Staff Picks
Five strategies to lower your site's bounce rateFebruary 22, 2010Some news sites, including Forbes.com, The Huffington Post and DailyMe, have developed strategies to increase engagement and decrease bounce rates -- a metric used to describe the percentage of single-page site visits, often traffic referred by search engines. Here are a few examples of their strategies.
How to make a heatmap – a quick and easy solutionJanuary 21, 2010 In case you don't know what a heatmap is, it's basically a table that has colors in place of numbers. Colors correspond to the level of the measurement. Here's how to make a heatmap with just a few lines of code.
Nobody has a million twitter followersJanuary 6, 2010Last week, I wrote a bit about what it's like to be on Twitter's suggested user list. The response to that post has been really gratifying, and I wanted to share a bit of what I've learned, as well some of the more interesting responses.
What's next in Web designJanuary 5, 2010 While commercial products obey to the laws of the market, which in part are influenced by the resources needed to produce these products, the web is defined by the user. If the user wants something he will either get it or create it himself. To see beyond today’s limits of the web all we need to do is see what is needed.
Video editing software cheat sheetJanuary 4, 2010One of the ongoing challenges in teaching journalism nowadays concerns the choice of software for video editing. I’m going to pump out a brief overview here and hope that lots of people will weigh in with their own experiences and suggestions.
No one wants to buy magazines on the iPhoneDecember 21, 2009This time last year, Esquire was only selling about 17,500 newsstand issues per month, and GQ about 39,000 newsstand issues per month, according to a WWD article. Assume those numbers are flat to down this year. So even if the iPhone were to suddenly gobble up a huge percentage of newsstand sales -- which it won't -- it's not hard to see why the magazines aren't showing up in iTunes bestseller lists.
Snap Bird helps you find the Tweets that got awayDecember 10, 2009With the hundreds of tweets that sail through our Twitter feed every day, it can be difficult to remember who said what, when, or linked to something worthwhile. Search site Snap Bird makes finding particular tweets a breeze.
Getting it right and getting it wrong with the new mediaDecember 7, 2009It’s weird to think that companies whose job it is to reach tech-savvy consumers aren’t using new media tool correctly. Here I chronicle just a few standout cases of companies using new media correctly.Journicide: A looming, lost generation of scribesDecember 3, 2009Vanishing employment opportunities and shrinking freelance compensation threaten to wipe out a substantial percentage of the next generation of professional journalists.
How I hire programmers December 1, 2009You learn very little from a resume and people get real nervous when you ask them tough questions in an interview. Programming isn’t typically a job done under pressure, so seeing how people perform when nervous is pretty useless.