• Choice Blindness
  "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)."
  (tags: business)
• ITV Player to go on PlayStation 3 | Media | guardian.co.uk
  ITV is to put its catch-up TV service, the ITV Player, on the PlayStation 3 by the end of the year.
• BBC Dimensions
  Dimensions takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are.
  (tags: infographics innovation)

• Instructions for installing the Living Stories WordPress plugin and theme – Project Hosting on Google Code
  "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. "
  (tags: wordpress google journalism)
• Lack of hyperlinks exposes the news industry's legacy workflow systems
  "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."
  (tags: newspapers linking)
• Stroome.com
  "Welcome to Stroome, the world’s most collaborative video editing community. Upload videos, share clips, then mix it up and mash it out."
  (tags: tools video collaboration)
• The social news service on Readness.com
  "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."
  (tags: tools news)
• Council spending on websites: find out how much they spent. As a spreadsheet | News | guardian.co.uk
  "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."
  (tags: data)
• Social Search Tools for Awareness | Edelman Digital
  Below are several Facebook search tools for making yourself aware of the online conversation.
  (tags: tools socialmedia facebook)
• Wired's last schtick is dead. Long live…. – broadstuff
  "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"?"

  (tags: internet business)

• Google Hires BBC News Exec To Woo Publishers | paidContent:UK
  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”.
  (tags: google bbc)
• Can hyperlinks be libellous, or are they just mere footnotes? | Law | guardian.co.uk
  "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."
  (tags: Law)
• Roy Greenslade: Why newspapers need people like Rupert Murdoch
  "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."
  (tags: newscorp newspapers)

• Alternative Energy
  Interactive graphic showing which countries spend the most on renewable energy.
  (tags: infographics)
• Can Money Buy Happiness?: Scientific American
  "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."
  (tags: business)
• How Power Affects Us – WSJ.com
  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.
  (tags: business)
• Immersed In Too Much Information, We Can Sometimes Miss The Big Picture
  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?
  (tags: socialmedia)
• BBC News – Today – Can journalists be replaced by computers?
  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.
• Knight Foundation’s new biz consultant thinks news startups can learn from outside of journalism » Nieman Journalism Lab
  “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.”
  (tags: business)
• Mirror journalists to hold series of strikes after new ballot | Media | guardian.co.uk
  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.
  (tags: trinity_mirror nuj)
• The Guardian launches governmental pledge-tracking tool » Nieman Journalism Lab
  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.

• McSweeney's Internet Tendency: After a Thorough Battery of Tests We Can Now Recommend "The Newspaper" As the Best e-Reader On the Market.
  What concerned us most about The Newspaper was its lack of Wi-Fi. Information on the system was locked, while on other e-readers it was open, ubiquitous and current. Eventually, however, we found this advantage to be overstated, even misleading. Engineers using The Newspaper typically did so 30 to 60 minutes a day. Afterward, they went outside, formed relationships, and took in what life had to offer.
• US Hacks/Hackers network forms London branch
  Hacks/Hackers, a network of journalists and coders founded in the US, is coming to the UK with the first meeting of its London branch.

A number of people have mentioned that there was no Ruby in the Pub last month.

Well, now I can finally reveal why!

With the help of my colleague Julian Burgess, Aron Pilhoffer from The New York Times and Burt Herman, founder of Hacks/Hackers and CEO of Storify, Ruby in the Pub is relaunching this month as the London Chapter of Hacks/Hackers.

There are a number of really good reasons for the change:

1. It widens our monthly meetups to involve anyone who is interested in digital journalism.

2. We become part of a national and international network of meetups and activities run under the Hacks/Hackers name (please also check out their survival glossary for digital journalists, it is rather good).

The first Hacks/Hackers meetup will be at the Shooting Star Pub, Spitalfields next week (August 18). More details can be found on Meetup.com. If you are interested in where journalism meets technology, please come along!

UPDATE: If you are a London-based journalist we’d be really grateful if you could print off our poster and promote the launch of Hacks/Hackers in your newsroom. Thank you!

• How the New York Times creates its graphics
  "Graphics director Steve Duenes and graphics editor Archie Tse talk about the pressures of turning round illustrations to explain breaking news stories such as 9/11, their relations with the newsroom, and whether they have a fixed house style."
  (tags: newspapers infographics)
• Marketing budgets set to rise in UK – Warc News – Warc
  "Search engine optimisation was named as the most important media channel by 45% of the sample, with social networks on 42% and advocacy/word of mouth on 37%."
  (tags: business marketing)

• News Corp's Next Digital News Venture – CNBC
  Sources close to the company tell me that the company is considering creating a new purely digital news play that would be designed for the app world and would be available through subscription on devices like the iPad.
  (tags: paidcontent newscorp)

• A few words on the Times paywall « Heather Brooke
  "I believe the experience and skills I’ve gained over 22 years as a journalist and writer have value which is why I don’t give away my work for free. I’ve written for the Times because they have valued what I do enough to pay me. The New Statesman magazine also asked me to write an article but they didn’t want to pay me anything. To me, that shows how much they value quality journalism."
  (tags: paidcontent newscorp)

• FT ceo Ridding on why paywalls are commercially and morally necessary
  "What we hadn't realised, and what may turn out to be bigger benefit, is that it provides a deeper understanding our audience.
  Without contravening people's privacy, the data supplied by users enables us to know much more about them, allowing us to observe patterns of interest and trends. In editorial terms, it allows for a degree of engagment. On the marketing front, it is very powerful indeed. We can target much more efficiently, and it gives us ideas about product development."
  (tags: economics newspapers paidcontent)