Overview: Online Architecture

Our scientists are publishing sophisticated data visualisations for policymakers to use. But are policymakers using them? ... I interview Annie White and Nil Tuzcu of Harvard’s Growth Lab about their use of data visualisations for policymaking... summarise the resulting guidance we’re giving Knowledge4Policy publishers.

Some sites are a victim of their own initial success. A decade after launching, an EC community platform was struggling to remain relevant. Over the intervening years it had offered a flexible, powerful publishing solution to many different parts of the EC...

We’re about to start testing new online designs to make scientific evidence more accessible to policymakers. Volunteers needed! - recruiting wireframe testers via K4P

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 …

Celebrating a small milestone for the K4P project on Medium.

Managing a Medium Publication to share our the journey as we build Knowledge4Policy: "share our experiences … as transparently as possible, and invite ideas and perspectives from experts in evidence-based policymaking around the world"

“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 …

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…

What’s the difference between customization and personalization? - Customization: The visitor deliberately chooses between options designed to make the user experience more personal.- Personalization: The visitor is automatically shown personalized pages based on anticipated needs / wants.

Where I think Circa took a step forward ... the idea that we could ... take ANY story and add a structured element to it — even if the only structure was “this item read, this item unread.”.. I do think there are a few concepts that Circa created and executed upon that were truly “inventions”... The concept of atomizing news ... allowing a r…

Cards are bite-sized, self-contained, interactive units of graphical real estate presented within digital apps... cards are mostly used within apps to present information and provide interactive functions ... Things get a lot more fun, however, once cards can be shared between different apps.... The Guardian provides cards on Google Now ... [wh…

"... infographics are often taken at face value... And it is hard to fact check infographics... Fast Company republished 10 facts from Buffer. Fact checking one of the facts in that list went like this: The fact quoted an infographic -> that quoted a blog post at Huffington Post -> which in turn quoted another infographic -> which quoted a blog…

Good overview of Circa's approach: "A new model for online journalism is emerging, focusing on the atomization of news stories into “bite-sized chunks” of information aimed at mobile audiences."

"Since Taylor launched an earlier version of the site at The Boston Globe in 2007, In Focus has known for longform photo storytelling, featuring huge, high-quality images.... If you’re pandering to social media, if you’re going for clickbait, it cuts away at any sort of storytelling." - Q&A: How Alan Taylor, online photography pioneer, is rethin…

"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…

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…

"Politico has redesigned its website for the first time in its seven year history, and The Guardian's U.S. recent refresh marks the first time it's redesigned almost entirely in public, with its readers' input. Here's a look at the thinking behind the redesigns, and what the publishers were able to pull off." - Politico, HBR, The Guardian: W…

"There has been a lot of discussion lately about long-form content and how it is changing the content marketing playbook.... Is long-form content really worth the extra effort? It seems that way. SERPIQ recently completed an analysis of the top 10 search results for more than 20,000 keywords and revealed a surprising pattern. The length of cont…

At last, someone else using gardening metaphors when discussing content strategy & information architecture: "The stream—that great glut of ideas, opinions, updates, and ephemera that pours through us every day—is the dominant way we organize content.... Problem is, the stream’s emphasis on the new above all else imposes a short lifespan on conte…

"The original converted 7.6% better than the new variation... The leads from the long form version of the page were better in quality ... in most cases long form copy doesn't just boost your conversions, but it also increases your rankings too." Indepth and (inevitably) long analysis. Huge feedback. - How Content Length Affects Rankings and…

Sometimes long form content helps with conversions, and sometimes it hurts, and sometimes, long form content is better for SEO, but other times it’s worse" Read the full article to understand why ... and how, and when. Key point: " the best long form content marketing doesn’t make one feel like they’re being marketed to...." - Why Long Form Cont…

"1. Expert credibility comes from having knowledge others do not. People want experts they can understand and trust, especially when trying to understand complex or ambiguous topics like new technology, engineering, advanced science, or law... 2. Harness hierarchical credibility 3. Seek referent credibility 4. Take advantage of associative credib…

@baekdal explores "a complete and total blind spot in the newspaper industry ... based on a business model that used to work in the old days of media, but was as a result of scarcity." Newspapers, he argues, are "the supermarket of news ... [but] upermarkets only work when visiting the individual brands is too hard to do... But on the internet, e…

"The New York Times lost 80 million homepage visitors—half the traffic to the nytimes.com page—in two years.... this will make the news more about readers ...[because] homepages reflect the values of institutions, and Facebook and Twitter reflect the interest of individual readers [who] aren't interested in hard news, but rather entertainment, se…

Interesting approach to covering a story from a site known for long-form, no-click content: short-form, multi-click content: "Content is broken into small parts, and many of the main points are expandable ... This is mostly quick-hit aggregation ... a stream of posts that don’t require clicking to separate pages. " - Quartz launches Glass, a “no…

Deadtree media to do more with legacy content than paper birdcages! The latest high-profile move into explanatory journalism is New York Times' The Upshot: "offer a combination of data journalism and explanatory reporting ... head-to-head with Ezra Klein’s Vox and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight ... a kind of internal aggregator and explainer for…

Great example of modern US longform content from Vox, where they use a specific style to link to one of their 'content cards'. Plus a killer quote on the 'blame Brussels' syndrome: "... banks that owned eurozone government debt were saved, and so were institutions around the world ... Meanwhile, politicians got to take credit for keeping their c…

We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views

And not just journalists. New generation news sites are redefining news and, by consequence, rethinking information architecture, content strategy and CMS. I only hope the results filter through to everyone else, and sooner rather than later. "... a moment when young talent began demanding superior technology as the key to producing superior jour…