Beyond audience analytics and editorial review, what are some other ways to suss out how well your website content is performing? Here are seven website graders you can try today. We’re all hoping for a silver bullet for email management, but Google Inbox isn’t it. While the Material Design approach makes the app look slick, the default bundling of conversations and …
Friday 5 — 11.7.2014
This week Google Maps is rolling out a new redesign with improved ease of use. Beyond the clean look and brighter palette, note the increased surfacing of transactions through the map, like making a restaurant reservation through Open Table or booking a car through Uber. Reddit’s Bit of News bot summarizes news that’s shared on Reddit as it reaches …
Friday 5 — 10.31.2014
Benedict Evans demonstrates how mobile is eating the world. It’s worth reading for the astonishing growth metrics, like 80% of all adults in the world owning smartphones by 2020. One larger point is that tech is rapidly moving beyond the tech sector to transform all industries. And for now, that starts mobile first. Product managers are critical in the …
Friday 5 — 10.24.2014
Analytics firm Chartbeat has opened up its measurement methodology, limitations and all. By exposing their thinking and technology, they give the service’s users better insight into their reports — and simultaneously ramp up the pressure on the competition to go transparent. Now that we’ve all given up on comments, annotation is on the rise. The Genius …
Friday 5 — 10.17.2014
Twitter has enabled streaming audio to a limited number of partners via Audio Cards using Soundcloud. Now users can listen, like and share audio content on SoundCloud without leaving Twitter. This feature will be big for music, and useful for finding new audiences for public radio programming. Audio excerpts might also serve up interesting teasers for online learning content. With …
Friday 5 — 10.10.2014
Google has enhanced its search results with an “In the News” box. These results include blogs and other content sites that are not traditionally indexed as news. This would explain the travesty above, where a Chelsea blog is listed related to a search for Arsenal F.C. Here’s a thoughtful recap and lessons learned from the NYTNow …
Friday 5 — 10.3.2014
Pageviews and clicks provide some insight into your content’s performance, but understanding if and where your users are paying attention is far more valuable for content producers and advertisers alike. Chartbeat announced that it’s been certified by the Media Ratings Council for a new way of measuring reader attention: active exposure time. Are we actually …
Friday 5 — 9.26.2014
Even with the meteoric rise of social media, search remains a significant driver of traffic for most sites. Google released a helpful, scrolling infographic reviewing the basics of how search works. Visual social network Pinterest is a treasure trove for publishers. Not only a resource for trendspotting, Pinterest can in some cases drive more referral traffic …
Friday 5 — 9.19.2014
Facebook is updating its News Feed, again. This set of changes focuses on putting more weight on trending topics, so your feed reflects more discussion of what’s going on right now. Now the recency of the likes and comments on posts will matter more, perhaps reducing the frequency of those odd moments when a friend’s heavily-liked …
Friday 5 — 9.12.2014
When Spotify bought music intelligence platform Echo Nest, they gained access to a trove of data, and a smart team of people who could optimize curation. A new Spotify Insights blog focuses on telling scientifically-driven stories about music. This first post takes a look at how music migrates, and the varying musical influence of cities around …