7th November 2015
1) Very interesting – Adweek Brought Together the Major Players in the Ad Blocker War, and Here’s What They Told Each Other. ‘In the last two weeks, I’ve heard more companies saying, “Next year is all about branded content. You can’t block branded content.”
2) …At the same time Robert Thomson, CEO of NewsCorp, has brushed aside the threat of ad blocking – “The role of ad blockers is much more pronounced in what you might call commodity content sites, sites that have more noise than news, and that’s certainly not ours,” he said.
Nice idea Robert, but unfortunately that is not how adblocking works.
3) Great piece from Dave Trott – ‘What is Content Anyway?’ and ‘Why we need a better definition of content than ‘stuff’.
….related to this an interesting piece on the next generation of News content and the growing importance of metadata – The Future of News is not an Article.
4) So, now Google is helping us to write. ‘ Google just gave a little bit of help to anyone tired of typing out the same reply to e-mails over and over again. An updated version of Inbox, one of Google’s mail apps, will “read” your e-mails and offer up suggested replies’.
5) Facebook will be every Publisher’s CMS and that is probably a good thing (at least for the consumer).
6) Getting their own back… Companies are attacking Consumers for bad reviews. “The company claimed (the) negative review violated the non-disparagement clause in its terms of sales agreement and threatened… a $3,500 penalty unless the review was taken down. That clause prohibits… customers from “taking any action that negatively… effects its reputation, products, services, management or employees.”
7) From Monocle Magazine (audio piece) ‘Music and The City’ – ‘Acoustics and music can help shape the way people interact with their cities. But how aware are we of the sounds that surround us and are there places that are more musical than others?‘
8) Addictive. Remember Piano Phrase? If not, it was a piece of music written in 1967 by the minimalist composer Steve Reich for two pianos and was his first attempt at applying his “phasing” technique, which he had previously used in the tape pieces to live performance. Here it is simply and wonderfully re-imagined for the browser.
9) The iTunes user agreement becomes interesting and readable at last – ‘ITUNES TERMS AND CONDITIONS: The Graphic Novel. The complete, unabridged legal agreement, as drawn by R. Sikoryak’.
10) Whoa. Video of two men with Jet Packs flying in formation with an Emirates Airbus A380 over Dubai.
And finally, more drone fun – A self-flying drone dodges through tree branches at 30 miles per hour.