"Q. Is it realistic to think that a European public sphere could ever be created? TGA: My view is that we should try, but we shouldn’t ever kid ourselves that this is going to be like a national public sphere. Apart from anything else, we speak different languages, which is a huge barrier. The key for me, in continuing to make the argument for …

"Blockstream is working on technology ... to secure other kinds of assets, such as contracts or ownership of stock.... building on top of it using what are known as “sidechains.”... Blockstream has developed a way to safely move bitcoins back and forth between the blockchain and sidechains in order to add new functionality to Bitcoin transactions…

“focus groups are supposed to ... source ideas that need to be researched.... No one buys shoes, cooks dinner, votes, banks, or even buys movie tickets sitting at a table under florescent lights while engaged in a moderated group discussion." or seek to understand the EU, for that matter. - Focus Groups Are Worthless — Medium

"Here is the science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions every day:"

"research into network science has begun to shed light on how synchronization happens and how we can make our enterprises function more effectively.... Great overview. Of particular interest to I-Labs: - "research helps explain why it is so hard for enterprises to adapt to new challenges... leaders need to treat new initiatives not as mere organi…

Personally I've been creeped out by all this since reading the Filter Bubble, but apparently I'll be feeling less lonely about it next year. Great image here: "Think of a world in which your phone constantly checked in with the central phone company to decide which of your relatives it should allow you to call, and to jumble their sentences aroun…

"... Both outlets are trying... to crack the task of making a viable online outlet for in-depth, narrative journalism of several thousand words, paid for by readers. They are the most recent, but far from the only, entrants into an overcrowded genre." Good overview of the intense innovation and first failures in the oversaturated longform marketp…

"With 95% confidence we conclude that an increase in ranking “the intranet search helps me find the information I need” results in a higher valuation of the respondents intranet as a whole. The impact for the same question related to menus was statistically insignificant." Not quite the deathknell for information architects and resellers of stic…

"handing over a key component of your relationship with readers to Twitter and Facebook is a mistake... suggests to readers that their comments and interaction aren’t worth the trouble" [If] "Comments are broken ... that’s not the fault of readers — it’s the fault of publishers for not seeing their relationship with their readers as being of valu…

GE's FastWorks is "a framework for entrepreneurs, building on “The Lean Startup” ... an approach to developing new products that came out of “Agile” software development... It’s now being tried in manufacturing since GE and others believe that rapid learning cycles with customers will reduce the risk that you build something you can’t sell." Star…

"If your schedule is filled with Time Debts, then it doesn't matter how hard you work. Your choices will constantly put you in a productivity hole. ... Email is a time debt that most people participate in each day. If you send an email now, you are committing to reading the reply or responding with an additional message later. Every email you sen…

"information consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently ... instead of reaping the benefits of the digital revolution we are intellectually deprived by our inability to filter out sensory junk... we are collectively wiser... but individu…

"Frugal innovation is more than a strategy. It denotes a new frame of mind: one that sees resource constraints not as a liability but as an opportunity — and one that favors agility over efficiency. Frugal organizations ... create good-quality solutions that deliver the greatest value to customers at the lowest cost... we have gleaned five valuab…

"While many journalists have lost faith in the future of their trade, venture capitalists are taking the opposite view.... providing big chunks of funding to online news providers, such as BuzzFeed, Vice, and Vox. Some of what these publishers put out is mere click bait, but they also produce serious journalism... subscription-based journalism ..…

"a smart contract is a contract that enforces itself. ... a computer program that can be run on hardware which automatically executes those conditions." Good intro to what can - and can't - happen once you have bitcoins. - DAOs Are Not Scary, Part 1: Self-Enforcing Contracts And Factum Law – Bitcoin Magazine

"It can actually have a tremendous impact on visitors perception of your website, whether they can easily find what they are looking for, and ultimately whether they purchase what you are selling." Pretty sell-focused, but there's no better force to refine an information architecture than assigning a value to each click ... and each bounce! - Ho…

"Here are 14 of some of the most recent changes to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+ and Instagram that social media marketers can benefit from."

An interview with Jim Bankoff, who just raised another raised $46.5 million in funding for Vox Media ("the fastest growing Web brand of 2014"), caught my eye.

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…