Overview: Communications Tactics

"Search engines, especially Google, have gotten remarkably good at understanding searchers' intent—what we mean to search for, even if that's not exactly what we search for. How in the world do they do this? It's incredibly complex, but in today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the basics—what we all need to know about how entities are connected i…

"Through applying semantic markup to our site, we've embedded an incredibly rich layer of meaningful data in our code.... but don't let the search engines have all the fun; we can use that data, too. By looking at the semantic markup on any given page, we can see what type of "entity" we're looking at ... and its attributes or properties. If we c…

"this is a slippery slope at best: once you have made the decision to alter the flow ... based on abstract criteria programmed into an algorithm, then at some point you are going to decide ... to hide or remove certain things ... to improve the signal-to-noise ratio ... The whole point of having a social network in the first place is that the peo…

"One of the standout features of the recent resurgence of email newsletters from news outlets has been a focus on providing an aggregated experience that encompasses what other publications produce.... the idea is to pick the best and most relevant content, whether it comes from their own stable or someone else's... by producing the highest qual…

"Swarmize enables journalists to tell new, collaborative stories by making use of real-time data collection and visualisation" Just the tests they've already done are awesome. The code's on GitHub. Think to use in surveys, real-time social media monitoring, live blogs ... anything where real-time is useful and/or you might want a second bite at t…

"we are kicking off the relaunch of The Lede with a three-part series on content strategy... we begin with an element of content strategy that often gets overlooked … but that is crucial to understanding your audience intimately enough to influence it." Hint: it's AUDIENCE. And it's a podcast, so grab it and give it a listen tomorrow morning on y…

Great overview of product design and development documentation in a world of agile development: "Documentation is instrumental for concepting, designing, creating and measuring the performance of products. But ... there’s nothing about a thick stack of paperwork which resembles the experience of your real product. ... thick deliverables created …

An organisation which cannot remember cannot learn; an organisation which cannot learn cannot improve.

Nothing here about geolocation, augmented reality ... but good points anyway. Via @nosemonkey ""In a world where notifications are full experiences in and of themselves, the screen of app icons makes less and less sense... Why open the Facebook app when you can get the content as a notification and take action... right there at the notification o…

"It's also possible to see Rooms, Ello, and Tilde.club as a rebuke of the new internet _ a place dominated by designed-by-committee apps that raise millions before the first users even sign up, where interactions are either real and largely mundane (Facebook, Instagram, most of Twitter), or shadowy and toxic (Yik Yak, Reddit, 4chan). These new exp…

"The Post’s suite of Web apps presents a more specialized alternative to traditional do-it-all content management systems like Drupal... Currently in development at The Post is an application tentatively titled “Storybuilder,” ... including a feature ... to create an index of facts associated with each story. Using this index, Storybuilder could…

"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…

“Go in and add some information, thank them for finding mistakes, thank them for adding information on their own ... You want to have a dialogue with them.” Well, duh. - Eight best practices for journalists who reply to online comments | Current.org

Th@e new Guardian Visuals team will bring together ... the graphics desk, picture desk, interactive team and parts of the digital design and multimedia teams... it's hard to assemble teams that are cross-disciplinary ... and have the right combination of designers, developers, graphic artists, photographers." - Guardian forms new editorial teams…

"A newsroom typically contains reporters, editors, data journalists, developers, designers … But traditionally they work in separate departments, unable to seamlessly collaborate together. That’s why silos don’t work. Instead, there should be a horizontal of these newsroom archetypes to truly integrate the journalism with the tech." - J-teams, le…

"Collaboration on the web has always been a challenge. Beyond the typically one-dimensional CMS, other familiar tools such as Google Docs and Dropbox also fall short because they either lack multimedia support (Docs) or don’t offer a true version control system (Dropbox). Over the past year-and-a-half, however, a host of potential collaboration s…

"journalists should see Vine as a resource for more social storytelling,... A key step for producing a good Vine is to think "video first", and build the story around the element that you want to visualise... "A good Vine is one that you want to keep watching ... It's not a story, it's not a tweet, it's a little tiny loop that should look good." …

"So if you too are just starting out with scraping, here are five of the most useful tools I’ve encountered while learning and working on my project." - Five data scraping tools for would-be data journalists | Knight Lab | Northwestern University

"L'explosion du numérique et du transmédia a permis aux créateurs de développer leur univers et leur storytelling sur un grand nombre de supports. " - Comprendre le transmédia en 5 points | InaGlobal

"... a new way of measuring the actual attention of readers, as part of a move to get publishers and advertisers to stop focusing only on clicks and pageviews... Unlike pageviews, which simply measure whether a page has loaded, or even unique visitors ... metrics like “active exposure time,” ... can determine how much time a reader spent with a s…

""How to stop trolling online?” is the question of the moment. From [Quora's] inception, its efforts have been geared towards “making quality scale,” ... also meant keep making the application a safe place for users to write... It has introduced a new anti-harassment feature, where users are prompted to flag any comment or post ... Quora moderat…

The last is the best: "14... One sure way to trigger writer's block when blogging is to think, "I have to capture all my thoughts on this idea and write it about it definitively once and for all."" I definitely fell into that trap, and also definitely found that I could: "... work around the edges of an idea over days and weeks and months and re…

Just substitute 'governments' for 'businesses' and 'brands', 'citizens' for 'customers', and 'policy' for 'product' in this excellent HBR post: "Businesses need to take Ello and its manifesto as a wake-up call to rethink the way they use social networks to reach customers... That means stepping back from the relentless quest for followers, click…

The seminal launch 538 launch post: "... while the first two steps of the process (collecting and organizing information in the form of news stories) are thought to fall within the province of “objective” journalism, explanatory journalism is sometimes placed in the category of “opinion journalism.” ... [which] doesn’t seem to abide by the standa…

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, …

"This is a Big Deal for a lot of people right now, because the software companies that support our social lives have become so evil and pervasive and controlling in recent years." - What Does Ethical Social Networking Software Look Like? — The Message — Medium

"What's fascinating about Longform isn't its success... but how it went from a fairly simple website to an ambitious world-changing platform by nothing more than user feedback. No abstract theories... Just the simple power of going iteratively from MVP to a product people want... the new Longform app allows you to follow individual writers' wor…

"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 …

"The trouble is that information doesn’t nourish us... it turns out to be boring.... if there is an antidote to boredom, it is not information but meaning... Information is ... an undifferentiated stream of sense and nonsense ... the journey from information to meaning involves more than simply filtering the signal from the noise. It is an alchem…

As commented on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/New-Narrative-Europe-closing-event-4203563.S.5916497700450234368), a poll with an interesting set of options to choose from: "Do you: a) Love Europe as a state of mind? b) Love Europe as a solution to the challenges we face together? c) Love Europe for its victory over the barriers which o…