Tag Archives: game of thrones

This Week’s Top Ten Stories

12th April 2014

1) From the great @Adcontrarian (Bob Hoffman) speaking at the Advertising Week conference, on The Golden Age of Bullshit. 

2) Interesting piece on how social media accelerates access to new and different information – a new study by Newsworks and Twitter has found that 60% of respondents had engaged with News brands on Twitter, that they wouldn’t typically read in print.

3) Everything you need to know about the Heartbleed Virus. 

4) From Frederic Filloux – Why Religion is a safer bet than Facebook – ‘Casting doubt on Facebook’s future is like going to Rome and questioning the existence of God. It’s not the right venue to do so….. Why then, question Facebook’s future? Mainly for two reasons: ARPU evolution and diversification’.

5) So they may soon find Flight 370, but just how deep could the aircraft be? Take a look at this amazing graph to really understand the Depth of The Problem – It could be 15,000 feet down.

6) This high impact ad should probably put you off texting while driving.

7) If Social Networks were Game of Thrones Houses – ‘When you play the game of social media, you win or you die’.

The new series is on our screens, but If you have missed out on the story so far, here is a re-cap from Wired. 

And (gruesome alert) here is every on-screen death from the first three seasons of the show. 

8) InFocus, from The Atlantic, has some great shots from Smithsonian Magazine’s photo contest. 

9) Interesting piece from @neilperkin’s, @fraggl feed: “‘Big data’ has arrived, but big insights have not. The challenge now is to solve new problems and gain new answers – without making the same old statistical mistakes on a grander scale than ever. Tim Harford from Undercover Economist, asks whether we’re making a Big mistake with Big Data. 

10) How to explain Bitcoin to your Mum (comic strip) I think, with this, I finally get it….

This Week’s Top Ten Stories

14th February

1) Networking site LinkedIn’s shares fell 15% on weak earnings outlook– apparently ‘looking for new sources of revenue’ – Read More 

2) ….and Twitter’s valuation took a battering at the end of last week –read more. I only recently reported that Goldman Sachs had endorsed the company’s high valuation, as they considered Twitter was ‘the new Google’ – ‘The enhancements include incremental improvements in existing ad products and targeting capabilities similar to the evolution of Google’s Adwords platform’. Just goes to show that market valuations are extremely unreliable at best – Read More 

3) Great piece here from @rorysutherland in Wired – Why appeals to altruism are dangerous – read more. 
Appeals to altruism are dangerous precisely because they absolve the practitioner from too much criticism or sceptical questioning about the real consequences of their actions, focusing instead on the spirit in which they are carried out. This may explain why we hate Nazis so much more than we hate Maoists or Stalinists: unlike the latter two mass murderous groups, the Nazis didn’t even pretend to be well-intentioned.

4) The New York Times gets into big data – and hires a chief data scientist in order to boost subscriptions – Read More 

5) The Twilight of the Brands – The New Yorker on the interminable decline of the Great Brands and branding – Read More 

6) Irrefutable evidence that Millenials have it worse than previous generations – Read More 

7) Designs of the Year announced. Including one striking ‘Teletubby style’ building from Baku – Read More 

8) So the app phenomenon that was Flappy Bird is over, apparently the creator thought it was ‘too addictive’ – read more. Thank goodness then for the Sesame St alternative – Read More 

9) For all Game of Thrones obsessives – this is what is coming in season 4 – Read More 

10) Pretty windy on Wednesday wasn’t it? This is what Blighty looked like from space – read more. And this from the US – when bad weather is a good thing – Thousands make the trip to see ice caves made accessible by frozen Lake Superior – Read More