organize a game night, and keep in touch with family all in the same place.

there’s no shortage of startups, projects, and developers trying to apply the blockchain concept to everything... because it gives the tech industry another bite at a long-coveted apple: decentralization. Is there a decentralization event-horizon beyond which platforms simply dissolve... Here are two instances of that dream... Ujo imagines an au…

Algorithms quietly make a myriad decisions for us each day... Perhaps most importantly, these algorithms decide what we see online and how much we are aware of what is going on in the world around us... Today's digital assistants are designed to abstract ever further away from pages of links towards synthesizing information on our behalf... What …

Neat idea, if not exactly being exploited by many

How can you make your social visuals more compelling?The Media Octopus put together an information-packed infographic on the importance of social visuals. It contains a lot of great advice and creative ideas for marketers looking to up their visual game, including these four tips for visual social success:

Science journalists may write about science, but it’s also our job to look beyond wonders, hypotheses and data. It is to look at the people doing the science and whether they have conflicts of interest, or trace where their money is coming from. It is to look at power structures, to see who is included in the work and who is excluded or marginaliz…

Tap into the wisdom of your citizensYour city platform for citizensourcing

Ultimately, what publishers and advertisers care about most, however, is how much quality time a person spends with a story. To judge that, publishers are developing newer metrics like “time spent” reading, “scroll depth,” “engagement,” “recirculation,” “shares,” and “percentage of article completed.”

the collapse of the digital interface of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) IT system... supposed to be one of its key exemplars for GDS in showcasing its "agile" approach to delivering digital technology... the system will be 40 per cent over budget at £215m and has led to disallowance penalties to the EU of up to £180m per year due to mis-paym…

the first crux of Harcourt’s argument: The expository society exploits, rather than represses, our desires. The second ... government and commercial surveillance infrastructures have wholly merged.... Harcourt’s analysis hinges on desire: We want to participate, we are impelled to do so, and we like it. But it seems to me we are as much compelled …

It's been a year since Snapchat launched its network of media partners ... publishers have built mobile audiences, and some have found a new revenue source...Snapchat requires a huge committment. Content cannot be easily repurposed from other formats... .BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti has said views from Snapchat make up 21 percent of his company’s to…

Using push notifications can be a very effective and powerful way to gain and maintain audience engagement on mobile apps. But if not done correctly, they can turn out to be utterly irritating. ... Personalization is the way forward if push notifications are to survive. 

With independent journalism increasingly looking like an endangered species, a EU communication strategy that helped European media build the European Public Sphere would be a smarter longterm move than propaganda and brochureware

I instinctively open an Incognito tab in Chrome... Where I’m going, I don’t want the algorithms to follow... I hide from the algorithmic version of myself these algorithm-friendly representations decide what millions of people read, buy, eat, and watch every day. The algorithmic self is only inert and abstract because we technologists choose to k…

By the time Cameron wrote “Orbital Content” in April of 2011, almost all visits to A List Apart and zeldman.com were triggered by tweets and other third-party posts... SO JUST WHY are we afraid of Medium?

The might of Google and Facebook in the digital market, combined with structural changes such as the growth of mobile, which is proving harder to monetise than print, has increased the pace of change since last summer... Guardian Labs, its branded content division launched in 2014, to “make a far, far greater contribution” over the next three yea…

the government’s chief scientific adviser, published ... Distributed Ledger Technology: Beyond Block Chain... official study that explores how the aforementioned technology “can revolutionise services, both in government and the private sector... the potential to help governments to collect taxes, deliver benefits, issue passports, record land reg…

If you create live video, here’s that table of live streaming apps you’ve been searching for.

Over the next few years, there is no doubt content and attention will continue to shift from tens of millions of web sites to a few centralized networks that people access via apps

"I’m posting different things in different places, not just reposting the same thing over and over" - in response to Shel Holtz and Dave Winer on Medium

Every insurance company’s core computer system is, at heart, a big, fat centralised transaction ledger and if the insurance industry does not begin to learn about, evaluate, build with and eventually embrace Blockchain technology, they will leave themselves naked and open to the next Uber, Netflix,  AirBnB orwanna’ be Unicorn that comes along and …

As a reporte... there may be a simple solution to the bad commenter problem: You. When reporters get involved, it results in fewer uncivil comments, according to research... “it’s like a teacher walks into a classroom and suddenly all the kids are quiet and fold their hands at their desks.” Here are a few tips and best practices for reporters in …

uncivil comments dropped by 15 percent when reporters were participating in the conversation

a closer look at what types of comment sections news organizations ... value they are adding to news organizations’ overarching strategies...a list of questions to ask and best practices for news organizations seeking return on investment...key questions, considerations and links to further reading for evaluating what commenting strategy works bes…

The European Political Strategy Centre gathered a select group of leading international academics to provide input to the ongoing public consultation on a regulatory environment for online platforms.

the federal government hopes to unveil a "model state policy" on self-driving cars that would offer "a path to consistent national policy,"

The job of politics... finding common cause with people who aren’t like you. But current incentives seem to point in the opposite direction... I blame the internet ... You can’t take on inequality and injustice with a coalition of people who use the same slang, listen to the same music, and post the same emojis that you do.You have to be willing t…

When you put your life online, people think they know 80% of who you are. But internet personas are really only 20% true.... “It seemed like you were using personal experiences to gain approval from ‘the internet’  ... I wondered why the approval of your friends and family wasn’t enough. It felt like a distorted version of you"

benefit of building a brand that audiences recognize ... allow us to build a strong revenue model and a strong connection to an audience. If they see us on Snapchat and Snapchat has a very large audience, then they get to know and trust Vox and see it as a source that they care about... think about your brand as an interconnected ethos that should…

first U.S. newspaper and first business publication available on the platform ... (U.K.’s Daily Mail is also there).... team consists of five people who will publish eight items each weekday ... “a mix of core coverage, such as Markets, Business, and World news, and the luxury and lifestyle features that we believe provide the perfect snackable c…