Every design has it’s literary inspiration printed on the inside neck. So every time you step out, you’re primed for chatting about something other than the weather.

or decades, journalists in mainstream news organizations were shielded from the revenue side of the operation. Many argued their lack of knowledge helped avoid even the appearance of commercial influence in the editorial well. But with increased stress in the news industry and new disruptive technologies giving even entry-level reporters an understanding of audience behaviors and income streams, things have started to shift.

It’s an attempt to open the doors of the The Times to developers, technologists, designers, and entrepreneurs, who can use Times tools to help answer some of the field’s big questions. This iteration of TimesOpen is a five-event series this fall, each focusing on a different topic: mobile/geolocation, open government, the real-time web, “big data,” and finally a hack day in early December.

Some of the most striking of Nass’s experiments involved testing the best way to get people to reveal information or do you a favor. Participants in one experiment interacted with a program that said something like “Most PCs these days have at 2MB of memory. Being an older model I only have 1MB. What do you feel inadequate about?” Participants were much more likely to reveal personal information in this case then when the program simply stated the specs of the machine.

The same was true when a search program was configured to be “helpful” or “unhelpful”  in some search tasks participants performed. When people were then asked to help optimize the screen resolution on a computer where the program had been “helpful”, they were much more likely to do so than with the less helpful version.

Online infrastructure for your small business doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. By leveraging many of the free and inexpensive products offered by Google, you can create a website, a domain-branded e-mail system, and a document collaboration platform, all unified under one master login and password.

Users can now enter news stories into the Facebook search field and any article which relates to the text inputted – and which has been 'liked' by a person within the user's network – will then appear in the results and link out to the original article.

On the upside, content farms expose journalists and amateur bloggers to an audience; on the downside, they often pay less than minimum wage.

If there’s any interest, I’ll add more features to it, but for now, it’s just a the simplest of things, a web application with a unique URL for every charity based on its charity number, and with the  basic information for each charity is available as data (XML, JSON and RDF). It’s also searchable, and sortable by most recent income and spending, and for linked data people there are dereferenceable Resource URIs.

Working for a living: A study of how Americans work and how they live

Nobody ever said creative execution was sexy. In fact, it’s grueling. Author Junot Diaz battled writers block for 5 years before finishing his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Inventor James Dyson built over 5,000 prototypes before he found the right design for his vacuum. And the list goes on. We must find joy in the process of execution, not just the end product.

Because recently, Blog, I have found it increasingly hard to negotiate the choppy waters of 'changing times'; I have, if you like, lost my compass. I have striven to be optimistic about newspapers and the future but sometimes the words rang very hollow indeed.

See how two colors blend easily

I will not stop teaching these tools, but I am going to do it with more help. I think I need to spend classroom time presenting my case for the basic knowledge of software instead of teaching it during class time.

Gilbert says the non-pros will work on a path from generalists to columnists to doing editorial features, with pay increasing along that continuum — though he’s clear to point out that people doing the writing won’t be looking to the company “as their main source of income.”

"Our hallelujah moment was when we broke the Reggie Bush story," says Yahoo!'s Pitaro, referring to a 2006 scoop reporting that the football player accepted improper benefits from sports agents while at the University of Southern California. "As we started to gain more credibility and positive reaction to our stories, we decided to apply the [sports] approach to other areas…and hire more talented writers and break even more news."

The key to the issue is synchronicity: if people are occupying that space at the same time, then they can be addressed as a crowd. If it is asynchronous – people occupy the space at different times, and return to check communications – then that mode of address doesn’t work.

Unlike infectious diseases and news, behavior change spreads faster through online networks that have many close connections instead of many distant ties. Redundancy is key, as people are more likely to engage in a behavior if they see many others doing it.

Here’s the deal: Get paid at least £350 per week, space in our office, royalty share of profit for successful ideas and a link to W+K’s worldwide creative network.

the blogging interplay — between presentation and communication, between product and process, and, perhaps most interestingly, between process and performance — is relevant to any news organization trying to navigate familiar journalistic waters with new vessels. I spoke with Braun about that dynamic and the lessons it might have to offer; below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

These researchers found, in each study (all are randomized experiments with control and treatment conditions), that a simple expression of thanks by someone in authority led people to be more likely to volunteer to do extra work

In this series, Feynman looks at the mysterious forces that make ordinary things happen and, in doing so, answers questions about why rubber bands are stretchy, why tennis balls can't bounce for ever and what you're really seeing when you look in the mirror.

"Our results bolster the argument that people use the media to enhance their social identity," said Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, lead author of the study and associate professor of communication at Ohio State University.
"Older people and younger people have different goals when they use the media, and it shows in what they choose to read."

Infographic

What is the Web for? And why do we care so much? Why has this simple technology sent a lightning bolt through our culture? It goes far beyond the Web's over-hyped economic impact: 500 million of us aren't there because we want a better "shopping experience." The Web, a world of pure connection, free of the arbitrary constraints of matter, distance and time, is showing us who we are – and is undoing some of our deepest misunderstandings about what it means to be human in the real world.

The other great thing about the Twitter model is it’s a good way of understanding how the Internet works. One of the great early works about the Internet was David Weinberger‘s book Small Pieces Loosely Joined. It’s a very seductive phrase and one that I’ve returned to again and again over the last decade as it seems to be the fundamental difference between old media and new. But it also seems to me to be an accurate reflection on how society works.

There's no shortage of newspapers that offer iPad applications, many of them with much more free content than WSJ and NYT. However the sector is ripe for innovation, which is what apps like Newsy and Flipboard are doing.

I was among those who scoffed when Mark Zuckerberg dubbed his algorithmic aggregation of personal updates a “news feed.” I was wrong. It’s news just as Mr. Bradford’s bar-top register was.

A quick guide on creating maps that tell stories, aimed at reporters

Evidently, the company aims to generate the bulk of its revenues from local businesses advertising on neighborhood websites, which can be equipped by locals with news updates, photos, a local events calendar, discussion boards and more.

"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."