This is the most extensive guide to data journalism I’ve seen to date but the editors are clear that it is not meant to be a “comprehensive repertoire of all if the knowledge and skills you need to become a data journalist.”

Welcome – The Data Journalism Handbook.

This flowchart from The Extreme Presentation Method can help you select the best type of chart for the message you want to send. Juice Analytics’ Chart Chooser tool takes the process a step further: The tool automatically picks chart types for you based on your selections, and offers Excel and PowerPoint templates to download that help showcase your data properly.

via How to Choose the Best Chart for Your Data.

The .net strip #25: Time spent on a new social network | Feature | .net magazine.

How do you keep visitors on your site longer once they’ve clicked through from a search result? David Deutsch gives the lowdown

This article first appeared in issue 222 of .net magazine – the world’s best-selling magazine for web designers and developers.

We all want to get our site to the top of Google. But that’s only half the story – what happens when people click through to your site?

Do they hang around a while and check out what you have to offer – or quickly move on to the next result? Obviously we want the former to happen, so how can we make sure it does?

When visitors find nothing of interest on your site at first glance and leave immediately, this is known as a bounce.

A website with a high bounce rate from good quality traffic sources is an indicator that the website isn’t performing up to its visitors’ expectations.

via Reduce your bounce rate | Feature | .net magazine.

It seems common for companies who are dealing with public outcry to try to remain silent on the matter for as long as possible.

This has happened in tech with everything from Facebook’s privacy controversies to Square’s recent negative publicity that could affect recruiting.

Is this to not draw more attention to an issue? It seems like an early, honest response could quiet many of these PR crises

via Public Relations: Why do companies often stay silent when facing a wave of criticism? – Quora.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society here at Harvard has hosted a spree of folks this month talking about the kinds of subjects we’re interested: how information gets made, how it gets shared, and how it gets consumed. First was James Gleick, talking about the ideas contained in his terrific book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Then came metaLAB’s Matthew Battles, who brought in his knowledge of the history of knowledge to talk about what it might mean to “go feral” on the Internet. And finally, earlier this week, Mike Ananny of Microsoft and Berkman spoke about the public’s right to hear and how APIs are changing media infrastructure and affecting free speech.

via Must-see TV for the weekend: Three takes on how we create, spread, and take in information » Nieman Journalism Lab.

To get people to move from one social system to another you need:

Something dramatically better to move to. AOL beat Prodigy because it had a better UI. Compuserve beat AOL because it was faster and had more intelligent conversation. Usenet beat Compuserve because it had more choice. The Internet beat Usenet because it had even more choice, but also was better integrated into other things, was easier to develop for, and eventually had far better spam and noise control. Etc etc.

You’ve gotta get influencers to move AND stay in the new place. Google+ got some, but most of the influencers are still available in Twitter and Facebook. I have never seen an online community get popular with non-influential users first and then the influencers follow. It ALWAYS happens the other way. Which is why I watch what influencers are doing so much. (Modern equivilent, what are people with Klout scores of more than 50 doing).

Provide infrastructure for future platform that others can’t react to. The Internet eventually beat AOL, despite AOL making billions, because communities on the Internet supported the web browser, which got very popular starting in 1994 and more popular every year since. AOL could never react to this new platform, so users left, eventually. Imagine that Google+ works with those new Google Glasses better than Facebook does and that the Google Glasses get very popular. Will Facebook be able to react? (Today’s shifts are happening because of mobile — look at why Twitter’s tweet volume doubled last year).

via Social Media: Google+ and Microsoft’s SO.CL are well-funded but it appears they are not able to engage users and create traction. What are they missing? – Quora.

Technology advancements have changed the way business gets done for all kinds of companies, including media agencies. Established agencies are competing with newer, more nimble firms founded by digital natives, and leaders in the field are innovating best practices and inventing new ways to deploy messages, activate consumers and measure outcomes.

Clearly, digital has forced us to adapt. But what are some of the biggest changes? We spoke with a few agency leaders to learn how the digital revolution has impacted their companies.

via 5 Ways Digital Has Forced Agencies to Adapt.

There is a wonderful essay in The Hedgehog Review about the promise and perils of information overload. Titled Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart, this essay written by Chad Wellmon explores the history of information overload and explores its implications. But Wellmon also spends some time demonstrating that information overload is far from a new problem:

These complaints have their biblical antecedents: Ecclesiastes 12:12, “Of making books there is no end”; their classical ones: Seneca, “the abundance of books is a distraction”; and their early modern ones: Leibniz, the “horrible mass of books keeps growing.” After the invention of the printing press around 1450 and the attendant drop in book prices, according to some estimates by as much as 80 percent, these complaints took on new meaning. As the German philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried Herder put it in the late eighteenth century, the printing press “gave wings” to paper.

Complaints about too many books gained particular urgency over the course of the eighteenth century when the book market exploded, especially in England, France, and Germany. Whereas today we imagine ourselves to be engulfed by a flood of digital data, late eighteenth-century German readers, for example, imagined themselves to have been infested by a plague of books [Bücherseuche]. Books circulated like contagions through the reading public. These anxieties corresponded to a rapid increase in new print titles in the last third of the eighteenth century, an increase of about 150 percent from 1770 to 1800 alone.

via Information Overload Is Not a New Problem | Wired Science | Wired.com.