31st July 2015
1) The Future of the Web… by the man who invented it – “The information that publishers and networks obtain from tracking people’s internet use allows them to understand their weaknesses, fears and ‘hopes and dreams’.”
2) Great new book from Lucy Kung as featured on Radio 4’s Media Show – Innovators in Digital News.
“What are The Guardian, The New York Times, BuzzFeed and Vice doing right? This book looks at several key players in the digital news industry and draws on extensive first-hand research inside the organisations”.
3) Turning Bridges into Music
‘What does the Brooklyn Bridge actually sound like? The recording is a sustained, rumbling whistle, like a finger run around the rim of a wine glass in a deep cave’
4) How brand-new words spread. An interesting animated infographic – ‘Words spread like weeds-seemingly at random but actually governed by invisible forces. Look away for too long, and suddenly new ones are emerging from who knows where.
5) Interesting piece from Charles Arthur of The Guardian – The adblocking revolution is months away (with iOS 9) – with trouble for advertisers, publishers and Google.
6) War Child subverts Call of Duty games with a video portraying the nightmare of being a warzone kid
7) Great piece from @neilperkin – On The End of Apps (as we know them). ‘How we experience content via connected devices – laptops, phones, tablets, wearables – is undergoing a dramatic change. The idea of an app as an independent destination is becoming less important, and the idea of an app as a publishing tool, with related notifications that contain content and actions, is becoming more important.’
8) Malcolm Gladwell’s speech on the ‘Snapchat problem, the Facebook problem, the Airbnb problem’. Malcolm has told a data-driven marketing technologist crowd that data is not their salvation. In fact, it could be their curse. “More data increases our confidence, not our accuracy… I want to puncture marketers’ confidence and show you where data can’t help us.”
9) Great fun. The first and final frames from some great movies.
10) It’s holiday season, which is great news for holidaymakers; but the rapid rise in tourist numbers is having a negative impact on some of the worlds most popular destinations. On this topic, from my blog last week – Far From The Madding Crowd…? Tourism in the 21st Century.