Overview: Communications Tactics

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

information architecture has become ripe with myths... I want to take a few moments to dispel some of them.... People convince themselves that information architecture is about organising content in a logical way. It is not... people aren’t logical.... users need to be able to reach content in three clicks.... there is no evidence to support…

the value of curation combined with a second, algorithmic step: personalization. Fill a barrel with the best of the best. Now when I walk in, based on insights about my taste and what I’ve selected in the past, choose *for me* from the barrel. Wow! Thanks! - Why I Unfollowed You on Instagram — Medium

There is no shortage of content aggregators and aggregators of aggregators... give us a better overview of all the sources of information we have subscribed to and found ourselves now depending on... Constantly checking our feeds for new information, we seem to be hoping to discover something of interest, something that we can share with our ne…

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

I’ve been experimenting with online communities since 2002, and thought I’d seen every useful idea already implemented. Knowledge Hub (“K-Hub”) has a lot of features common to Community of Practice platforms, and have an interesting take on Blogs, which I’ve not seen anywhere else. And it’s almost excellent...

… 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…

For its genre, Dorsey’s memo is indeed admirably brief and to the point. But it’s still riddled with jargon. Why is it so hard for executives to write in a truly straightforward manner? Here is Dorsey’s memo, with our suggested cuts in strikethrough and additions in bold. - Jack Dorsey’s jargon-free firing memo, edited to remove the jargon - Qu…

This COP21 soonfeed lets you discover and get alerts to live streams, live blogs, hangouts and other online happenings related to the Paris climate talks. - 50 Days of Spin to COP21 - Happeningo

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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…

... it’s fantastic... there is a lot to nitpick, but it is fantastic from a strategic perspective.... Twitter just reinvented the newspaper. It’s not just any newspaper though — it has the potential to be the best newspaper in the world... imagine a tweet-based newspaper drawn not only from the best sources in a mobile-friendly format, but one …

“moments” are mini news digests of tweets across a range of topics... with splashy full-screen photos and videos. Each individual moment is made up of about 10 tweets... allows users to follow stories they’re interested in for a limited period of time... clearly targeted at curious or casual users... a “catch-me-up” type of news digest, using t…

Moments surface the best of what’s happening on Twitter... What you see on Twitter is what’s happening in the world. What follows are the standards and guidelines for creating Moments that we as a Twitter curation team follow. - Twitter Moments: Content Guidelines | About

Moments helps you find the best of Twitter as easily as tapping an icon – regardless of who you follow. Just visit the new tab called Moments, where you will discover stories unfolding on Twitter. - Moments, the best of Twitter in an instant | Twitter Blogs

We at Motherboard have decided to turn off our comments section, a decision we've debated for a year or more. What finally turned the tide was our belief that killing comments and focusing on other avenues of communication will foster smarter, more valuable discussion and criticism of our work... Sending an email knowing that a human will actua…

Below are some basic marketing test ideas across all nineteen traction channels. These tests are designed for businesses trying to get to product/market fit, either preparing for a successful launch or post-launch, but may be useful for any business... middle ring tests and should cost less than a thousand dollars and take less than one month o…

Lifestream unified our digital life: Each new document, email, bookmark or video became a bead threaded onto a single wire in the Cloud, in order of arrival...Whenever you add a bead to the lifestream, you specify who may see it... Your future home page is a bouquet of your favorite streams ... News streams blended with shopping streams, blogs,…

Yes, I’m now curating news about news curation

The goal is to distinguish your story from the floods of others and pique a journalists’ interest enough that they want to write the story. A simple, well-crafted pitch makes this so much easier. - How to pitch the [tech] press — Startups, Wanderlust, and Life Hacking — Medium

I’m here to help you figure out which advertising platforms might work best for you based on your specific situation... here are the main options that most marketers might suggest today: Google Adwords Yahoo/Bing Ads YouTube Ads Amazon Ads Mobile App Ads Social Media Ads Game Platform and In-Game Mobile Ads Remarketing Ads Audio Streami…

Google and Twitter to help publishers show “instant articles” to people who use their services on mobile phones... Twitter users or Google search users who click on a link while using their phones will see full articles pop up on their screens almost immediately... an open source project, and hope to convince multiple tech companies to adopt it…

as the internet of things surrounds us with devices that can hear our words, anticipate our needs, and sense our gestures, what does that mean for the future of design, especially as those screens go away?... It's all about getting away from the touchscreen, and interfacing with the devices around us in more natural ways: haptics, computer visi…

I hate conferences. Always have. Always will. Maybe it’s because of my fidgety metabolism and intolerance of bullshit-peddling. Or maybe it’s because, champagne and canapés apart, conferences are usually a colossal waste of time and money. - Ten Commandments for Conference Organisers | Gareth Harding | LinkedIn

In trying to access the federal programs which will allow her to afford college, Joanne must navigate the websites of multiple agencies. She finds dozens of government websites which all seem relevant to what she’s looking for. Joanne is confused. Are these programs related to each other? Are they even all a part of the federal government? Are any…