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RSS is still a crucial part of Web infrastructure, but its news feeds lack connection with specific human beings

A revolution in information technology has transformed businesses around the globe over the past two decades. More recently, companies have discovered that technology-enabled data is an underappreciated but highly valuable asset.

A parallel transformation is now taking hold in the nonprofit sector. In fact, our research shows that the fastest-growing organizations are making serious efforts to track their results and learn from them. It's an essential ingredient of scaling the impact of any venture — all the more so for social ventures where access to a decent education, basic healthcare, or clean water may be at stake.

College Summit, a nonprofit that helps increase college enrollment and persistence rates among low-income high school graduates, is a case in point. (College Summit is a previous client of my organization). Data collection and analysis is built into the organization's DNA. And innovative technology soon will extend its reach without increasing its size.

College Summit partners with 180 high schools in 12 states and serve upwards of 50,000 low-income students in their quest for a college education. The organization offers a post-secondary planning course for ninth- and tenth-graders and guides juniors and seniors through the college selection and application process. It also provides teachers with annual training academies and onsite coaching. Just as importantly, College Summit seeks to create a college-going culture by recruiting and training "peer influencers," seniors others kids look up to and who mentor classmates.

Numerous programs aim to boost college enrollment among low-income high school grads but what sets College Summit apart is its relentless pursuit of data to inform and guide its work. The organization's data gathering system, developed by corporate supporter Deloitte, generates weekly reports at the school and district level. The reports track, for example, how many ninth graders have developed a postsecondary plan, which steers them to sign up for courses required for college admission. Among seniors, the system tabulates how many have written an admission essay, where they have applied, and how many have filled out the federal financial support application.

The data in these reports give principals and teachers the ability to track individual students' progress. "The reports help schools focus scarce resources on the students who need it most," says J.B. Schramm, College Summit's founder and CEO. "Those who are falling behind get extra attention."

But data collection doesn't stop at the schoolhouse door. Ultimately, College Summit wants to measure its long-term impact. That means tracking students' experience in college. Gathering that data proved to be a major challenge. It isn't easy to follow students once they've left the program and to extract data from multiple colleges and universities. But it's worth the effort. In a 2010 nationwide survey by Deloitte, 92% of high school principals and teachers said that having data on students' academic performance in college was critical to evaluating the effectiveness of high school curriculum and teaching. But only 13% said they actually receive such information.

At College Summit high schools, educators now get reports showing where students enroll, the credits they earn, and the remedial courses they take. Educators use the information to make curriculum changes and improve future graduates' chances of college success.

College Summit's experience with postsecondary student performance data played a role in building congressional support for statewide data collection programs. In three separate acts since 2007, Congress has authorized funds to help states development postsecondary outcomes data for all high school graduates. As a result, all 50 states have committed to producing these reports and sharing them with educators and parents.

If data has been the story of College Summit's early success, technology is poised to write a new chapter. After nearly two decades of successful program replication, "we reach only a small portion of the total demand among low-income students," says Schramm. As a result, College Summit began to question how it could scale its impact without increasing its size. "Our model has been all about young people taking charge and making decisions,'' says Schramm. "So the question became, how can we take that model and scale it up?"

The answer: Facebook. Next fall, in collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Facebook, College Summit will launch 20 free, custom-designed apps on the social networking site that will help guide low-income students through college admission and on-campus success while providing students a platform for building supportive online peer groups. College Summit secured a $2.5 million grant from the Gates Foundation to support the app development project, called the College Knowledge Challenge. It kicked off last fall with two hackathons that attracted 160 app developers. From those, 20 winners have been funded to develop their projects — everything from an app that provides automated alerts for important deadlines, to one that guides students seeking to transfer from community college to a four-year university, to another that forms "personal success teams" to help students through critical steps in college preparation.

Schramm acknowledges that apps alone are no substitute for a supportive home and school environment. But for students who don't have the benefit of such support, the apps may provide a much needed lifeline.

What data did to propel College Summit's success to date, technology is poised to do for its future. The lesson here is clear. Together, data and technology put measuring and expanding social impact within reach as never before. It's a lesson in the power of investing in "good overhead" that too few organizations — and their funders — take to heart. Yet it is at the very heart of tackling the world's thorniest problems and winning.

Please join the conversation and check back for regular updates. Follow the Scaling Social Impact insight center on Twitter @ScalingSocial and give us feedback.

Scaling Social Impact
Insights from HBR and The Bridgespan Group

• We Need Open Data To Change The World
• Is Collaboration the New Greenwashing?
• How Nonprofits Prove Their Worth
• You Can't Just Hack Your Way to Social Change

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jazzy jeff used to be a world-renowned surgeon, until..

The beloved but doomed Google Reader is still a healthy source of traffic. Google+, on the other hand…

According to data from the BuzzFeed Network, a set of tracked partner sites that collectively have over 300 million users, Google Reader is still a significant source of traffic for news — and a much larger one than Google+. The above chart, created by BuzzFeed's data team, represents data collected from August 2012 to today. (Yesterday, Google announced that it would close Reader in July.)

We should add that this data isn't complete. Google Reader traffic became much harder to measure last year when Google began defaulting users to SSL encryption in such a way that masked referral data. And this doesn't include data from apps that use Google Reader as a sync service, such as Reeder. In other words, it's likely that we're actually missing some Reader traffic here.

The second graphic* shows measured Reader and Google+ referrals over time. This one, too, requires qualification: The changes in Reader's numbers can be explained mostly by the addition of new sites to BuzzFeed's partner network, not growth in Google Reader (the total number of visitors to partner sites increased, in other words).

But the relative numbers are still surprising: Despite claims that it has over 100m monthly active users, Google+ barely moves the needle for sites across the network, while Reader is a healthy source of readers.

*For reference: in August of 2012, according to the same data, Facebook drove over 70m visitors to sites in the network while Google Reader was well under 10m.

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Microsoft's latest ad campaign "The Browser You Loved To Hate" brings a message for all the Internet Explorer haters out there: It sucks less.

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If you've been wondering what to get your sassy best friend who cracks the raunchiest jokes at the party and cooks fabulous meals in her spare time, look no further. Fifty Shades of Chicken is a spoof on the best-selling novel Fifty Shades of Gray that replaces heroine Anastasia Steele with a big-breasted chicken and Christian Grey with the strong and competent hands of a very handsome chef. Yup, this cookbook definitely takes "hot and sultry" to a whole new level. More

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[ By Steph in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

Each city is as different, and as beautiful, as we are. That’s the sentiment behind ‘Metropolitan Cityscapes‘, beautifully complex city maps with the negative space around the streets meticulously cut out, leaving delicate patterns behind.

Perhaps your tie to your favorite city is family history, or perhaps you walked down one of those unfamiliar streets as a visitor and have never forgotten the way it felt to take part in something entirely new. Designers Chauntelle Trinh and Eckard Buscher didn’t just arbitrarily choose the cities for their series of papercut maps, they explored them and set out to capture their essence.

Rather than simply modifying a city map and cutting it out, the designers undertook what they call ‘expeditions’ to gain an intimate understanding of metropolitan cities like Hong Kong, New York and San Francisco. Walking the streets to get a sense of the terrain, discovering the features that stood out to them, colored the way they designed each map.

“The centre of a city, its beating heart, is a palimpsest overflowing with imagery. Layers upon layers of stories have accumulated and disappeared through time. Behind each facade, each brick, each pathway, untold stories, memories and dreams are waiting to be narrated. Above all the noise, if you listen carefully, you can hear your own tale of the city.”

“To tell our stories of the city, we peeled away all the complex urban layers so that only the bare bones of place remains. Each line drawn and cut on every cityscape has a distinct story. Metropolitan Cityscapes are a new vision of the city as organism.”

Want More? Click for Great Related Content on WebUrbanist:

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CityFabric creates t-shirts, totes and prints that are painstakingly hand-printed with maps of the city of your choice, including Raleigh, Brooklyn and Seattle. 2 Comments - Click Here to Read More »»

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By Jon Bershad.

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Floppy Table is a steel table in the shape of a floppy disk that comes equipped with a metal shutter revealing a storage area. Made by Berlin-based artist Marian Neulant and Axel van Exel, each table is hand-made and lasered with a serial number as a mark of authenticity. Available for order online / €720 ($930 USD) + Shipping.

Shut Up and Take My Money of the Day is a feature series dedicated to highlighting the latest innovations and visions in the world of consumer product design and gadgetry.

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All landings at San Diego International Airport on November 23, 2012 between 10:30 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., composited and time-lapsed into a 25 second clip by Cy Kuckenbaker.

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Swedish filmmakers Marcus and Hannes Knutssons' Super Mario Beads series returns for yet another epic adventure in the suburbs!

Need moar? Check out the Fan Art of the Day archives!

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Check out the latest holiday special video from the White House YouTube channel, starring the First Family's pet dog. For more information on the 2012 White House holiday celebrations, check out the events page.

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Who makes more: A skilled welder or a McDonald’s manager?