"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 Pri…

"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…

" 2015 is likely to see a democratization of data throughout the organization, meaning that more departments will become adept at using the insight that it can bring. Rather than working towards a central strategy that is created by senior management, day-to-day activities will be based on data and the insights created from it." - Big Data Top T…

How do we want to communicate with each other? ... what kind of communicator would we actually want to use?... How do you signal that you're available to talk about movies, but not to talk about work? As we talk to more people more of the time, we'll also need smarter status indicators and smarter ways to break down conversations. The closest t…

"“People who download our app visit much more frequently and consume 10 times more articles than people coming from the mobile Web.... [BUT] Here are the common mistakes publishers with apps make — and, in some cases, how they’ve been addressed." A must-read next time someone asks fir a mobile app and/or a responsive site. Which is best? When i…

what it says in the box - How to Create Amazing Infographics - Design School

"an interactive mission, with all other elements of the campaign designed to direct people to experience it.... a range of media including TV, online rich video takeovers and a 30-second You Tube trailer." That doesn't scratch the surface of what I reckon is probably the best thing I've seen online all year. A must see.

"Every new platform that relies on user generated content depends on influential users who make the platform indispensable, thereby attracting larger numbers of users to try it out. But it's a Catch 22; the platform needs the influencers to make it indispensable, but these users won't become addicted unless it's already indispensable" Same 'vic…

"Here's what I've come up with for advice to the 20-year-old version of me on being creative." Particularly like Neil Gaiman's advice: " A lot of times ideas will turn up when you're doing something else. And, most of all, ideas come from confluence - they come from two things flowing together. " Which is why I-Labs is all about bringing peo…

"Although Serial’s audience has broken records, it  is far from the only podcast that enjoys serious listener engagement —successful podcasts often have that ability to move audiences... “It’s on-demand, so people are actively choosing what they want to listen to, stories are delivered with a human voice and personality. The intimacy of radio i…

"Charted automatically visualizes data. Give it the link to a data file and Charted returns a beautiful, shareable visualization of that data... open-sourced and available for anyone to use at charted.co... it adjusts to any screen, automatically updates itself" - Introducing Charted - Data Lab - Medium

Interesting description of the benefits of being a 'fast follower' by The Economist's Paul Rossi: "instilling a culture across the business where staff are keeping an eye on what's going on ...the editorial side [is] ... actively talking to people about new technologies. How to deliver content, how to deliver video... on the commercial team everbo…

"Readers spend a lot of time on RealClear's sites... because there's a seemingly endless amount of well-curated links to top publications writing about the big news stories of any given day... The result is a true smorgasbord of opinion, rather than a collection of links aimed at furthering a particular point of view... The expert level of curati…

Really good longread on where journalism is now, and some ideas of where it needs to go. "The public sphere is now operated by a small number of private companies, based in Silicon Valley... a defining issue not just for journalism but the whole of society... social media platforms ... have abdicated editorial responsibilities to software and al…