The Totem of Chat
The totem of chat: The lowest, that would be Facebook, followed by Gchat, then texting, then email, then phone. Face to face would be ideal, but it’s not of this time. — Lena Dunham of HBO’s “Girls”
Email for Power Users
A wise project manager once gave me a short course on using email that I’ve been passing along to my teams ever since. The central idea is that the recipient should instantly be able to determine the following three things at a glance: Is this email time-sensitive? Does this email require a response? Is this
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Buzzfeed’s No-Fail Secret to Creating Viral Content
Slate’s excellent Farhad Manjoo has written a very funny (because it’s true) piece on how to create content that will instantly go viral. He did his research by studying the most viral posts on Buzzfeed.com and attempting to puzzle out the secret of their virality. It turns out that the Buzzfeed’s secret is easy. They
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Listening to Users: “Go Away Pig, What Do You Know About Bacon?”
In an essay entitled “The Age of Criticism,” Randall Jarrell said that most critics’ attitudes toward living poets was, “Go away, pig! What do you know about bacon?” When you plan new projects, launch new products or market your site, how much do you listen to your users?
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WSJ Drama Critic Terry Teachout’s 15 Commandments of Reviewing
Prolific writer Terry Teachout is a teacher, biographer, memoirist, librettist and blogger, but he is best-known as the Wall Street Journal’s drama critic. In his blog, About Last Night, he posted a list of rules that he used to hand out to his students. Here are his 15 Commandments for Reviewers: Be simple. Write in
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Google Launches Content Experiments Tools for Publishers
Constant experimentation and improvement is the heart of any digital strategy — especially for media properties. As part of their world-domination plan, Google has integrated A/B and multi-variate testing tools in the Analytics suite. With Content Experiments, you can develop several versions of a page and show different versions to different visitors. Google Analytics measures
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Brooklyn: Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta
A web friend recently suggested this as the new motto for the borough.
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Audience Development, Weight-Loss, and ‘The Power of Habit’
According to New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, almost 40 percent of our daily behavior isn’t intentional. We don’t think about it. We get up, have breakfast, go to work, attend meetings, write email, surf the web, make plans, all without being particularly aware of we are doing. It’s just habit. And changing our habits
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The Atlantic’s One Sentence Traffic Growth Secret
With one sentence, The Atlantic Wire changed their editorial direction and, in the last six months, their traffic has exploded. According to digital director, Bob Cohn, this is the secret: “No More Stories That No One Will Read.” Simple. Bob Cohn via MediaBistro
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Scary Great Ideas
A few months ago, Paul Graham, founder of the startup incubator YCombinator, wrote that most really big ideas are frightening. He believes that you can tell if you are on the scent of something really ground-breaking by how much anxiety it produces personally and institutionally. This phenomenon is one of the most important things you