Interesting colection of notes from Andy Matuschak:Peripheral vision: "My physical workspace is full of subtle cues... together give me a kind of “peripheral vision”: when I’m doing one thing, it’s easy for me to fluidly notice other nearby things... Software systems, by contrast, often lack this kind of peripheral vision.". I started he…

Andy Matuschak's daily routine and content strategy appear similar, but much more complex, than my own. It starts with something we share: "When my days don’t go well, it’s often because something derailed me in the morning, and I never really got back on track", and manages his day so that he spends the first two hours of the day f…

One of my favourite writers (offline and online) on his personal content strategy, first taking aim at the "tawdry and mercenary" version of "“why writers should blog”... the story goes, “and build a brand ... to promote your work.” Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception.&qu;…

"Bridgit extension enables users to organize, share, and ultimately monetize their research... to create bridges that connect ideas on web pages (represented by content snippets)... any Internet user can connect information on an idea-to-idea basis that aggregates into an Internet of ideas ... A bridge is a bi-directional, co-locatable conc…

Books on note-taking... always too vague and boring, full of platitudes ... never an overarching system for turning notes into concrete results ... [but]How To Take Smart Notes ... is by far the most impactful and profound book I’ve ever read on the subject... most books are a few morsels of real insight wrapped in... fluff... I systematically unr…

More than 1,000 social marketers were surveyed by Sprout Social for better understanding of goals, metrics and use of social media data in business... Sixty-nine percent ... increasing brand awareness is their number one priority ... top three uses... 1. Understanding their target audience, 2. develop creative content, and 3. Assess campaign pe…

why Wikipedia has been a more successful news source than Wikinews... Wikipedia’s formulaic style and continuous format are more conducive to collaborative writing projects ... writing a news story with a lead, a coherent narrative, and a deadline is very different than writing an encyclopedia article...tension between the Wikipedia community... …

the lean canvas... single-page template designed to distil the fundamental goals and objectives of a business, and offer a clear route to achieving them... to design a product around perceived market and consumer variables... In about 45 minutes ... journalists learned how to apply this framework to their news organisation’s editorial and business…

The challenge of knowledge is not acquiring it... The challenge is knowing which knowledge is worth acquiring. And then building a system to forward bits of it through time, to the future ... challenge where it is most ... needed...when you’re applying that knowledge directly to a real-world challenge, you won’t have to worry about memorizing it..…

the same person who spends 127 hours per year on Instagram... has “no time” for reading... the ability to read is becoming a source of competitive advantage... the physical, emotional, attentional, and mental capability to sit quietly and direct focused attention for sustained periods of time...terms ADD and ADHD are falling out of use ... the ent…

the primary battle many Content Strategists fight every day... While the boarding pass was the single most important thing to the passenger... it seemed to be the least important thing to the airline. The passenger became more frustrated with the airline with each passing offer and informational screen thrust in their way... We need to shift our …

If Facebook is to thrive ... it’ll need to evolve. Here’s where we think it’s heading… developers and platforms ... will be unable to post content on behalf of personal Facebook profiles... can only post to business profiles and pages on both Facebook and Instagram... Facebook might be hoping that more unique content shared by users, reaching mor…

there’s an appetite for ... the Smarticle ... story format designed for mobile ... meet readers where they are in their knowledge of a developing story by only presenting them with the elements that are most useful to them

The “forgetting curve,” ... is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something... unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain ... leaving you with a fraction of what you took in... those who binge-watched TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than people who watched one episode a week... most common…

Although curation can save very significant time to those who benefit from it, it positively does not save any time at all to the curators who exercise it. It does to those who benefit from it... it requires the author to find, vet/verify, organize high quality information from multiple sources, and to add value and perspective ... What follows is…

Content management is about to undergo a foundational shift as artificial intelligence and machine learning bring long-sought order to enterprise content... the more content you collected, the harder it was to manage... machine learning algorithms actually work better with more data, and that has the potential to fundamentally alter how we think …

“The website and the apps are based on the rhythm and structure of the newsletter now.”... daily briefing... published as an email newsletter, in Føljeton’s app, and on its website...features a mix of original reporting that focuses on a single topic each week ... cultural writing, an editorial, and curated links... (USD $7.55) per month... When …

summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of myths. The Debunking Handbook boils the research down into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators

the Facebook Pages seeing the biggest average engagements per post across news, interests, politics, and more

research the critical trends and market conditions that are of importance to their clients and the company. From that commitment content flows at relatively low cost. It’s easy to write when you have compelling research to share, that has already been paid for by the strategic needs of the company.

author of The Content Trap and professor at Harvard Business School, talks about the strategic challenges facing digital businesses, and explains how he and his colleagues wrestled with them when designing HBX, the school’s online learning platform... success for the best companies does not come from making the best content, it comes from recogniz…

still ... publishing "dutiful, incremental pieces," ... designed to fill a daily print edition... dominated by long strings of text... a series of goals for areas including visual journalism, reader engagement, newsroom training and diversity... new content management system... build stories with visual elements and examine what the final produ…

Raising Barriers... took readers to eight countries across three continents and examined the divisions between countries and peoples through interwoven words, video and sound... we used every multimedia tool in our arsenal. Here’s what we learned from the experience

hierarchy of good writing, particularly of good science writing... Explainers make information clear and comprehensible... Elucidators go beyond explanation and into illumination — they transmute information into understanding by ... integrating various bits of knowledge into a larger framework of comprehension... Enchanters do all of the above, b…

using Facebook to repackage some of its magazine stories into video form... takes advantage of a Facebook tool that lets publishers merge a series of photos into videos... kept things simple... roughly 30 seconds and rarely going beyond a few words, a chart, or a photo in each individual slide... take as little as two minutes

Each issue is conceived around a single topic ... with a new cluster of pieces, grouped together as chapters, published each Thursday.... To supplement ... Facts So Romantic, a blog updated closer to daily Another against-the-grain move: Its print magazine collects the best of the magazine’s web content... printed on high-quality paper and desi…

they’re not the game-changer he thought they’d be... We have to stop trying to find a single problem. It needs to be solved in a million different ways, every single day.

covering trials can be tricky... trials don’t always unfold in orderly narratives. Instead, they develop in fits and starts, depending on which witnesses are called and which exhibits the prosecution and defense choose to enter.... attorneys don't actually build narrative... The challenge... to create a way to track those arguments as they're made…

Any strategy that doesn't take the ability to execute is a lousy strategy to begin with. Strategy is not a game of chess, but depends on operational capacity... simply tacking on publishing functions to their existing operations without implementing any new processes or practices ... is a grave mistake.... The ongoing conversation with the audie…

After two years work analyzing more than 400,000 stories, the American Press Institute is beginning to find general patterns in what works to attract and hold the attention of digital readers... stories longer than 1,200 words, got 23 percent more engagement, 45 percent more social referrals and 11 percent more pageviews... photos (or audio or vid…