Tag: publishing

  • Friday 5 — 3.11.2016

    Friday 5 — 3.11.2016

    chart: when people read reddit

    1. When are people on Facebook, Reddit, or Gmail? This data dive by Medium’s head of Product Science discovered that the times of day when people read tend to follow consistent patterns each week. 
    2. Design thinking has been all the rage for a while. It’s one thing to understand the overall concept, and yet another to change an organizational culture. This McKinsey interview examines ways to create a design-driven culture. I particularly liked this breakdown of four vital elements of culture: understand the customer; employ empathy; design in real time; and act quickly.
    3. Facebook opens Instant Articles to all publishers in April. Good news for WordPress users: Automattic just released a new plug-in to post directly to the platform. You’ll still have to pass Facebook’s review process.
    4. Farhad Manjoo is all in on Amazon Echo, and writes that the device brims with groundbreaking promise. He points to the way the device insinuates itself into a home’s routine, and has prompted the development of an app ecosystem. After just a month with the product, I can’t say I’d disagree.
    5. Motherboard offers a nuanced overview of ways to think about bots. Once you’ve read through the social and policy implications, John Borthwick can show you how to create your own.

    Weekend fun:  Take a break from this week’s Game of Thrones trailer to try out faceswapping, high on my list of top ten disturbing trends enabled by the internet. Facebook recently purchased the MSQRD faceswapping app to keep up with Snapchat, and Mark Zuckerberg’s already given it a whirl.

     

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

     

  • Friday 5 — 2.19.2016

    Friday 5 — 2.19.2016

    harvard sky clouds

    1. Can’t find the right words for your tweet? GIF search is rolling out to Twitter users for both tweets and direct messages. Giphy’s new $55M funding round seems to confirm that GIFs are taking over the world.
    2. In mid-April, Facebook will open up Instant Articles, a format that loads articles within the app more quickly than traditional links, to all publishers. Poynter notes the opportunity that a “distributed content model” creates for publishers, but the analytics implications are daunting.
    3. Avid Slack-er? Here are some ways to make the real-time communication tool even more useful with bots. I tried Meekan (h/t Mike Petroff) but it wasn’t as practical for calendars vulnerable to frequent meeting shuffling.
    4. Usability principles remain relevant as we move into a world of voice interaction systems. This overview covers the most important design principles of voice UX, and sadly also reveals that Alexa is not the brightest bulb in the box.
    5. Dao Nguyen, publisher of Buzzfeed, dispenses a lot of wisdom on the intersection of data, intuition, and creativity. This interview is worth the read for anyone in digital publishing charged with balancing competencies and cultures on the business and editorial sides.

    Weekend fun: Retro fans, delight! You can now recreate 1977 by watching Star Wars as restored from 35mm prints, thanks to Team Negative 1.  Alternatively, celebrate Star Trek’s upcoming 50th anniversary by flying your USS Enterprise drone.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

     

  • Friday 5 — 5.15.2015

    Friday 5 — 5.15.2015

    facebook instant

    1. The big news for publishers this week was Facebook Instant Articles. The New York Times and Buzzfeed were among the first publishers on board, reaping the benefits of reach, fast-loading articles, revenue sharing, and data access. While some fear it’s a deal with the devil, Poynter is more measured in its assessment.
    2. What do Facebook Instant Articles and the $4.4B Verizon-AOL deal have in common? This Stratechery post draws the thread of the important shift in digital advertising that underlies each development.
    3. Launched in 2012, Quartz is a business site that’s reshaping digital news — and along the way has prompted its competition to raise its game in data visualization. 10 million monthly readers and a daily email with a 42% open rate are data points in a successful overall strategy described as “Quartz can go anywhere our readers are, in whatever form is appropriate.”
    4. Many of us are obsessed with workplace productivity hacks and smart filtering as our days are besieged by internet distraction. Here’s an alternative take: embrace your digital overload.
    5. I bought the Apple Watch early for fun, and have been pleasantly surprised by its workstream utility. Text messages and Slack notifications pop in usefully and unobtrusively, and can quickly be dismissed. Walt Mossberg offers his cautiously optimistic take on “a fledgling product whose optimal utility lies mostly ahead of it.”


    Weekend fun:
     Self-congratulatory splash pages with tedious descriptions of user benefit are the calling card of website redesigns like this or this. Thankfully, The Onion used its redesign to mock all other redesigns and their self-congratulatory explainers.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • Friday 5 — 2.27.2015

    Friday 5 — 2.27.2015

    new medium interface

    cute or not
    Weekend fun: Tinder for pets? Now there’s an app for that, called “Cute Or Not” — and it’s a shrewd move by Buzzfeed.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • Friday 5 — 9.26.2014

    Friday 5 — 9.26.2014

    how search works
    1. 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.
    2. 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 to publishers than Facebook or Twitter.
    3. Social media anxiety most often takes the form of FOMO (fear of missing out) — that feeling you get when you realize all your friends are on a fabulous ski weekend while you’re home in your pajamas binge watching True Detective. A new site aims to ease the pain of a different form of social media anxiety — when you fret over your unliked Instagram photos.
    4. Are messaging apps taking over your mobile device? Here’s a breakdown of the trends that are sticking (e.g., disappearing messages, ambient messaging) and leading to the app proliferation.
    5. If you work in marketing or publishing, chances are you spend some of your time sourcing digital design. 8 tricks to selecting a design partner underscores the value of a designer who understands business goals, and who will stand up to you and your bad ideas.

    Weekend fun: The time-honored geek ritual of unboxing a new tech product is re-imagined in Blue Man Group’s video of the iPhone 6. But once unboxed, will it bend? Here’s a roundup of internet reactions to #bendgate.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up to get a weekly email.

  • Friday 5 — 7.25.2014

    Friday 5 — 7.25.2014

    1. New Yorker mobile storyThe New Yorker has updated its web presence to take advantage of the internet’s love affair with quality, longform reads. The mobile design gets it right, with smooth interactive elements like a fly-in hamburger menu. This Guardian review credits the re-design for avoiding looking “like a middle-aged man dropping the ends of his words in an attempt to be down with the kids.” One quibble: given that their goal was to increase readership, I’m surprised they buried their email signup at the bottom of the page. But the best news of all? The archives since 2007 are free for three months, so dig in.
    2. The most important product design work is usually the ugliest, according to this Intercom post on The Dribblisation of Design that kicked up a kerfuffle online a while ago. It’s still a good summary of why the most interesting part of design is not the PSD, but the problem-solving.
    3. Remember back when Facebook was going to die because they were too old and uncool to get mobile? Yeah, me neither. Now they’re making money, handheld over fist.
    4. Reddit launched a new Live feature for unfolding news to better serve and reflect the high activity on the site when news breaks. The updated format makes the story easier to follow, and allows users to add content without starting a new thread and fragmenting the conversation.
    5. Should you buy an Amazon Fire phone? Unless you’re an Amazon-loving, domestic-only-traveling, early-adopter type who adores AT&T, Engadget suggests you hold off.

    Weekend fun: Emoji karaoke is a thing, and the folks who came up with the one below are undisputed masters. Read more via Nate Matias, and try it yourself.

    emoji karaoke

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

     

  • Friday 5 — 7.18.2014

    Friday 5 — 7.18.2014

    instagram graph

    1. With a growing and highly engaged (dare I say fanatical?) user base, Instagram has remained a social media darling. This comprehensive piece describes how its founders make the business tick, keep user engaged in a landscape of mercurial tastes, and prepare the app for monetization in the future.
    2. There’s a new Facebook app, but only for famous people. Features focus on ease of use for content publishing (rather than perusing friends’ vacation pics), tracking mentions, and hosting Live Q &As.
    3. Anonymous app Secret, famous for airing the tech industry’s dirty laundry in a mobile-friendly, passive-aggressive art form, raised $25M this week. Here’s how.
    4. Is the internet dumbing us down into a culture where we merely share attention-grabbing headlines without consuming the content? Or can content that’s not aggressively shared find a readership over time? If you’re publishing online, it’s worth understanding how the curve of content consumption that dives into the valley of “meh” sometimes results in the hill of “wow”.
    5. Did you ever write an email in haste and repent, well, immediately afterward? If you use gmail, these tips on un-sending that email might help.

    Weekend fun: Who’s the biggest Star Wars geek fan: Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart? Watch and find out.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

     

  • When lines blur: medium and content in online publishing

    We all like clarity — bright dividing lines that indicate what we’re accountable for and where we should fear to tread. Back in the old days of newspaper publishing, roles were clear: the journalists wrote the copy, the photographers snapped the images (but not too many of them for a Serious Publication), and the business side handled the unseemly aspects of the work, like advertising and circulation management. For the most part, people knew how to swim in their own lane to achieve a clear result.

    medium message word cloudBut along came the internet, and all the intricacies of online publishing emerged once people realized the new world wasn’t just a Quark-to-HTML export function. Along with disrupting who could capture and report the news (with highly variable quality), the internet has also made murky the clear dividing lines dictating where the content drives use of the medium, and where new opportunities in the medium drive the content.

    Two recent articles highlight different aspects of this complexity:

    Om Malik weighs in with a terrific piece on the opportunities for journalism in a post-Snow Fall world. Lauding The New York Times for its innovation, he points out:

    There is a failure in the media business to understand that the medium and the content are intertwined much like those lovers on the walls of Ajanta and Ellora caves. … Now take all of that as context and then understand why I keep harping on the point that Snow Fall-type products are a brand new media, a whole new style of storytelling and a model for 21st-century journalism

    There is a remarkable opportunity here for online publishers ready to adopt a forward-thinking digital strategy. The winners will be those willing to blur the content type lines — and they will get there only by embracing innovative techniques for delivering shareable content made possible by the rapidly shifting digital medium.

    Next, Karen McGrane surfaces important issues with how we think about and design the content management systems that underpin how we actually do online publishing. We need to separate content from presentations to preserve meaning and structure for an orderly and semantic web. It’s hard, though, as she writes:

    And yet, we know that medium and message are intertwined so tightly, they can’t be easily split apart. Graphic designers rail against the notion that “look and feel” can be painted on at the end of the process, because design influences meaning. The more skilled we are as communicators, the more we realize that the separation of content from presentation is an industrial-age feint, an attempt to standardize and segment tasks that are deeply connected.

    The very tactical way we create, edit, and publish the content has implications for how we both structure and perceive it. Without continuous investment in these systems (unlike the one-off printing press capital cost), content creation will struggle to meet the shifting of the digital medium. Beyond the system itself, there’s a new need for people who have an outward-facing awareness of all the mobile and social places the content will live, and the rendering an sharing opportunities inherent to each.

    Bottom line: As the bright lines previously dividing the medium and the content blur, there’s a need to re-think the capabilities and approaches supporting each. How does this new murkiness change what the content is, how it’s created, and how it gets pushed it out into the world through a lens of realtime context? Successful organizations will innovate often and measure fast, and operationalize the kind of nimble experimentation required to succeed.