eMedia Vitals

Some news sites, including Forbes.com, The Huffington Post and DailyMe, have developed strategies to increase engagement and decrease bounce rates -- a metric used to describe the percentage of single-page site visits, often traffic referred by search engines. Here are a few examples of their strategies.

 In case you don't know what a heatmap is, it's basically a table that has colors in place of numbers. Colors correspond to the level of the measurement. Here's how to make a heatmap with just a few lines of code.

One of the ongoing challenges in teaching journalism nowadays concerns the choice of software for video editing. I’m going to pump out a brief overview here and hope that lots of people will weigh in with their own experiences and suggestions.

Last week, I wrote a bit about what it's like to be on Twitter's suggested user list. The response to that post has been really gratifying, and I wanted to share a bit of what I've learned, as well some of the more interesting responses.

 While commercial products obey to the laws of the market, which in part are influenced by the resources needed to produce these products, the web is defined by the user. If the user wants something he will either get it or create it himself. To see beyond today’s limits of the web all we need to do is see what is needed.

This time last year, Esquire was only selling about 17,500 newsstand issues per month, and GQ about 39,000 newsstand issues per month, according to a WWD article. Assume those numbers are flat to down this year. So even if the iPhone were to suddenly gobble up a huge percentage of newsstand sales -- which it won't -- it's not hard to see why the magazines aren't showing up in iTunes bestseller lists.

With the hundreds of tweets that sail through our Twitter feed every day, it can be difficult to remember who said what, when, or linked to something worthwhile. Search site Snap Bird makes finding particular tweets a breeze.

A short list of metrics that news agencies should be monitoring with an emphasis on engagement.

Vanishing employment opportunities and shrinking freelance compensation threaten to wipe out a substantial percentage of the next generation of professional journalists.

You learn very little from a resume and people get real nervous when you ask them tough questions in an interview. Programming isn’t typically a job done under pressure, so seeing how people perform when nervous is pretty useless.