"The investment research firm sees value in her investigative work, particularly Leder’s ability to find useful, “actionable” information. “I think there’s been a discussion about whether information has been commoditized or not,” Morningstar’s Kunal Kapoor told me. “Some news may have been, but that’s just half the story.” "

"Bookmark the pictures you like around the web. Enjoy people's favorite images."

“The daft thing is, we all knew that it was going to end. We knew that the internet would eventually take away our ad revenue; that classified would go first, followed by property and sits vac. And yet we did nothing about it. We didn’t plan for the future or invest in innovative content and means of delivery. We just carried on snuffling up the profits like pigs around a trough.”

The number one rule when responding to all criticism, even the negative type, is to stay positive. Adding more negativity to the conversation by letting yourself be drawn into a fight with a customer or user will only reflect poorly on your business.

"The crowdfunded journalism site Spot.us unveiled changes to the site today based on feedback from its users and writers. Users can now easily follow updates on a reporter’s pitch and donate their time or expertise to a story, instead of just their money."

"Young people are particularly sceptical: almost two-thirds of 18-29-year-olds believe that networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook are an ‘overrated and often pointless’ way of carrying out political debate. Only nine per cent see such websites as ‘useful’ for campaigning."

"Join us for a sneak preview of Drupal Gardens Beta. We give a complete walk through of the new features planned for version 1.0. One of the primary goals of Drupal Gardens is to empower users to quickly and easily assemble socially smart and powerful Drupal 7 websites without programming. "

"Think of it this way: social media is about the people who use it. If you dismiss Yahoo or MySpace as yesterday’s news you’re essentially dismissing those people, suggesting that their interactions, creativity and choices are of zero interest because of the platform they’ve chosen. It’s hard to think of anything less in the ‘social’ spirit."

The Chart API provides Image Charts which are rendered by a Google chart server in response to a simple URL request. Image Charts are fast to render and can be easily emailed and printed. In addition to the extensive gallery of charts, this server now also provides dynamic icons, QR codes, and math formulas.

"Too many news startup ideas fail because they take an upside down approach. Journalists think of a product and then decide who to make it for. Instead you need to define your audience first – and then ask “what do they need?”."

"You sign up for usability testing, we notify users, you watch and listen to them use your site, you read their summary."

"Users are often in a rush to complete their task and reach their goal. By removing obstacles and making the web-form easier to complete, we increase the likelihood of visitors reaching your conversion page. So how can we increase the likelihood that visitors will reach your goal page and find your web-forms easier?"

"# What draws your attention?
# What do you like on this page?
# Where do you click for information about X?
Wouldn't it be great to be able to ask your website visitors questions like these or any other question?"

If there is one undercurrent of design these days it is this: design is becoming more strategic and thus more important to business success. With this power comes great responsibility. As designers we must be accountable for what we produce, and that means we must start aligning our work with concrete business metrics.

The amazing thing about our business is we get think about (and sometimes work with) emerging technologies and trends. Here are some other important trends for the next few years: gestural and multi-touch interfaces, social networks, game design. Apple's tablet, everything to do with geolocation, multi-channel customer experience.

UX London is a unique three-day event combining inspirational talks with in-depth workshops presented by some of the industry’s biggest names.

However, if every reporter or editor has the same interests and thinks alike, the newsroom will unknowingly and collectively produce the same stories and target the same audience, leaving other sections of the readership or viewership underserved and underrepresented.

"Relationships. That’s what the business of media must become. In our New Business Models for News, we began — just began — to project the value of the relationship a new media service can have in its community: creating events; educating; gathering and selling data; selling goods directly (as the Telegraph does, quite successfully); running networks to help others succeed; saving money by collaborating. This is why the notion of charging your best customers — cutting off your richest relationships with a toll booth — seems so dangerous to me. "

"Hyundai's US arm has nearly 3,000 "followers", but Joel Ewanick, its group vp of marketing, was unsure about the benefits it provided for the automaker… By contrast, Facebook, where Hyundai has 14,000 "fans", has proved to be more useful from a marketing perspective, having adopted many of Twitter's best features…"

"I have been a member of hunch from the very beginning, it is such a shining example of social community building I decided to note some of it’s most useful features to act as a resource for other social site designers. "

This is a simple, potentially effective technique. But of course you need to know who your visitor is. That’s simple enough if you require your users to register on your site, or you know who they are because they log into your site via Facebook Connect or some other third-party connection.