Monthly Archives: August 2011

Tuesday Newsday: Worldwide News Sites

This week I’ve done an ana­lysis of how news sites world­wide approach apps and mobile web sites. To get some vari­ety, I’ve chosen The New York Times, The Guard­ian, Al Jaz­eera, The Irish Times and The Onion.  If there’s a world­wide news site or app you’d like to see reviewed, just let me know and …

August 31, 2011 – 13:56 | By martha | Posted in News/Magazines | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

Fun With Data & Goal-Setting

I’m work­ing on a small pro­ject which involves per­sonal data track­ing, so I’ve been doing a bit of user research on people who set goals and track their pro­gress towards them. 43Things is a pop­u­lar and easy-to-use site for set­ting goals and record­ing your pro­gress, and I’ve enjoyed using it in the past myself.  I …

August 27, 2011 – 00:50 | By martha | Posted in Technology | Tagged | Comments (10)

Experiments in Formatting News: A Better New York Times

Last week, I came across a Chrome exten­sion called Ochs which takes the New York Times and provides a cleaner, easier-to-read lay­out for it.  The cre­ator, Michael Dono­hoe, recently left the Times after seven years there and built Ochs to scratch his own, long­time itch.  This is the lovely and very usable res­ult:   WHY …

August 24, 2011 – 00:12 | By martha | Posted in News/Magazines | Comments (1)

Tuesday Newsday: Zite and the Best Aggregators

With the announce­ment yes­ter­day that Zite is in talks with CNN for a very sweet deal, today seemed like a great day to review a hand­ful of my favour­ite news aggreg­ator apps.    ZITE: Zite has been a favour­ite app of mine for a while, and I have even recom­men­ded it in the past on the …

August 23, 2011 – 20:33 | By martha | Posted in News/Magazines | Tagged , , | Comments Off

AUGH, My Eyes! My Eyes!

Hav­ing recently read both Des Traynor’s art­icle on magazine versus print advert­ising and Andy Rutledge’s art­icle on digital news being broken, I have a new prob­lem.  I notice I’m sud­denly much more con­scious of advert­ise­ments on web­sites and applic­a­tions I use. This is a prob­lem because I used to be so good at tun­ing out the …

August 19, 2011 – 15:25 | By martha | Posted in Technology | Tagged , , | Comments Off

CS Forum: Designing Narrative Content Workshop

If you’re work­ing in the area of con­tent strategy, writ­ing, devel­op­ing or design­ing web sites, mar­ket­ing or any­thing in between, you should prob­ably be plan­ning on head­ing to the Con­tent Strategy Forum in Lon­don from Septem­ber 5th – 7th. CS Forum has excel­lent speak­ers includ­ing Karen McGrane, Gerry McGov­ern, Kristina Halvor­son, Erin Kis­sane.  They’ll be cov­er­ing …

August 16, 2011 – 16:19 | By martha | Posted in Speaking | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

Tuesday Newsday: Amazon’s Kindle Cloud Reader

It would have been dif­fi­cult to not notice Amazon’s launch of their new web app for read­ing Kindle books last week.  Part of the reason is because it’s a very easy-to-use and intu­it­ive app.  But mostly the noise was about the fact that Amazon had very clev­erly bypassed Apple’s 30% cut. Apple, as any app developer …

August 16, 2011 – 15:18 | By martha | Posted in News/Magazines | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Tuesday Newsday: The Atlantic Magazine

The Atlantic has some of the best con­tem­por­ary writ­ing and pho­to­graphy today, show­cased in their excel­lent monthly magazine (10 issues annu­ally), their news and updates web­site The Atlantic Wire and now their iPad ver­sion: The Atlantic Magazine: Digital Edi­tion, which was just relaunched a week ago after a year in devel­op­ment. Many iPad magazines go …

August 9, 2011 – 16:34 | By martha | Posted in News/Magazines | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

Welcome to Web App Magazines

Hav­ing spent the last ten months work­ing on a hand­ful of digital magazine pro­jects, I under­stand the feel­ing of fear that builds as you dis­cuss grow­ing your audi­ence on dif­fer­ent devices, dif­fer­ent plat­forms, dif­fer­ent screen sizes. There are a lot of addi­tional factors bey­ond this that affect the qual­ity of your pub­lic­a­tion to new read­ers. …

August 5, 2011 – 18:58 | By martha | Posted in News/Magazines | Tagged , , | Comments (2)