30th September 2016

Digiday’s definitive guide to millennial terms.  Love these perspectives on established social media : Instagram – ‘Snapchat for old people’ , Snapchat Discover – ‘an oxymoron’ and LinkedIn – ‘Tinder for Gen X’ . Many more classics can be found here  – ‘How do you do, fellow kids?’. 

The perennially pugnacious Mark Ritson is often worth listening to and he makes some good points in his piece –  ‘Facebook’s erroneous video metrics show no one has a clue about digital’ .’Not media agencies, not big-spending clients and not armchair digital strategists. From the shadowy box…that is programmatic, to the increasingly complex and deluded world of digital views, the idea that digital marketing is more analytical and attributable than other media is clearly horse**it’.

@adcontrarian on ‘The Devaluation Of Creativity.’ Here he takes a swing at Sir Martin Sorrell – ‘A while back, Mr Sorrell gave a talk in London.  According to press reports, he told the conference……‘media, has become “more important” than the message…this is unacceptable. Someone who believes media is more important than the message, believes the instruments are more important than the music; the canvas is more important than the painting; the bottle is more important than the beer.’

Great perspective from1843 magazine (from The Economist stable) that suggests burnout is caused by more than simply working too hard. ‘The exhaustion experienced in burnout combines an intense yearning for (a) state of completion with the tormenting sense that it cannot be attained, that there is always some demand or anxiety or distraction which can’t be silenced’.

How LinkedIn became the great social leveller. (In the past) ‘most of the time jobs were still a case of who you knew, rather than what you knew. The rise of job giants like Monster and Guardian Jobs started to change this, but it was LinkedIn in 2003 that dramatically turned the tide. Reid Hoffman [LinkedIn’s co-founder] really had this vision of levelling the playing field. It was about giving everyone the same access to the same contacts and the same opportunities, no matter their background or family connections’.

I think this makes a lot of sense. ‘How being alone may be the key to rest’ 

So, what is Blockchain and why is it becoming so popular? ‘Blockchain is a ledger of records arranged in data batches called blocks that use cryptographic validation to link themselves together. Put simply, each block references and identifies the previous block by a hashing function, forming an unbroken chain, hence the name. Put like this, blockchain just sounds like a kind of database with built-in validation—which it is. However, the clever bit is that the ledger is not stored in a master location or managed by any particular body. Instead, it is said to be distributed, existing on multiple computers at the same time in such a way that anybody with an interest can maintain a copy of it’.

A school in the States replaced detention wth meditation and saw some really interesting results. 

Some great stuff from @atlasobscura this week. You can listen to the first computer generated music, created by Alan Turing, here. America’s short, violent love affair with indoor track cycling,  some mesmerising pictures of abandoned buildings in the high Artic and ranking the pain of stinging insects from ‘caustic’ to ‘blinding’.

Finally, as The Ryder Cup starts, here is Bill Murray causing a stir at the event, as only he knows how.