Nieman Lab shares insights about the progress and user adoption of Stela, the New York Times’ in-house analytics platform. As publishers adjust to living in a world of distributed content and to using analytics data to drive decisions, there’s value in more than aggregating the data: make it approachable, simple and fun to use. Make your buttons look like buttons. Nick …
Friday 5 — 1.15.2016
Mobile apps versus native web is a false dichotomy, per Luke Wroblewski. Brands need both: the former offers rich experiences, while the latter provides greater reach (including in-app browser views). We have a longstanding, love-hate relationship with email, where gratifying immediacy for the sender often means notification hell for the recipient. The Atlantic explains how we got here, why email …
Friday 5 — 8.15.2014
Lots of buzz about the U.S. Government’s launch of a new SWAT-team digital service, and its digital services playbook. The tenets above are clear and proscriptive, and, true to the complexity of digital transformation, allude to the tremendous change management effort required. It’s not trivial to enable institutional culture shifts like “Address the whole experience …
Next gen mobile: your app data finds you
The news industry is still struggling with the shift to digital, as the leaked New York Times innovation report underscores. Apart from new required competencies like video, data visualization, and analytics that digital transformation demands, there is a similar tectonic shift in reader (user) expectation. News has gone from being a canonical resource that people …
Multi-generational takes on tech
What will technology creation and use look like as the early adopter population ages? How can existing baby boomers — the pig in the python — contribute to and engage with the new tech economy? How can older adults keep up with younger generations in an increasingly digital, social, and mobile world? The Washington Post …
Digital in the DNA matters
More and more, it’s becoming apparent that digital publishing is its own thing, not an additional platform for established news companies. They can buy their way into it, but their historical advantages are often offset by legacy costs and bureaucracy. In digital media, technology is not a wingman, it is The Man.
Friday 5 — 12.6.2013
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 …
Friday 5 — 10.04.2013
Have fun playing with bitly’s new Real Time Media Map, which visualizes how content from different media outlets is being consumed across the U.S. As you can see from the drilldown above, we read a lot of The Onion here in Massachusetts. Next week Google Analytics opens its free, online Analytics Academy. Another example of …
Crowdfunding models in media
Small business lending statistics take no account of Kickstarter and crowdfunding; Andrew Sullivan’s experiment with The Dish has so startled traditional media that people are only beginning to understand how potent, powerful and perfect a model it might be – that is, when people pay something for content they value because they understand that everything …