Three Best Things 4/5/10 - 4/11/10: WikiLeaks Publishes Conan O'Brien's Tweets On Billboards?

• Thing: Conan O’Brien’s tweets on billboards by Examiner.com. Everything Conan bangs out on Twitter immediately appears on billboards around the country. There’s not a syllable I can add to this that would make it any greater.
• Thing: Inside WikiLeaks’ Leak Factory by (Drupal-powered) Mother Jones. However you feel about WikiLeaks’ video release from earlier this week, it’s worth reading up on the site’s founder. The type of cat who claims his Facebook fan page is run by Noam Chomsky when it actually isn’t, this guy chides a pair of assassinated potential sources for not acting “anonymous” enough. WikiLeaks has an amazing public ideal and has certainly mixed lots of very good work in with all its weirdness, but this article just offers up too many really revealing and hilarious quotes to pass up.
• Thing: What Makes NPR and the Economist So Special? by the Washington Post. The answer, if you want the short version, is that they’ve found the sweet spot between news and opinion. Newspapers are dying because it’s too easy to get news the moment it happens, rather than waiting to read about it the next morning. Think about the blogs you read — chances are they include very little straight-up no-frills news content. Something anyone who writes, speaks, or creates can ponder… how can you tell the story-of-the-week in such a way that people will listen? [Via Rafi Kam]

Bonus Bonus Bonus

SEOmoz shows how to use the psychology of choices to improve your site’s conversion rate. In their example, a nonprofit was able to gain more newsletter subscribers by altering their call-to-action. Instead of just asking users to subscribe, they began asking users to either subscribe or link.

Think about how many times this could happen in a day: Mary Internet is on the fence about subscribing. She’d like to pitch in, but doesn’t feel like committing. But there’s another option — a link? Sure, that’s a one-time way to help.

There’s no data on this part, but it’s not hard to imagine subscriptions would increase too, making the new call to action a double success. Brilliant! We’ve been working with more nonprofits lately, and we’d love to try out something like this.