December 2012
1 post
November 2012
15 posts
Former OED editor covertly deleted thousand of... →
infoneer-pulse:
An eminent former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary covertly deleted thousands of words because of their foreign origins and bizarrely blamed previous editors, according to claims in a book published this week.
Robert Burchfield’s efforts to rewrite the dictionary have been uncovered by Sarah Ogilvie, a linguist, lexicographer and former editor on the OED.
Ogilvie worked...
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October 2012
2 posts
Few enterprises are ready for the app economy’s... →
smarterplanet:
In the new app economy, organizations no longer own all the data they need to make accurate business decisions. This loss of control requires data marketplaces and data syndication models that few enterprises are currently prepared for. Apigee’s Anant Jhingran looks at three important steps that companies need to take to succeed in the app economy.
Traditional enterprise...
August 2012
7 posts
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“James Gleick on information: The basis of the universe isn’t matter or energy —...”
– James Gleick, author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology, in Kevin Kelly’s interview Why the Basis of the Universe Isn’t Matter or Energy—It’s Data, Wired Magazine, February 28, 2011. (via amiquote)
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Awesome index site for digital journalism and data... →
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Communicating Data →
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Google's Fusion tables →
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Google-Refine →
Cleaning data in Excel →
THE INVERTED PYRAMID OF DATA JOURNALISM →
July 2012
1 post
April 2012
13 posts
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Big Data's Big Problem - WSJ →
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I] Data in the World
Defining data Defining data can be a rather esoteric business, but for the purposes of this paper we will stick to the essentials. Data is typically viewed as a constituent of information - that is, the reduced, discrete entities that make up a larger system, set or understanding. One of the cornerstones of non-fiction writer James Gleick’s enthralling book The Information: A History, A...
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“Social media is here to stay. We need to get past the point in which we...”
– danah boyd: Whether the digital era improves society is up to its users – that’s us (via greggyour)
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SEO in newsrooms and news-writing
In the hearts of many newsman and woman lies a profound respect for a certain entity, the sublime sanctity of which has been enforced by centuries of hard-nosed proof-readers and dogmatic sub-editors. Since the first printed newspapers roughly a half century after the advent of the printing press in the mid 1400s [Johannes Weber (2006), Strassburg, 1605: The Origins of the Newspaper in...
Created by Knewton and Column Five Media
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Notes on argument & other establishing themes
This week, I resigned to lots and lots and lots of reading. Exhaustive lists and noteage to follow but for now, I’m starting to see how the whole thing is going to focus. One problem I’ve been toying with is the question of how to angle the paper so the title question reflects the most valuable insights in the paper.
Among the things I’m the most excited about is an insight...
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Outline - quick, rough & dirty
The purpose of this study is to look at the nascent data and gamification strategies being employed in news production environments to incent the production of news journalism. To the extent it is possible this paper also aims to reveal what the practical consequences of these strategies might be for the people producing news as well as for the nature of news output produced under such systems.
...
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A taste of intro or how I might lead
It may have started in 2002. After leaving the video game industry and receiving an MBA with distinction at Kingston University, twenty-year video game design veteran Nick Pelling had an idea. By combining business management strategy, game dynamics and computer programming Pelling believed he could integrate gaming interfaces with consumer electronics to make user experiences faster and more...
GAMIFICATION: Molly Kittle: One of the Top 10... →
bunchball:
The team at Bunchball was excited to see one of our own, Molly Kittle, named as one of the Top 10 Women in Gamification on Gamification.co. Molly Kittle, our Vice President of Digital Strategy, has been with Bunchball since the early days and has seen us grow from a young upstart to the…
GAMIFICATION: From Mad Man to Gamification Guy →
bunchball:
By Joseph Cole, Digital Strategy Producer, Bunchball Joseph Cole, @joefcole
There’s a lot of excitement around working for an ad agency. Popular TV shows like Mad Men have really helped to drive the perceived glamour and sexiness of the ad agency world. It’s absolutely true. You do…
March 2012
2 posts
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Traffic Whoring and the Newsroom →
Just as I re-settle into a new dissertation idea and start sweating for material, here comes Nieman Lab, ever fascinating, unmissable, thank you.
futurejournalismproject:
A fascinating look at Gawker’s newsroom by Nieman Lab’s Andrew Phelps.
In particular, the results of an experiment in which each staff writer spends one day a week on “traffic-whoring duty” while the rest pursue in-depth...
On The New Yorker typeface
The New Yorker’s signature display typeface, used for its nameplate and headlines and the masthead above The Talk of the Town section, is Irvin, named after its creator, the designer-illustrator Rea Irvin.[17]
The body text of all articles in The New Yorker is set in Adobe Caslon.[18]
[from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Yorker#cite_note-caslonref-17]
See...
February 2012
1 post
January 2012
5 posts
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Some Chaps & Chapettes from the Times it behooves...
Derek Willis is a web developer at the New York Times and writes about ‘investigative and computer assisted reporting’ on this awesome blog.
Tyson Evans is a self described ‘developer, designer, journalist’ on the Times’ interactive news desk. All his info available on this appealingly simple homepage. Note here his volunteerism at the Society for News Design, which...
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Working the BuzzFeed contact sheet
Tonight I’m working the BuzzFeed Team page for designers and analysts to chat to for the project.
Some amazing people at that publication at the moment including:
Greg Leuch - Senior Designer at BuzzFeed: Radically well-branded across seemingly infinite platforms (and here and here and here) as @gleuch, perhaps best-known for Shaved Bieber but an all-round viral heavyweight.
Mark...
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The Guardian's typeface family
Not hyper-pertinent but an interesting aside and definitely something to follow-up later on in the research, The Guardian’s much-discussed 2005 switch to Berliner format and accompanying redesign of the paper’s look included a new typeface family called Guardian Egyptian, in which all text in the paper is set.
Guardian Egyptian was created by graphic designer and typographer Paul...
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Dear Guardian iPad team,
I’ve just sent the Guardian iPad team a brief email including a request for contact info for who best to talk to about design on guardian.co.uk, design (Mark Porter?) on the the new Guardian iPad app (which is lovely, incidentally) and analytics packages on both of these.
Copied below are the two questions I asked specifically about analytics packages:
- What analytics package does...
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Navigating the news site: the impact of page... →
Refereed paper presented to the Journalism Education Conference, Griffith University, 29 November – 2 December 2005 Ms Margaret Van Heekeren School of Communication Charles Sturt University, Bathurst
A number of criticisms on this paper to follow. Among them: - Eye tracking doesn’t say anything about reader behaviour. That’s what clicks are for.
- The paper doesn’t deal with...
November 2011
8 posts
Method
A group of sample news sites will be selected to represent a range of size and profitability but who cater to the same or similar readerships. National Dailies in the UK would be a suitable group, though perhaps reluctant to hand over statistics, especially for comparative work.* Alternately, a patch covered by amateurs, national papers and magazines as well as by a spectrum of Social media...
My Question
What effect does the design of online news sites have on reader behaviour?
- ‘reader’ as defined by unique visitor as defined by Alexa.com, Google Analytics, server-side analytics or other web analytics platform.
A sample group of 50-100 (too many? too few?) online news publications will be chosen for analysis of two basic kinds:
Design analyses:: Tagging the homepage and story...
My testable statement (needs precision)
Certain design criteria on news websites are reliable indicators of how readers interact with content. -Content, as measured through interpreted web analytics.
Example: pages with higher ratios of text to white space seeing higher B%
Example: homepages with high numbers of stories in grid format seeing relatively high ToP - esp if length of p is relatively long. Though this maybe tempered with...
