"When asked to pick the "most credible" source of information about products, 38% of those polled chose other users, compared with 32% for the brand itself, 7% for journalists and 3% for marketers."

"Unilever, the FMCG giant, Toyota, the automaker, and Fidelity, the investment firm, are all thought to have agreed to advertise in the first eight iPad issues of Time, paying around $200,000 (€149k; £134k) to do so."

EasyJet today confirmed that its new chief executive is Carolyn McCall, the head of the Guardian Media Group.

"In November of last year, the company began to roll out auto-captions on a limited scale, which use speech recognition to automatically transcribe what’s said in a video. And now, it’s going to enable the feature for all videos uploaded to YouTube where English is spoken."

"The point of the matter is this: user-centered design isn’t simply a luck of the draw; its an iterative process that involves a complex interplay between designers and the users for which they design."

"Horling – a developer with Google's personalized search team – said that up to one in five searches are tailored to the user's particular location, web history, or online contacts. "As it stands today," Horling explained, "between these three techniques, just about every user who's engaging with Google search today is affected.""

"On the other hand, the politics of the paper's owner seem to matter much less. For example, once one controls for geographic factors, there is no statistically significant correlation between the newspaper's own slant (horizontal axis below) and average slant of papers in other communities owned by the same owner (vertical axis)."

“How slant gets implemented at the ground level by individual reporters. My guess is that most reporters know that they are introducing some slant in the way they’ve chosen to frame and report a story, but are unaware of the full extent to which they do so because they are underestimating the degree to which the other sources from which they get their information and beliefs have all been doing a similar filtering. "

"It turns out that those stories that indicated they contained videos were shared more than the average story on Facebook, while they were actually shared less than the average story on Twitter. This is likely because the Facebook platform makes it easy to embed multimedia content into updates while Twitter does not."

""Advertising alone is not going to sustain scale of newsrooms," he says. But growing a subscription base allows advertisers to know exactly who it is that they are selling to, which increases its value. "If you have an audience that is paying for your journalism they are engaged and that is an important message for advertisers.""

""We are not planning to close any further titles," said Sly Bailey, chief executive of Trinity Mirror. "The major activity [in terms of cost cutting] was at the begining of the year [2009 when the ad slump hit hardest] and while I won't say we won't close anything in the future ever, we have no plans. There is [also] no redundancy programme planned"."

""We certainly don't believe throwing up a paywall is the right strategy," she said. "It won't be possible to charge for general content, I can't see why people would pay for high quality content when it is free elsewhere … the BBC is an obvious one here.""

"If social sites, including Twitter, are a new center — Nick Negroponte’s “Daily Me” morphed — that’s a new challenge, and maybe opportunity, for the news industry. The challenge: getting the news to where the readers are hanging out, and figuring out to monetize there. The opportunity: If properly seeded in the social sites, the readers themselves do the (free) marketing and distribution of the content…"

"Right now we don’t have any sort of immediate plans [to charge for web content], but we’re definitely thinking about what new products we can create, including on the web,” Sheikholeslami told me. “If it makes sense to charge for it, we would.”"

"The BBC? Paying for advertising on Google?"

"Reporters Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber have created a guide that reverse-engineers how they reported a year-and-a-half-long investigation on how states handle disciplinary action against nurses. The results of their work were alarming, and its consequences were swift…"

"As you can see, men tend to focus on the youngest women in their already skewed preference pool, and, what's more, they spend a significant amount of energy pursuing women even younger than their stated minimum. "

"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. "