Knight Foundation, which benefited from being formed at the peak of financial success of newspapers, is continuing to invest significantly in new business models to support journalism across the country. Live chat Oct. 8, deadline for next year’s grants Oct. 15. Get to it!
Technorati Tags: new media, news, Knight News Challenge, partnership, entrepreneurship, startups

Emily Riley at Forrester salutes Razorfish and TNS Cymfony for illustrating how to do some simple arithmetic to calculate a “Social Influence Measurement” or SIM score. It’s not too dissimilar from Net Promoter Score from satmetrix.com (ratio of customers who say they would recommend you to others), but has a little more depth. You do need a “listening platform” from which to get the data: TNS, Visible Technologies, Radian6 (lifted from a cautionary comment by Thom Kennon). 

Nate Silver is the former baseball stats analyst turned poll analyst whose straightforward explanations of statistics (and the liars who try to twist them) on fivethirtyeight.com have become the standard for explanatory journalism of the kind seldom appreciated by, say, newspapers. Not sure I want to recommend making a business line out of these bets, but it will be fun to watch!

The social network for gadget-owners, supposedly for the 95% of the relationship that follows that 5% of lust. Great graphics, blessedly non-techie simple language in the site navigation and messages — but it seems to overlap some with getsatisfaction.com (for product complaints), at least on day two.

A Santa Fe company that’s made a nice living building custom search tools for the databases generally inaccessible to Google for such clients as Intel, has recently unveiled a set of specialized search sites that are open to the public: scienceresearch.com, mednar.com (medical) and for business research, biznar.com.

A good intro to uses of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. from the point of view of a smaller business that sells to other businesses.

It’s not enough that they (okay, we, since I’m in the biz) are tracking where you go and what you do, but not they/we want to understand your motivation. Harvard Business Review has a nice intro by venture investor Anthony Tjan of Cue Ball: http://tr.im/nkGe

One tip: “…a technique we used at Thomson Reuters
called the three-minute rule; we observed what users were doing three
minutes before and three minutes after each interaction with the
product.”

IAB Doc Seeks to Nail Down Social Media’s ROI – MarketingVOX

Which would suggest that we are liable to pretty wide swings, depending on how much we read: I’ve just finished The Palace Council by Stephen Carter, which overlays a plot to control the country over the lives of the black middle-upper class from the fifties through the seventies; The Broker by John Grisham, really about how wonderful the city of Bologna is; The Way We’ll Be, by John Zogby, pollster extraordinaire (and current business partner), who lays out the remarkable changes in the 18-29 generation. So who am I? Well, luckily, the reading is cumulative, so take a rolling average: I’m a white liberal interested in cultures and milieus other than my own…What do you think?

From Jay Small. Newspapers are all asking the wrong question: they’re asking what other newspaper is doing the right things. Better, in fact, the only smart thing to do, is ask what other businesses are doing the right things: smallinitiatives.com.