@jakeporway asks: How did you know the project was a success? And how are you going to be able to answer that question unless you have data?”

The point is that technology has extended and partially externalized our brains. No matter how smart you are, I’d wager that you are more effective when you have your preferred technology tools at the ready.

Resources for #datavisualization. I learned of @tableau software at last year’s #ideaseconomy.

every 60 seconds, there are over 700,000 messages being delivered on Facebook, 2,000 000 videos are being watched and 175,000 Tweets are sent on Twitter. Funnily enough, I bet, not all of those will be tweeted at optimal times. What I also found interesting is that this means over 250 million Tweets are now posted daily, up from 200 million in January.

“The problem is that a journalist never really knows whether their work is going to be read online or offline, even if they’re writing solely for the web. The story might get downloaded into an RSS reader, to be consumed offline. It might be emailed to someone with a Blackberry who can’t possibly be expected to open a hyperlink in a web browser. It might even get printed out and read that way.

Besides, the simple fact is that even if people can follow links, most of the time they don’t. An art of writing online is to link to everything, but to still make your piece self-contained enough that it makes sense even if your reader clicks on no links at all. Cryptic sentences which make no sense until you click on them are arch and annoying.”

As one survey participant wrote, “We are trying to reinvent the newspaper business on the public broadcasting business model— noncommercial funding and public interest reporting about underreported topics for underserved communities. We need to sustain community journalism in an era in which the commercial model is failing.” Another participant put it this way: “Commercial media’s profit margins are so thin—or, are getting so much thinner—that they are more and more focused on making money than on meaningful journalism. Nonprofit media will have to fill the void.”

Most online platforms say they don’t share personally identifiable information with advertisers, but studies have shown that large amounts of data about a single person — even anonymous data — can sometimes be used to identify the individual.