December, 2013 Archive

Where’s my stuff?

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The trend of staying home and spending made for a strong online shopping season. Amazon recorded roughly 426 orders per second on Cyber Monday, and overall online sales were up 21% over 2012. Good news for some retailers, but the high volume combined with bad weather and a shorter than usual holiday shopping season to …

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Friday 5 — 12.27.2013

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The end of each year brings a slew of “best of” posts — here are five of my favorites: Flowing Data selected data visualizations that told great stories and made meaningful, real-world observations through data. See visualizations of everything from poisoned names to pizza to porn. Looking for a way to spend your gift card …

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5 lessons from Justine Sacco

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Too busy preparing for the holidays to have heard of l’Affaire Sacco? Buzzfeed has a useful summary of how one woman’s tweet took over the Twittersphere last weekend, and took down a career — at least temporarily. Five quick takeaways: The interplay between social and traditional media has never been greater, so what happens on …

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Friday 5 — 12.20.2013

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Mandatory reading for web design geeks: Snow fail: Do readers really prefer parallax design? New research poses good questions about user orientation to parallax scrolling, which may be better suited for content heavier on video and other visualizations rather than text. NPR continues its leadership in forward-looking digital initiatives by securing $17M in grants. $10M will pay …

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Digital readiness checklist

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Today 85% of U.S. adults are online, 64% are on Facebook, and a full 56% of us have a smartphone glued to one hand 1. Digital natives and immigrants alike are now accustomed to using technology in the flow of daily life. Previously discrete activities like checking email, posting photos to social networks, and shopping …

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Friday 5 — 12.13.2013

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Instagram Direct lets you send your photos, videos, and messages to select recipients. While comparisons to Snapchat feature prominently in the media coverage, this feels more like a catch-up feature like its video announcement back in June. One new ephemeral capability: you can delete your photos from recipients’ phones. In another Snapchat-response move, Twitter announced you …

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Four Ways to Scale Digital Capabilities Beyond Your Team

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Posted over at Harvard Business Review blog network: Digital today is part of everyone’s job — and many enterprise organizations are adopting strategic mobile, social, and cloud initiatives to educate and empower employees. But these organizations still face a daunting challenge in distributing digital expertise: how do you develop digital competency more broadly across a …

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Friday 5 — 12.6.2013

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Google Trends is a handy, visual tool for comparing topics by their relative search volume — see graph of search trends for Hong Kong and Singapore above. This latest release uses its vast historical data to offer dotted-line predictions of future search interest. Another useful feature: the algorithms now aggregate different searches likely to be …

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Enough said

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On the 7th day, God realised he had only tested Earth in Chrome. — I Am Devloper (@iamdevloper) December 3, 2013  

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Effective data visualization, football edition

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As an Arsenal fan (the London team that’s currently first in the Premier League, a fact I try to work speciously into every conversation), I spend far more time than I should reading about soccer/football online. Like many sports, football is a goldmine of data from goals to assists to caps. In addition, football (unlike …

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