Overview: Online Architecture

thoughtfully designed user interfaces can make us a freer, more humane, and more just society, just as poorly designed ones seem to have made many of us less compassionate, less informed, and more antagonistic... for a case study, we only need to look ... online forum Nextdoor.com originally ... a way of fostering community through neighborhood-s…

as news outlets tailor their content to addictive platforms to pump up traffic, the distinction between consuming journalism and being wedded to “emails, constant notifications, and social media” is increasingly meaningless... if we are what and how we read, then our thinking will mirror the scattered and shallow tendencies of Web browsing.... …

Read the same documents our reporters gathered. Watch the video out-takes of an interview, or take a 360-degree virtual reality adventure. Test your knowledge about complex issues with a quiz. Sound off about issues, interacting through polls and emoticons or by leaving a comment. We’ll give you the tools and access to become involved, either in d…

websites that support Chrome push notifications can send out updates that look and feel like regular app updates even if the Chrome browser isn't currently active on an Android device.. it requires an HTML5 feature called a Service Worker ... notifications will work on desktop and on Android, but not on iOS.... it will be up to web developers to …

I was feeling less informed every day, despite being inundated with options for information... our points are sorted by "importance", which is to say the most important on top, least on bottom, one other option was to sort by the timeline in which points were added... our writers are adding individual bits of information in discrete text boxes and…

The New York Times smartphone products now have redefined Page One for the digital era. Finally, we have a model. Mobile can be harnessed to share the day’s news, and works far better to keep us informed than newsprint ever could....engagement — more minutes, now especially in mobile — drives subscription sales, retention, and the ability to incre…

we want to create use cases for people with limited time available to explore news stories on the mobile ... challenge is to provide the news in a quick, snappy format while also providing the opportunity to deepen their understanding when needed. As well as providing summaries and deeper information we feel this approach could lead to news bec…

Circa is indeed returning, but it won’t be the Circa its users remember.... “an independent digital news site aimed at the new generation,” building on the “intellectual property and technology of Circa News.”

In this week’s edition, a months’ reading - some 30 posts - on social media, digital transformation, content/system design and EuroPCom2015. But first some news from me

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…

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."

With a very nice longform, multimedia html5 presentation to boot. "In this bustling environment, there is less news and more noise. ..." More news but even more noise, rather.

"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…

"The news media sector has become heavily dependent on traffic from Facebook and Google. A reliance now dangerously close to addiction. Maybe it’s time to refocus on direct access... Which company in the world wouldn’t be seen as fragile when depending so much on a small set of uncontrollable distributors? for a news, value-added type media, the…

A useful look at how user-centricity has leapt out of the web department and into the business strategy: "... Quartz ... Gawker, BuzzFeed and Tumblr... are increasingly thinking about what they do as providing a service, not just as a business that generates content and then delivers it to people.... you have to experiment, and iterate rapidly, …

"The New York Times today introduced “Watching,” a major new feature on the NYTimes.com homepage on desktop and on the mobile website. Watching is a stream of developing and noteworthy news designed to amplify the scope and urgency of The Times’s digital report. Watching offers a tailored feed of the news of the moment, such as early outlines of …

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…

A new generation of companies, like CIRCA, are redefining the structure of how information is treated, and building new CMS to support it. Their approach will inevitably feed into a new generation of CMS for whom the 'article' and 'page' are, if not meaningless, at least optional. And I for one can't wait. "what we’re really doing at Circa is a…

Surprise surprise... "Circa is developing two types of ads: magazine-style full-screen banners, like Flipboard, and sponsored posts... which look and feel like editorial, created by a separate staff.... One future revenue possibility would be licensing access to Circa's article data to other publishers," - News App Circa Looks to Na…

"we essentially write new content that we then throw away at the end of the day. Content shouldn’t die by design... topical contexualization... means guiding readers through large, convoluted news topics. ProPublica’s topic pages get us closer to contextualizing huge topics. For every major series that they cover over time, there’s a landing page…

#Context emerging as 2014 theme: "...newsrooms are going to reframe our understanding of “responsive design.” We’re going to see content move beyond simply responding to screen size and instead respond to reader context, adapting to behavior." - Nieman Journalism Lab