Tag Archives: monday note

Ten Stories We Have Enjoyed This Week

6th Feb 2016

1) Interesting piece from Chris Messina (inventor of the Twitter #tag) – ‘2016 will be the year of Conversational Commerce’ (ht @onlydeadfish) – ‘Conversational commerce… largely pertains to utilising chat, messaging, or other natural language interfaces (i.e. voice) to interact with people, brands, or services and bots that heretofore have had no real place in the bidirectional, asynchronous messaging context.’

2) ‘The End of Twitter’, a piece from The New Yorker: ‘It wasn’t that long ago, I would have told you that Twitter was more like a utility, a service so fundamental that I could imagine a scenario in which it was literally underwritten. Twitter needed to exist. A stream of those hundred-and-forty-character tweets was how you found the most crucial, critical, and thought-provoking stories of the moment…(but) what should worry Twitter (now) is irrelevance, and there is growing data to suggest that that is where the company is headed.’

3) Apparently Technology is making it easier to trust strangers. ‘This (development) is a threat to big organisational systems – e.g. universities, corporations, banks and healthcare, that have depended on people placing value in the belief that traditional safeguards and centralised guarantees will keep them safe and render goods and services reliable. As this traditional institutional trust framework continues to crumble, it creates fertile ground for technology-engineered decentralised trust directly between people.’

4) Surprised it isn’t more? ‘The Dark Side Of Online Dating’: Half of us are lying. ‘Of over 3,000 people surveyed across the UK, France and Germany, 47% said they were likely to misrepresent their weight online, 48% said they’d lied about their interests and 50% said they’d be likely to misrepresent their physical appearance.’

5) ‘The Tragic Data Behind Selfie Fatalities’ . Since 2014, 49 people have died while attempting to photograph themselves; the average age of the victims is 21 years old, and 75% of them are male. We are more likely to die this way than from shark attack.

6) So long then, Kevin Bacon and your Six Degrees of Separation. It appears that this theory, concerning human connectivity and initially postulated by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy in 1929, has been significantly compressed. New research suggests that for the 1.59 billion active users of Facebook, there are only 3.57 degrees of separation, on average.

7) Interesting stuff from Frederic Filloux, in his Monday Note: Surprising Findings from a News Apps Survey – 1) We rely on a very small number of news apps; (2) Twitter and RSS-related apps score quite high, they are the de facto vector for News; (3) Once huge, Flipboard is losing ground fast while Apple News is not faring well; (4) Half of readers surveyed would rather have no ads in exchange for a monthly fee.

8) Great article from The Baffler: Movements are not marketing, but marketing has come to replace movements in our culture. “The Body Shop owns compassion, Nike spirituality, Pepsi and MTV youthful rebellion. We used to have movements for change; now we have products.”

9) The definitive list of what everyone Likes on Facebook – ‘Japanese pop duo Puffy AmiYumi (139,218,340) beats Beyoncé (80,634,320). The Minions (75,372,780) beat Kanye West (74,589,850). Disney on Ice (36,144,060) beats Game of Thrones(34,527,750). The hobby “cat communication” (4,663,340), whatever that is, beats Sarah Palin (4,645,190).

10) So Long Social Media: ‘The Kids are opting out of the Online Square’ – ‘The newest data increasingly supports the idea that young people are actually transitioning out of using what we might term broadcast social media – like Facebook and Twitter – and switching instead to using narrowcast tools – like Messenger or Snapchat. Instead of posting generic and sanitised updates for all to see, they are sharing their transient goofy selfies and blow-by-blow descriptions with only their closest friends.’

And finally…

Quite a tumble. A surfer survives a freefall from the top of a huge Hawaiian wave.

This is fabulous and endlessly watchable. Alanis Morissette and James Corden re-do ‘Ironic’ for the digital age (video).

Ten Stories We Have Enjoyed This Week

6th September

1) Is Modern Life Making Us Dumber ? 
We already know that we have smaller brains than our distant ancestors and more recently research has indicated that overall IQ’s are dropping.Apparently the rot set in when we stopped hunting and started farming. 

This is not a solution but it can help limit the damage – Why Walking Helps Us Think. 

2) The Brighton Digital conference is on this month and kicked of with the standout Dots : Connecting Ideas event ( #dotsconf ) which featured such innovation luminaries as @neilperkin, @faris and @herdmister. If you did not manage to make it you can find all speeches on here. 

My favourite quote from the day – You are a mash up of everything you let in your life HT Hugh Garry (@huey) 

In the same vein , from @brainpickings this week – On Why Dot Connecting is The Key to Creativity. 

3) A rather ‘time sensitive’ travel and information guide – 33 things to Eat, Drink, See and Do , before climate change ruins everything. Some of the highlights include – Cherries, Las Vegas, Oysters and of course – The North Pole. 

4) From Frederic Filloux – Legacy Media: The Lost Decade In Six simple Charts. 

5) So Apple may have had a data breach ( or not? ) Who then is at risk now? 

But this is more interesting – Our moral perspective on different kinds of leaks and how inconsistent we are. 

Slate’s Amanda Hess takes on commentators who have shared advice such as “don’t take nude selfies” that appear to be blaming the victim: “These messages instruct women that they are to blame for being sexually exploited because they dared to express themselves sexually in private and in consensual contexts. (When hackers steal credit card information, the public isn’t blamed for daring to shop.) As Lena Dunham succinctly put it, “The ‘don’t take naked pics if you don’t want them online’ argument is the ‘she was wearing a short skirt’ of the web.'” Hess brings up a lot of important points. But there is a difference between blaming the victim and reminding everyone of the inherent risks built into the network. We shouldn’t blame someone who had their personal photos hacked any more than we should blame a victim of credit card theft. But we should advise both to assume that if it’s on the Internet, it’s not safe. 

6) The Digital Revolution Exhibition finishes next week. Definitely worth a visit if you haven’t been. 

At the exhibition, City of Drones allows players to pilot virtual crafts through a ‘generative geometric environment’. City of Drones charts “the story of a lost drone drifting through an abstract cityscape,” in which, “players pilot a virtual craft to explore an infinite urban landscape.” It looks great and you can get an indication of how it works here. 

7) Interesting piece on why we always like to hear bad news and positive thinking and optimism come less naturally. 

8) Worth checking this out ,weekly from MIT – Recommended From Around The Web – Including : There is no hope for Amazon’s Fire Phone, Ferguson reveals a Twitter loop, Three things you didn’t know about Arachnids that live on your face…. 

9) A must for all lovers of sophisticated writing – The Unlikely Rise, Fall, And Rise Again Of “Viz” Comic (spoiler alert – it’s not as funny as it used to be…..) 

10) Essential weekend viewing : Slow-mo skateboard tricks – Impressive and soothing. 

Finally – love the new delivery mechanism for the latest IKEA catalogue.Welcome to the ‘bookbook’. 

10 Stories We’ve Enjoyed This Week . 24/5/14

1) A short Kickstarter Video : The Future of Work and Death. The great Will Self opines – ‘Most work is in fact a waste of time’. 

2) As ever the excellent David Hepworth writes brilliantly on the future of magazines and their relationship with advertisers: “Advertisers want to sleep with you but also want you to remain a virgin. They want to believe the favours they were granted are not being extended to the next hobbledehoy who comes along.” 

3) Google knocks Apple from the Most Valuable Brand top spot. 

4) David Bowie on the true measure of creative success – animated. 

5) Edward Snowden is now a comic-book hero. 

6) Google wants to be a gaming company – Looking to buy ‘Twitch’ : a service that allows people to share video recordings of games played on consoles. 

7) Spotify has just acquired it’s 10 millionth user – But It’s Not Making Money – As one analyst explains: “In many ways, the preferred solution [for Spotify] would be to get sold to someone. But they’ve become too successful.” 

8) GoPro is looking at a $100 million IPO and wants to turn itself into a publisher. 

9) Interesting piece from Frederic Filloux – Time to Rethink the Newspaper Seriously – Interesting content drawn from the New York Times Innovation Report , cross referenced with the views of the Editor of the Financial Times, Lionel Barber, in his digital roadmap published in Jan 2013. 

10) Rather Fun. An artist takes movie posters a little too literally. 

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….