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.