AMY O'LEARY

How the user experience hides "waiting" to make for a more pleasurable experience.

"The "everyone should learn to code" movement isn't just wrong because it falsely equates coding with essential life skills like reading, writing, and math. I wish. It is wrong in so many other ways."

As someone who gets multiple requests a week for professional assistance, lots of good advice here for assistance-seekers. -AO

The "Kardashian" proposed as a unit to measure attention. Hilarious: "I choose the Kardashian as a unit both because I like the mitteleuropean feel of the term – like the Ohm or the Roentgen – and because Kardashian is an exemplar of attention disconnected from merit, talent or reason. The Kardashian mentions how much attention is paid, not how much attention is deserved, so naming the unit after someone who is famous for being famous seems appropriate. Should the unit be adopted, I would hope that future scholars will calculate Kardashians using whatever public figure is appropriate at the time for being inappropriately famous"

From the always-interesting Tim Carmody: "It reminds me a little bit of Penn & Teller; where they do the magic trick, and then show everyone how they did it. And both of those things are a kind of performance. But it’s a new kind of performance. And people are hungry for both of those things. They want engagement, they want transparency, but at the some time, they want to be surprised and filled with wonder at something new."

A gem from the LAT Archives from Rebecca Solnit.

"In the richness of language, its grace, breadth, dexterity, lies its power. To speak with clarity, brevity and wit is like holding a lightning rod." - Salter.

A fascinating and somewhat reassuring read. The action plan for the reporters really isn't so different than how big breaking news stories are assigned today. -AO

"In doing this, Sloan isn’t just removing the Web’s distractions and tyranny of choice. He’s enforcing the linear narrative more than we could do with paper, and more than we usually do online."

"Great audio, as I’ve previously written, transports us to an imaginative place somewhere between the story’s world and our own. If you’re driving down the road in Florida but hearing a story about Siberia, it feels as though you’re floating above place and time. But beneath that floaty feeling stands a whole system that’s actually obsessed with time, down to the millisecond, it seems."

A simply told multimedia tale from Jonathan Harris with several brilliant moments. A particularly smart bit of advice here on storytelling. The big, splashy "Wow!!" versus the deep, interior "wow." Well worth your time. -AO

While I am glad that someone is examining digital reading, I don't feel like this piece asks any of the most critical questions about reading in a world where our attention is held hostage by a non-stop bidding-war of lowest-common-denominator influences. People don't watch their own minds work nearly enough. The right questions are rarely asked. -AO

"The Oxford American" goes after southern competitor "Garden & Gun."

"In a lot of ways by "scoops" what we really mean is "fast enterprise." In traditional journalism, enterprise was always discretionary stuff: news you made, either by investigating it yourself or by synthetically putting together reporting or research with an idea or take that had a chance of redirecting the reporting and conversation in the future. But traditional newspapers also had to be one-stop shops: Publish only enterprise stuff and you become marginalized, because you're not talking about the same things your readers are talking about; you're not meeting them in the middle. The social web reduces the need to make that compromise—but only so much."

A fantastic post and great roundup of strategies we've used for reader interaction.

"It might have been the most hazardous beer procurement process in the world at the time, which is why it drove James nuts when Green Zone guys in clean pressed khakis complained about availability or pricing like they were in a grocery store back in New Jersey. “People could get killed for your fucking Corona Light,”

"It’s difficult to want to read about imaginary people, now that we’re crowded by them 24/7."

"Buzzfeed may be focused on cat videos and aggregation now, but disruption theory argues that content companies like it will move into the realm of the Huffington Post — which in turn, has already indicated its desire to compete more directly with The New York Times."

"More and more, I read in pieces. So do you. Digital media, in all its forms, is fragmentary. Even the longest stretches of text online are broken up with hyperlinks or other interactive elements (or even ads). This is neither a good nor bad thing, necessarily — it is simply a part of modern reading."

"I often perform before hundreds of people at a time. Radio, on the other hand, is fundamentally a communion instead of a performance—it is the one speaking to the one, a voice going out into space to reach one person's ears. It is so wildly different performatively..."

"I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing finer."

"If Google really wants to make its search engine results pages more meaningful, forget about adding links from my Google+ friends. How about creating a scraper-free search engine, instead?"

An interesting look at the Slate/YouTube partnership.

"There's a very big world out there to cover, and TV broadcasters are often months behind. When you start comparing online versus television broadcast, broadcasters usually have a very long horizon where they might be programming in the fall what's going to come out in the spring. We can put things up within a matter of hours, and it's exciting to be able to engage with issues as they happen."

"I’m a bit obsessed with corporate communication, broadly defined: how do organized groups of people talk to each other? More specifically, I’m obsessed with the culture of the all-hands email or memo. The fiery rally-the-troops memo, the anodyne corp-speak memo, the new-hire announcement memo, the he’s-fired departure memo—I think they’re all fascinating."

This is a powerful piece on one reason why otherwise smart, strong, independent women can find themselves stuck in abusive relationships — to their own shock. "What would have happened if we’d all had a broader template that showed that vulnerability was just as valid a state for a feminist to inhabit as strength and invincibility?"

A good reminder that worthwhile ideas can come from all kinds of places, given the right turn of mind.

Classically interesting.

"When a reader is given a choice about how to consume their content, a major shift in behavior occurs. They no longer consume the majority of their content during the day, on their computer. Instead they shift that content to prime time and onto a device better suited for consumption. Initially, it appears that the devices users prefer for reading are mobile devices, most notably the iPad. It’s the iPad leading the jailbreak from consuming content in our desk chairs."

This is a very nuts-and-bolts look at how digital journalists' workflows can differ from that of their print counterparts, focusing on news roles such as court reporter, beat reporter, sports reporter and visual journalist. I am eager to consider how this would differ for a features or enterprise journalist, but I don't believe there are too many models of that yet.

"Even if you’re a journalist who never wants to write a line of code professionally, you can become a better digital journalist if you understand the technologies without which no one could ever experience your journalism. And the best way to understand is to do."

"If we are capable of listening, we’re going to discover that many African narratives have completely different structures than we’re used to."

Thoughtful and underconsidered.

An amazing, unconventional bit of memoir writing.

Behind the scenes on the most intensive sports story of the year from the NYT.

Hear, hear.

A must watch video from 1940 about "Journalism!"

Smart food coverage from The Awl. One of those pieces I think dozens of journalists -- food journalists, business journalists, wish they'd thought of.

This idea keeps coming back to me again and again as I think about work in the modern world. I can't shake it and it's super-smart.

"Hands do two things. They are two utterly amazing things, and you rely on them every moment of the day, and most Future Interaction Concepts completely ignore both of them. Hands feel things, and hands manipulate things."

This series is a must-read, showing how people with poor credit are trapped into usurious interest rates and aggressive repossession tactics, when they have no other options to buy a car, and need one to hold a job or a stable life together.

One reason for anonymity? "Because he feared Mr. Khan might take revenge."