"Not all social media is created alike," said Nada Stirratt, chief revenue officer at MySpace. "MySpace is a social-activation platform. We're drop-dead amazing at getting consumers and creators to participate."

"Our chief listener is critical to making sure the right people in the organization are aware of what the conversations on the web are saying about us, so that relevant people in the business can connect with customers," said Richard Binhammer, communications executive at Dell. Mr. Binhammer points out that "Dell has been listening for four years and created a position called 'Listening Czar' two years ago. We are a leader in the listening space."

"The findings suggest that if you don't want an ad to affect you in this way, you should watch it more closely."

The giCentre is engaged in high quality research and education involving the use of Geographic Information (GI).
We develop the theory, practice and technology that support Geographic Information Science and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), offer innovative and high quality learning opportunities and play a leading role in the international GI research community

"…the alternative to chasing clicks is building trust and an editorial brand. "What people want" arguments don't impress me. I think anyone with a half a brain knows that you have to listen to demand and give people what they have no way to demand. You have to listen to them, and assert your authority from time to time, because listening well is what gives you the authority to recommend what is not immediately in demand."

Finally, we learned that innovation is as much about newsroom culture and structure as it is about mastery of technology and presentation. It requires new approaches to multimedia storytelling that are as simple as putting reporters and developers in the same room so they can learn from each other and as complex as embracing failure, recognizing that being innovative means that some ideas simply won’t pan out – and that’s an opportunity for learning, too.

"Teaching social media is more than showing students the mechanics of Twitter. Rather, they should learn how to build a network of relevant followers and how to interact with them to be a better journalist.

In the classroom, we need to stress that social media technologies do not just offer journalists new ways of doing old things. They offer the potential to explore new ways of telling stories, of collaborating and connecting with audiences, of rethinking how we do journalism."

t turns out that alcohol dulls our ability to recognize cockeyed, asymmetrical faces, according to researchers who tested the idea on both sober and inebriated college students in England.

Aviary is a free suite of powerful online creation tools

A national initiative led by 12 of America’s leading research universities with the support of two major foundations will advance the U.S. news business by helping revitalize schools of journalism.

The skill of piecing together sense from fragmented and inaccurate information is a central attribute of human intelligence. Literal interpretation, and insensitivity to context, are not marks of rationality but mental disorders.

Will business continue to use the service? Several other pieces have to fall into place for the services to become more mainstream, said Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at Columbia University. “You need customers who buy into the technology and are willing to use it, and you need businesses that are savvy enough to use it in a smart way to harness that,” he said.

The Qype features, which include local business listings, will "replace and significantly upgrade" Johnston Press' existing directory website, which was built in house.

The new section, www.youtube.com/movies, is offering films ranging from horror titles, such as Night of the Living Dead, to 'classics' such as The Clan of the Cave Bear and even Bollywood hits.

Desai doesn't recommend seeking out failure in order to learn. Instead, he advised organizations to analyze small failures and near misses to glean useful information rather than wait for major failures.

Restricting one’s freedom to exit a system leads not only to the rationalization of that particular restriction, but also to the defense of all aspects of the relevant system, even in areas not related to the restriction.

This is weel worth 11mins 10secs of your life.

"We think paywalls are essential because we think giving away content for free, particularly if consumers value that content, makes no sense." he said. "Consumers have to pay for content they value."

Join the British Library in creating the first nationwide sound map.

Take part by publishing recordings of your surroundings using the free AudioBoo app for iPhone or Android smartphones or a web browser.

So we created a Flash application that pulls in live subtitles from an IRC channel and places them underneath a live feed of News 24. Thanks very much to Andrew McParland and his team in R&D for making the subtitles available.

As the subtitles appear on the screen they are sent off to a natural language processing API and relevant concepts are extracted from the text (and in our case returned as DBpedia terms).

No media is ever encountered in a vacuum, just as no real revolution happens in one date you can point to on the calendar. We can't talk about a revolution of the book without talking about a revolution of the desk. Benjamin's description of reading here abstracts from everything we know about concrete history, only to return it to lived experience and the relationship between written language and the human body.

Ultimately, "audience versus expert" may be a red herring that distracts from a larger discussion about personal preference and cultural bias. One of the surprises of Click! was the outcome that the top 10 photographs did not diverge widely based on evaluator expertise. Five of the top ten photographs were top picks for people from at least four different levels of expertise, and all the top ten were selected by people with at least two different levels of expertise. As Wisdom of the Crowds author James Surowieckinoted, "it suggests (though it doesn’t prove) that at least in some mediums, the gap between popular and elite taste may be smaller than we think."

Of collaboration between editorial and commercial in digital, he says the question is becoming increasingly redundant, “The internet is the perfect forum for integrating those two functions, in a way that traditionally wasn’t either desirable or probably practical in print.”

This kind of home-grown innovation is why, with the greatest of respect, News no longer regards you as our primary competition. Our competitors are people who are challenging journalism aimed at mass markets. And replacing it with well targeted, low cost, specialist news and information services.

"Martin Belam said…
There's a joke in there about old school journalists being willing to post a story on the basis of a tiny self-selecting sample that is statistically invalid because the result happens to support their editorial line, and new school journalists not doing that because…well, you get the idea."

I read it again. How? Adobe Flash? Javascript? HTML? Hold on… Am I reading the right ad? Are they looking for a technology-savvy journalist?, or a journalism-savvy programmer? What kind of hybrid is The Times loking for?

Think of it as an in-house blog that just happens to be open to the public; even though the blog is meant for NPR staff, it’s a useful read for anyone interested in the future of news or in best practices for launching a news blog. Here are a few of Thompson’s lessons:

There's just a couple of days left to add your support to the Brits who have submitted panels for the massive digital shindig and Digital Mission destination that is South by South West Interactive 2011.

After a conversation with the BBC’s Martin Rosenbaum at Hacks and Hackers, I started to understand that regional journalism has a particular set of needs and problems when it comes to data journalism. National news needs big picture data from which it can draw big trends. Government ata that groups England into its nine official regions works fine for broad sweeps; data that breaks down by city or county works well too.

These first five grants that we’re announcing today are just the beginning. Learn more about the initiative, and how to submit an idea, by visiting www.technologyforegagement.org.

Crowdmap is a tool that allows you to crowdsource information and see it on a map and timeline.

Poking around in The New York Times’s job listings, I found this description of three distinct internships “in the Web Newsroom of The New York Times”:

Adam Bain, previously serving as the head of News Corp.'s Fox Audience Network (the conglomerate's unit for online advertising operations, technology, and sales; prior to that, Bain had been News Corp. chief technology officer) has joined Twitter with the lofty title of "president of global revenue."

n the past it was worth occasionally checking out newspapers' robots.txt files as they listed the URLs of stories that they've had to withdraw for legal reasons (or joke Polish editions). Sadly, they don't seem to do that so much these days (and they'd get lost in the Mirror's massive file). Plus there's no easy way to check if they've been updated – Google Reader's ability to track changing webpages doesn't work with robots.txt files. Boo.

Total revenues at the owner of the Scotsman and the Yorkshire Evening Post were £207.3m in the first half of this year, down 5.2% on the first six months of 2009.

"What, if anything, the term ‘hyperlocal’ now means is something that keeps coming up in conversations I have and it strikes me that it’s no longer necessarily defined by a tight geographical area, but instead seems to have evolved to describe more of an attitude than a place."

The former digital media publisher of Times Newspapers, Zach Leonard, has been appointed as the new managing director of digital for the Independent and the London Evening Standard.

Since ditching free, 35,000 Ning networks have signed up for paid plans. 265,000 presumably have not, but no matter: those numbers mean Ning wooed nearly 12% of its non-paying customers into opening up their wallet–more than double its previous conversion rate. Ning’s paying customer base is now three times its previous size.

Our BP Claims Tracker does just that: it charts how much money BP has spent reimbursing claimants for Gulf Spill damages. The amount you see – $396 million — is the dollar figure reported by BP last Saturday, August 21.

"For men, they found, a woman’s most important feature was body mass index. “It turns out that men like women who are slightly anorexic,” Ariely says. And unlike a man’s height, there’s no amount of money a woman could earn to offset the effect of higher weight. Pursuing degrees doesn’t help either; education beyond a bachelor’s degree for women or a master’s degree for men did nothing to increase desirability. Another surprise: Smoking cigarettes actually increases a woman’s popularity on dating sites, which Ariely speculates may be because men associate smoking with promiscuity."

"We are working to make it easier to get your video content indexed in Google News, but ensuring it’s found in a timely fashion is another matter. So we thought we’d share six best practices for how news publishers can increase the discoverability of their news videos"

For decades, the World Database of Happiness has tracked down how happy people are—not at all happy, not very happy, quite happy, or very happy. As it turns out, most of us are mostly happy, even when things aren't going so well.

The search for artificial intelligence modelled on human brains has been a dismal failure. AI based on ant behaviour, though, is having some success.

David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut — and it may just change the way we see the world.

"What she discovered was that the students with the most extreme pro-alcohol stance expressed their opinions most readily, in general because they believed that they were voicing the majority opinion. But polls showed that the majority of students had a moderate to anti-alcohol stance. When pro-alcohol students were shown evidence that most people didn't support their views, they were far more reluctant to express their extreme opinions."

"How did this happen? Subversive, disillusioned, overtired or dyslexic production line engineer, or simply a typo? (Here are 153,000 others who also prefer the alternative spelling of Renault.)"

Now you can use Gapminder World – with all its indicators – from your own computer, even when you have no Internet. Just download and install the new Gapminder Desktop.

A downloadable version of Gapminder World is the single most requested tool, and we are very happy to be able to now offer just that, free of charge.

They are case studies that, for one reason or another, have made us think ‘great campaign’.   In deciding what is/is not a relevant case study, our social media litmus test has been to ask if they involve either online social interaction, user participation or user-generated content.

Now it is testing out local recommendations on a map with a sidebar showing restaurants, nightlife, hotels, spas, clothing stores, and more. Hunch local tries to figure out which spots your friends on different services might like (you can sign in with your Twitter or Facebook account) and offers them up at the top of its local search results. Each spot has a corresponding pin on the map. You can filter by different types of venues, and there is also a slider which lets you select more personalized “unique” results or more “popular” ones.

Rather, this post is just a reminder that eye candy is important, but it isn’t everything, and that for a design to be truly beautiful, it has to be functional, have purpose and contribute in some way to the website’s intuitiveness, usefulness and branding. All of these things contribute to the overall effect of a design.

For as much as technology can distract us from long-form journalism, though, it can also be a gateway into it.

Five guys — Nate Weiner of Read It Later, Marco Arment of Instapaper, Max Linsky and Aaron Lammer of Longform.org, and Mark Armstrong of @LongReads — have found ways to use Web tools to renew attention to long-form journalism, increase its shelf life and make it easier for people to consume and share it.

"The one sphere that really sticks out, however, is the login we choose when it comes to the news. Of all the logins to news sites tracked by Gigya, 45% are completed using our Twitter credentials, with only 25% using Facebook and 16% using Google. The numbers seem to solidify our vision of Twitter as a network best used to quickly share links and "newsy" bits of information."

For web 3.0 the press office will also need to:

Create and edit geotagged data such as a Google map.
Create a data set.
Use an app and a mash-up.
Use basic html.
Blog to challenge the mis-interpretation of data.

"Instead, Web fact-checkers generally try to show how articles presented in earnest are actually self-parody. These acts of reclassifying journalism as parody or fiction — and setting off excerpts so they play as parody — resembles literary criticism more than it does traditional fact-checking."

"According to the scientists, less than a third of participants realized at any point during the experiment that their preferences had been switched. In other words, the vast majority of consumers failed to notice any difference between their intended decision (“I really want Cinnamon-Apple jam”) and the actual outcome of their decision (getting bitter grapefruit jam instead)."

ITV is to put its catch-up TV service, the ITV Player, on the PlayStation 3 by the end of the year.

Dimensions takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are.

"With our new plugin and theme for WordPress, you can now run Living Stories on your WordPress-based blog, without dealing with the pain of building and deploying an App Engine or Tomcat application. The plugin will add pages to your admin console that allow you to create our special content types and link them together. The theme will modify your blog's look and feel and display the posts in the living story format, rather than a simple stream of posts. "

"Part of the reason that there is still a debate is due to the newspaper industry's unique legacy production systems and workflows. If you are generating 'web first' copy that includes a reference to a website address, whilst using a web CMS, then it is obvious to hit the 'link' button and add some HTML code to the page. If, on the other hand, you are in the middle of a desktop publishing workflow, optimised for hitting print deadlines, adding that kind of additional hypertext metadata doesn't seem quite so urgent."

"Welcome to Stroome, the world’s most collaborative video editing community. Upload videos, share clips, then mix it up and mash it out."

"Readness.com is a browser extension for Google Chrome that suggests content you'll enjoy based on what your friends read, as you browse the web."

"What happens when a council spends £2.8m on its website? Well, Birmingham city council discovered the answer when local developers thought they could do a better job – and promptly did, for a fraction of the cost."

Below are several Facebook search tools for making yourself aware of the online conversation.

"Now this is really going to shock the young 'uns, but this is not so much a Brave New Thing as The Way Its Always Been:

(i) There was a time the internet existed before the Web

(ii) We have been using the Internet without the Web all this time – think email, VoIP, Adobe Air, online gameworlds etc etc.

(iii) This will continue, and in fact its not impossible to imagine that the Web is a temporary phase.

In other words the correct response to this thesis is "We know. And"?"

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is hiring BBC News’ head of development and rights, Madhav Chinnappa, to its partnerships team for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, it tells paidContent:UK, “with a specific focus on helping publishers get the most out of Google News”.

"The Spectator decision shines only a dim light on the question of whether a hyperlink is in itself actionable, but the judgement is significant because it acknowledges that when a defendant publisher has linked to someone else's web pages, that content may be treated as part of the whole publication when it comes to deciding what the words complained about mean."

"Even though I have taken issue with the level of editorial control Murdoch has exercised, I cannot deny a major lesson of press history: single-minded, opinionated, determined entrepreneurs have always been the driving force behind successful newspapers."

Interactive graphic showing which countries spend the most on renewable energy.

"The researchers argue that because wealth allows people to experience the best that life has to offer, it ultimately undermines their ability to savor life’s little pleasures. Once we’ve had the opportunity to drink the finest French wines, fly in a private jet, eat foie gras with edible gold leaf, and watch the Super Bowl from a box seat, coffee at Starbucks with a friend, a sunny day after a week of rain, or an unexpected Reese’s peanut butter cup on our desks just doesn't provide the same jolt of happiness it used to."

There is no easy cure for the paradox of power. Mr. Keltner argues that the best treatment is transparency, and that the worst abuses of power can be prevented when people know they're being monitored. This suggests that the mere existence of a regulatory watchdog or an active board of directors can help discourage people from doing bad things.

Google’s Eric Schmidt recently stated that every two days we create as much information as we did from the beginning of civilization through 2003. Perhaps the sheer bulk of data makes it easier to suppress that information which we find overly unpleasant. Who’s got time for a victim in Afghanistan or end-of-life issues with all these Tweets coming in?

Dr Kristian Hammond, of the Intelligent Information Laboratory, looks at whether a computer armed with facts and figures from a football match can produce a passable match report.

“You want to spend as little amount of money on a product as possible, put it out there, and then get as much feedback as you can,” Wirz said. “I think that model is something that can be useful for journalism startups, in particular, to keep in mind.”

Staff at Trinity Mirror's three national newspapers are to hold a series of two-hour strikes, with the first set for Friday this week.

Its pledge-tracker, a sortable database of the coalition’s various promises, monitors the myriad pledges made according to their individual status of fulfillment: “In Progress,” “In Trouble,” “Kept,” “Not Kept,” etc.