This morning our friend Scott Klein tweeted about a chart published in the Susan G. Komen Foundation 2009-10 annual report: So much worse than a pie chart. bit.ly/yR7nIh via @nickbaumann — Scott Klein (@kleinmatic) February 7, 2012 The original "beach ball" chart. For a variety of reasons, pie charts can a misleading illustration of numbers, and this one did seem like it might suffer from similar problems. After a light prod from my PANDA colleague Chris Groskopf, I set out to see how well the  show all text

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Over the past couple of days, numerous stats and figures have been published about how Super Bowl advertisers took advantage (or not) of social media this year. But commercials also drive people to search engines, which in turn (when things go right) can lead potential customers to advertiser web... Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

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Last week, Jon Ralston, a veteran Las Vegas Sun columnist, dared reporters to ignore Donald Trump's unveiling of his presidential endorsement -- with low expectations about how that might play out. "I suggest media boycott of @RealDonaldTrump event in Vegas," Ralston tweeted.

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According to sources close to the situation, Yahoo will announce the impending departure of four of its longtime board members, including chairman Roy Bostock. The others headed out the door are Hewlett-Packard exec Vyomesh Joshi, Gary Wilson and Arthur Kern. I had reported in several previous posts that this exact group of directors was leaving, and noted in one yesterday that it was about to happen, and that new board members were also on the way. And, presto, it is so! (Update: Yahoo confirm...  show all text

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Moda Operandi, the closely watched online retail operation from ex-Gilt exec Aslaug Magnusdottir and Vogue contributing editor Lauren Santo Domingo, is in transition. Once accessible only via application, the year-old site is opening its doors and bolstering its content offerings in an attempt to draw new shoppers in and keep them there. Moda Operandi sells clothing “straight off the runway” through a series of three-day online trunk shows. Instead of waiting for items to appear in stores half a  show all text

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Skip college, work at a startup. That’s the idea behind a new two-year program called Enstittue that started accepting applications Tuesday. As newspaper headlines about recent college graduates read along the lines of “educated, unemployed and frustrated” and the average college student takes on a record-breaking amount of crippling debt (on average, $25,250), the program isn’t the first to suggest that there might be something remiss with our certification system. Enstitute has, however, prop...  show all text

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Last week, Jon Ralston, a veteran Las Vegas Sun columnist, dared reporters to ignore Donald Trump's unveiling of his presidential endorsement -- with low expectations about how that might play out. "I suggest media boycott of @RealDonaldTrump event in Vegas," Ralston tweeted.

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The Washington Post’s Social Reader app for Facebook is now available as an app for iPhone, iPod touch, Android and Kindle Fire.

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One hundred Internet years ago, in 2010, Dan Sinker got together with Mozilla and the Knight Foundation to push more news organizations to embrace the open web. Five technologists were selected as News Technology fellows, charged with bringing the “show your work” ethos to traditional newsrooms across the country. The fellowships are just getting underway, but now Sinker wants to solve a new problem: Suddenly news organizations are hiring coders, data visualizers, and product managers like crazy  show all text

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President Obama gets a thrill after inviting young scientists and inventors to his home. Playing with your food? Shooting things at the White House? It seems like a recipe for disaster and/or arrest, but somehow Joey Hudy managed to play with his food while hanging out at the Executive Mansion and still get this look of amazement out of the president. The 14-year-old Phoenix resident designed this Extreme Marshmallow Cannon and demonstrated it at the second White House Science Fair Tuesday. In  show all text

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Those cunning hackers known as Anonymous cracked the code. Read more posts by Joe Coscarelli Filed Under: international intrigue ,syria ,hackers ,anonymous ,bashar assad

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Even if you haven’t ever visited popular visual bookmarking site Pinterest, you might recognize its design elements — which have been popping up everywhere since the startup burst onto the mainstream scene in 2011. The site doesn’t use traditional web building blocks. “It’s almost like a window-shopping mode,” says Khoi Vinh, the former design director for NYTimes.com. “It puts the ball back in the user’s court,” muses Andrew Beck, a web designer at Blue Fountain Media. “It flattens the informa...  show all text

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This FAQ for Gannett journalists receiving iPhones was distributed today at the chain’s papers. FAQs for journalists receiving iPhones In late December, USCP President Bob Dickey announced a substantial investment in tools and training to help you – our journalists – fulfill your jobs more effectively. With these tools and training, we can move faster and more nimbly to deliver the news and information our readers expect in new and unique ways. The biggest chunk of this investment is for smart...  show all text

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I've given some thought to flânerie--the practice of explorative urban strolling--and I found Evgeny Morozov's technophobic Sunday Times essay, in which he laments "the death of the cyberflâneur," an off-base interpretation of both flânerie and the state of the social web. Morozov argues that the increased speed, commercialization, and publicness of the Internet prevents the languid exploration epitomized by flânerie. "If today’s Internet has a Baron Haussmann, it is Facebook," Morozov complain...  show all text

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As the U.S. limps back from recession, the tech industry has been hailed as a boon for growth and job creation. But upon closer inspection of multi-billion dollar valuations and scrappy startups on their way to profitability, you might notice that the revenues these companies command are wildly disproportionate to the number of people they employ. Facebook, which some have valued at $100 billion after filing for an IPO last week, employs a mere 3,000 people. Compare that with General Motors, wh...  show all text

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A survey by the Pew Research Center indicated that cable news channels have surpassed local television news as the chief source of campaign news.

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David Choe, a graffiti artist who chose Facebook stock instead of cash when he spray-painted the Facebook offices in 2005, says he could be worth more than $500 million. Mr. Choe took to the airwaves on Tuesday to discuss his windfall on The Howard Stern Show.

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You can follow someone on Twitter and friend them on Facebook, but real friends are people you break bread with.

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Rapportive, which makes a browser plugin that overlays Gmail with contextual information about email contacts, is being acquired by LinkedIn, sources said.

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The must-have app on the iPhone is not iMessage. It's not iTunes or Safari or even Find My iPhone. It's Instagram, the photo-sharing app that once described itself as "quirky." Cultish would be more appropriate these days. More »

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by Lena Groeger Fracking has only recently become a household word, but government involvement with the drilling technique goes back decades. We trace officials’ moves—and levels of caution—over time.

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A federal appeals court panel ruled Tuesday that a voter-approved ban on gay marriage in California violated the Constitution, all but ensuring the case will proceed to the United States Supreme Court.

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Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been under fire from world leaders to step down this week. He’s also under fire from hacktivist group Anonymous, who leaked hundreds of his office’s emails on Monday. While Anonymous is infamous for its hacking know-how, it doesn’t take a genius computer programmer to guess one of the passwords commonly used by Assad’s office accounts: 12345. The string of consecutive numbers is the second-weakest password according to a 2011 study. Anonymous broke into the ...  show all text

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In a recent profile, the New York Times takes special note of the good luck Sheryl Sandberg has had in her rise to the top. What does it take for someone to rise to the top -- the very top -- of a field? Hard work, mentors, connections, brains, charm, ambition -- it's a long list. But certainly one thing that helps very successful people get where they are is the mystical quantity we call "luck." Luck, it must be said, is a loaded word. Sometimes someone's luck is nothing of their own doing, a  show all text

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Guardian Josh Halliday reports that British broadcaster Sky News has issued extremely restrictive new social media guidelines, “including a contentious ban on retweeting rival ‘journalists or people on Twitter.’ “ An email to staff warned that “such information could be wrong… Read more

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Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers 8 Feb 2012 – Singapore [Update] Dave Morin, the CEO of Path has responded in the comments and I’ve pasted it below. As an aside – never in my wildest dreams did I imagine this to blow up like this. I hope we can keep calm and continue to discuss this sensibly. Arun, thanks for pointing this out. We actually think this is an important conversation and take this very seriously. We upload the address book to our servers in order to help t...  show all text

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Reporters banned from reposting non-company tweets and told to check with the news desk before breaking news stories Sky News has told its journalists not to repost information from any Twitter users who are not an employee of the broadcaster. An email to staff on Tuesday laid out new social media guidelines for Sky News employees, including a contentious ban on retweeting rival "journalists or people on Twitter". The new guidelines also warn Sky News journalists to "stick to your own beat" and...  show all text

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