Overview: Online Strategy

If there was an idea that could ‘fix’ democracy, it would have been thought-up already... When I started working on GovTrack, I thought I was building an accountability tool. If only the American public had more information they could head-off failures in government by voting more effectively in elections. ... I was wrong. The world is complic…

For Jay Rosen... Blogging is doing your work in public… For me it’s slightly different – this is where I do my thinking in public

This week NHSCitizen - one of the case studies I brought to myEuroPCom 2015 workshop on online communities- holds its first NHSCitizen Assembly, where the NHS Board meets citizens to ActionPlan the participants' top 5 priorities. Time to summarise the Hangout-On-Air I had on NHSCitizen with the Democratic Society's Anthony Zacharzewski,

Just as you’re about to publish your draft, we’ll suggest a couple tags for you to use based on what you’ve writte... to increase the number of tagged posts on Medium, but also to help users discover the right tags to use... In our algorithm, we use what is called a nearest neighbors approach... to compare posts... representing posts as vector…

NYTimes' “verified commenters.”... few hundred people whose comments are posted without moderation can end up dominating the reader commenting system... causes quite understandable resentment among thousands of others...Because they go up first, their comments are almost guaranteed to get the most exposure, “and hence rise to the top and be seen …

Silver is a combination of an iOS app, a Mac app, and a Sketch Plugin that seamlessly communicate with each other to make your mobile design process as smooth as possible - Introducing Silver : Lightweight Mobile Prototyping in Sketch 3 — Startups, Wanderlust, and Life Hacking — Medium

the Instagram experience, with its constant flow of images and text boxes, presented an alternative story geometry that demanded from me new things. Shorter stories... a deeper consideration of photographs and the rich, nuanced ways that words and pictures work together. ... a powerful, unexpected, and mostly underutilized storytelling tool...…

focusing less on how audiences interact with content on the screen but more about how, because of stories, we engage with each other as a community. Less transaction, more relation; less on audience, more on community... in 2003 I launched the initial version of Interactive Narratives ... Finding inspiring multimedia work was one benefit. But f…

Customers today can spot a phony from a mile away, and brand success will require that companies foster real, authentic connections that mirror human relationships... The live streaming revolution will be awkward. It will be messy. It will be funny, and it will be sad. And all of that is exactly what customers want... there’s something pure an…

Things that happen in an instant are mostly bad ... this earthquake or that horrible murder. ... But once you turn to statistics it gets much harder to have a pessimistic story... The kind of maths that people are taught at school focuses on algebra and calculus, which they hardly ever use later in life... You use statistics all the time - T…

People who advocate for comments on social media ... often argue that Twitter and Facebook engender higher-quality discussion in part because commenters are (usually) attached to real names ... [but] Twitter trolls are rampant, too. And a retweet or quick comment isn’t exactly the same as a thoughtful response. So recently we’ve seen a couple o…

Racontr is an easy tool to create and diffuse interactive content online

A quick post to Medium in response to: Facebook Will Be Every Publisher’s CMS And That Is Probably A Good Thing: For a publisher to adopt Facebook as their CMS would be a form of surrender, handing over their future to someone else. - I don’t know if you’re wrong, but I hope you are — Medium

I feel reasonably confident that within the next 6–12 months, you will only see Instant Articles in the mobile newsfeed. Why? Because they are better... they will eventually be available on all Facebook environments. There is seemingly nothing stopping Facebook from rolling out a full front-end to the product so writers can produce directly in …

The Writing Cooperative is a community of people who help each other write better through collaborated editing. - How to Write Better on Medium — The Writing Cooperative — Medium

Facebook and Apple... have chosen to focus on a future that takes the shape of an article... largely developed in response to the constraints of print ... a great opportunity for news organizations themselves to rethink those assumptions... considering the time scales of our reporting in much more innovative ways. Information should accumulate …

publications, where people are carefully curating great content around particular topics, themes, and ideas Here are eleven great publications that you might want to follow today:

We’ve shared many of the benefits of transparency already, and now I’d like to add to the list. If you’re contemplating transparency ... here are 3 big benefits I’d love to share. When you show your mistakes, you make yourself vulnerable... makes others want to cheer for you... frees you from the trap of perfectionism... makes people want to he…

Here’s what we’re doing so far on Makerbase to discourage abuse before it starts and address it right away when it does happen. - 8 Steps for Preventing Abuse in a Web Community — Making Makerbase — Medium

Garnish your post with a photo of a cute little kitten and animal-lovers will flock to your button like zombies to a brain smorgasbord... good writing ... does not presently guarantee an audience on Medium... risks becoming a click-bait factory, a lame production line pumping out articles around the same limited themes...it needs to radically i…

the next phase of Medium is about linking writers with brands, with Medium acting as the go-between, vetting creators. Meaning, in part, a native advertising hub filled with long-tail content.... There’s going to be sponsorships and branded dollars on the platform. Our vision is to connect quality creators with brands who may want to work with the…

Think of an interaction as a conversation between your product and your user... if the conversation is boring, your user will eventually leave ... Without interactions, there wouldn’t be any delight in the experience. - The 5 Pillars of Interaction Design — Medium

… because in the past I used marginal notes to provide additional info, remarks and links without breaking the flow of my main text… Now it looks like I’m having a massively narcissistic conversation with myself & my Profile is a total mess

... because in the past I used marginal notes to provide additional info, remarks and links without breaking the flow of my main text.... I’ve just gone through one of my longest posts to turn all of my suddenly-set-to-Private notes into Responses. Now it looks like I’m having a massively narcissistic conversation with myself & my Profile is a…

We'll probably never get a true "dislike" button on Facebook, but the social network just started to roll out the closest thing we've seen yet. Reactions, a new feature for Facebook's ubiquitous Like button that allows you to respond to posts with emoji...: "like," followed by "love," "haha," "yay," "wow," "sad" and "anger." - Facebook React…

In this week’s edition, two new social media products in one week; a few good longreads for the weekend; and more stuff for your online toolbox.

The code behind the effort is all available on Github... the fact that it uses an open repository doesn’t mean that Google isn’t running the project, or deciding what gets included and what doesn’t... publishers have another option ... simply take the best parts of the specification from the publicly available documentation and implement those …

"Accelerated Mobile Pages speed up mobile page load times through a new open framework called AMP HTML, which Google says "allows websites to build light-weight web pages." Google says it has nearly 30 publishers signed on to participate in the project, including The New York Times, Vox and Gannett." (What was the point posting each of the 6 ar…

the Google standard gives publishers a streamlined page-loading script they can use that takes advantage of smart caching of content—either on their own servers or on Google’s servers—to make the various elements load faster...an order of magnitude faster than the typical mobile page... a completely open standard that any publisher can implemen…

Media Cloud... is an open source, open data platform that allows researchers to answer complex quantitative and qualitative questions about the content of online media... by collecting and analyzing the news stream of tens of thousands of online sources.... academic researchers, journalism critics, policy advocates, media scholars, and others c…