Overview: Content Strategy

for manipulating public opinion... automation and artificial intelligence “can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than people.”...If disinformation in 2016 was characterized by Macedonian spammers... Russian trolls... 2020 is shaping up to be the year communications pros for hire provide sophisticated online propaganda operations .…

the same person who spends 127 hours per year on Instagram... has “no time” for reading... the ability to read is becoming a source of competitive advantage... the physical, emotional, attentional, and mental capability to sit quietly and direct focused attention for sustained periods of time...terms ADD and ADHD are falling out of use ... the ent…

The most successful audience team members have a complete understanding of how the organization works... interpret a treasure trove of data and analytics about what people are searching for, what stories they like, and what stories are missing that special something ...audience development was everyone’s job and no one’s job at the same time... Th…

It was 2010 and techno-optimism was surging... Pew Research Center ... asking 895 leading technologists, researchers, and critics for predictions of what the internet-connected world of 2020 would look like... 85 percent of respondents agreed that the “social benefits of internet use will far outweigh the negatives over the next decade,”...Flaws e…

The map juxtaposed pollution in northern Italy with the European Union subsidies paid to farmers in the region. The overlap was undeniable... The map was expunged from the group’s final reports... an approximation confirms ... the most heavily subsidized areas had the worst pollution...the bloc’s $65-billion-a-year agricultural subsidy program ...…

journalism primarily do one thing: cover events... The internet has sped up the news cycle. Now we put more emphasis on covering the last event... But ... events in this era have ceased to drive politics...impeachment... Mueller investigation ... “Access Hollywood” tapes... barely leave a trace on the polls...Events don’t seem to be driving politi…

recent UK election was a quarrel about the character of politics...Labour Party argued that it can be used for good... Conservative Party claimed that politics is bad... promised to... ‘get Brexit done’, so that we can all forget about it ...wage war on the political process, on trust, and on truth. Ensure the whole experience is miserable, bewild…

the creation of partisan outlets masquerading as local news organizations... distributing thousands of algorithmically generated articles and a smaller number of reported stories... focusing attention on issues such as voter fraud and energy pricing, providing the appearance of neutrality for partisan issues, or to gather data from users that can …

despite this being an election defined by Brexit, there is no substantive discussion of Brexit...Labour have failed to fill out what their ‘sensible Brexit’ would look like... the Conservatives have said little beyond their ‘get Brexit done’ slogan...the real and difficult choices ... Johnson would immediately face over Brexit... from one of the c…

Although V.R. has not been as lucrative as entertainment companies had hoped, the medium is used a lot in the military (flight and battlefield simulations), business training... health care (preoperative mapping, virtual cadavers... treat P.T.S.D. and phobias... transformed pornography... Independent creators and developers aren’t making their mon…

An op-ed from the future... In the age of cheap and accessible virtual reality, most consumers prefer to experience their narratives rather than read them... Virtual reality has given us a post-literacy landscape more grimly banal than Bradbury could ever have imagined... Books may be dead, but the stories ... the narratives that delight and disma…

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...

Organizations must connect their causes to the personal aspirations of their audiences to transform public attitudes... having a majority is not enough... You need a majority that can’t be eroded or peeled away... in 1996... 27 percent of the US public supported legal recognition of same-sex marriages... 60 percent in 2015 ... the new normal... ac…

In the US, radio began as a free-market free-for-all. More than five hundred radio stations sprang up in less than a decade to explore the possibilities... 40 percent were noncommercial... network of interlinked stations playing local and national content supported by local and national advertising, became dominant players...Soviet Union... ideolo…

Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry... We’ve spent the past two years studying online disinformation and building a deep understanding of Russia’s strategy, tactics, and impact...to develop procedures to identify disinformation campaigns... Profes…

AI-powered software ... could soon be weaponized for online disinformation... Although the output can be nonsensical... has also shown moments of unnerving clarity... far better-written than right-wing text we have analyzed as scholars... reliably generate tweets on political topics favored by the disinformation group, complete with hashtags... Mu…

some practical tips on how to carry out moderated think-aloud usability testing. It’s based on what I’ve learnt from academic research and from practical experience, both inside and outside government.

there are big issues with tags that limit their usefulness... tags are scattered... over 1 million unique tags. Many ... duplicates ... or so close that they have the same audience... represent each tag by a vector of numbers in a multi-dimensional vector space...find the meaning of these thousands of tags in a way that can represented by vector…

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 …

novelty and newness of these teams has worn off... growing acceptance ... that these teams are useful tool in driving new practices ... Less clear... is whether these units can enable the deeper digital transformation... ~ two key pieces of the puzzle: ... creating common platforms to power governments services is key to digital transformation o…

A privacy focused extension to annotate, search and organize what you've seen online.

If you’re in the market for an off-the-shelf text analytics API, you have a lot of options. .. go with a major player ... or a smaller provider that focusses on text analytics ... we look at what the most prominent software giants have to offer ... there are now at least a couple of dozen APIs ... The granularity of IBM’s categories is striking...…

Free Software for your own Search Engine, Explorer of large document collections, Media Monitoring, Text Analytics, Document Analysis & Text Mining platform based on Apache Solr or Elasticsearch ... and Open Standards for Linked Data, Semantic Web & Linked Open Data integration

Facebook needs to engage its users in more substantive acts of participation. ... mistakenly assumes that locally respected fact-checking NGOs can supply the trust Facebook itself is lacking. But NGOs lack standing... In a liberal democracy, NGOs can legitimately elevate arguments and offer counterarguments to government positions... we assume arg…

Information operations are rarely about changing the things people believe, but changing the way they feel. Anger and fear are not things we can correct with better facts... accounts run by ... Internet Research Agency, or IRA... shared [news from] some of the biggest, most reputable news organisations in the world... rhythmic, regular sharing o…

It’s taken me over ten years to move from enthusiasm, through frustration into a Zen-like state where I no longer blog about EU comms. But when the Eurobloggers called, I had to answer ;)- my link in the #EU09vs19 blog chain …

How fake news gets into our minds, and what you can do to resist it... to understand why it gets into our mind... by examining how memory works and how memories become distorted.... Fake news often relies on misattribution ... we retrieve things from memory but can’t remember their source... one of the reasons advertising is so effective... Repe…

This article is not a UX Research manual, it ... provides a general idea of how and when UX Research is conducted ... why designers should care about it...~ Understanding brings us closer to what we are already so familiar with. And that is the inception of UX Research... user research tackles the demographical data about a product’s existing and…

Medium was never something that we would get to define. Instead, it’s turned out to be an endless thought experiment into what publishing on the internet could look like.