Overview: Online Strategy

"From the responsive layouts to the improved APIs ... we’ve reimagined every aspect of the WIRED experience... I want to walk you through our thinking on the new site—to tell you about the technology and design innovations that make this iteration of WIRED possible. We settled on a card-based motif for both its flexibility and configurability..…

Good case study, concluding with observations on the role of journalists which also apply to government communicators: "An engaged journalist's role in the 21st century is not only to inform but to bring readers directly into the conversation through... real-time coverage, alternative story forms, crowdsourcing, beat blogging, user-generated co…

"Newsrooms don't need large budgets for analyzing data--they can easily access basic data tools that are free or inexpensive." - Drilling Down: A Quick Guide to Free and Inexpensive Data Tools | Global Investigative Journalism Network

"What was originally intended to be a simple and user-friendly tool for all EU citizens has turned out to be cumbersome and challenging in its use... Stakeholders have come up with concrete recommendations on how to adjust the instrument... first report on the application of the ECI Regulation by 1 April 2015 ... the first step towards a revision…

A whole load of recommnendations for the UK's House of Commons, including some intriguing ones - eg: "We believe the public want the opportunity to have their say in House of Commons debates; we also believe that this will provide a useful resource for MPs and help to enhance those debates. We therefore recommend a unique experiment: the use of…

"Crowdsourcing is not about work. Crowdsourcing is about community. Without a solid community, you get not-solid results from your crowdsourcing endeavor.... The goal of many of these tactics is not to stop assholes from being assholes, just to slow them down and demotivate them from destroying your community." - Crowdsourcing isn’t broken — Bac…

"This interactive project lets you step into the shoes of the president of Azerbaijan and assess how the decisions you make influence your popularity in the country" - President for a day, via https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/online-storytelling-ideas-from-hackastory-hackathon/s2/a564037

"There is a danger in asking the wrong question ... you’ll probably get the right answer for the question you’re asking, but it’s not going to be the right answer for the question you really needed to ask. " - A Beginner's Guide to Social Media Analytics | Amy Vernon | Ochen

"This paper shares ‘how’ to bring an Enterprise Gamification approach to your organization, building on ‘what’ is Enterprise Gamification, outlined in our earlier paper, ‘Let the games begin: Using game techniques to drive digital transformation’, and demonstrates the tangible benefits of gamification technique to empower employees" - Enterprise …

" online comments can be worth having, if the publisher puts the work in." Excellent case study. Found this stat particularly interesting: "Users who log in, which is required if you want to comment, view seven pages per session on average, while non-registered users make it to only 1.7" I'd suggest that users who both view 4 times as much conte…

~"Sleek and graphics-focused, the re-skinned Fusion will feature coverage of pop culture and tech, while also highlighting social-justice causes through verticals like “Justice” and “Voices.”... Part of our overall mission is to be a lab for experimentation and innovation for our parent company. Univision and ABC ... to reach this incredibly dyna…

"Guardian digital editor Aron Pilhofer say killing off comments is a “monumental mistake.”... ... many traditional newsrooms are failing to take full advantage of the web’s ability to create a two-way relationship with readers, and that this is a crucial element of what journalism has become in a digital age... ... "You see site after site movin…

"an inspiring design experiment... Earth: A Primer, a new interactive book for the iPad... instead of simply telling you about geological processes, it actually lets you control them. Each topic’s page pairs text and a simulation... Like a deity in training, you can sculpt mountains, summon rain storms, and move tectonic plates with your fingertip…

"reach is an easy-to-see vanity metric and not what you should be focusing on.... Facebook Insights provides some handy numbers, but the most useful ones are somewhat hidden." - 6 tips on Facebook analytics and going beyond...

Not just an interesting video about what neuroscience says about self-interest and compassion (and the lack of it amongst wealthy people!). Also a good example of how to maintain interest in a 'talking head' video interview through animation and video techniques. - We Are Built To Be Kind - YouTube

"We are currently witnessing a re-architecture of the web, away from pages and destinations, towards completely personalised experiences built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content ... the result of the rise of mobile technologies... from many pages of content linked together, towards individual pieces of content aggregated togeth…

"Google Analytics lets you create custom segments, dashboards and reports to find the information that’s most relevant ..." - How to Use Google Analytics Custom Segments, Reports and Dashboards | Social Media Examiner

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…

"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…

"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…

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.

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…

" 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…

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

"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…

"“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…

"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…

"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

Good overview of the year+ - long debate about comments, trolls & social media, "from the baby-and-the-bathwater dept ... This sudden disdain for traditional comments raises the question: is Facebook somehow immune to stupid comments? Is forcing all news conversation on to Facebook's terms really an improvement in meaningful dialogue?... It's lik…

"we’re collecting all the Facebook algorithm factors, updates, and changes that we can find and placing them here in this post for easy reference." - Inside the Facebook News Feed: A List of Algorithm Factors