Month: July 2013
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Fraggl – The Battle of the Algorithms
I thought it'd be useful to give everyone a development update on Fraggl, the Twitter curation app I'm building with Adaptive Lab (a version of this has also gone out on email to our testing group). It's taken a while longer than anticipated (isn't that always the way?) to get to this point but the good…
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On the Death Of Journalism
There's been more than enough pixel inches dedicated to talking about the death of journalism. I don't believe it. Neither it seems does George Brock who, in summarising the thrust of his new book 'Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age', takes the unfashionable view that rather than dying a…
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The Myth of the Eureka Moment
An intriguing addendum to last week's Google Firestarters event on creativity. Eric Barker posts about a story featured in Keith Sawyer's book Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity. Researcher Vera John-Steiner interviewed over 70 living 'creative geniuses' and analysed the notebooks of a further 50 that were no longer alive (including people like…
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Google Firestarters 9: Creativity Is Not a Department
Thurs saw the good, the interested and the curious of UK planning come together at Google Campus for our 9th Firestarters event (can hardly believe it's been going for over two years now). We like to shake things up with Firestarters, and this one had another unique angle in that it was curated by the…
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‘If You Have A Choice, Never Have a Job’
Since I left corporate world to run my own business, one of the hardest questions I have to answer is 'what do you do?'. My answer usually involves describing a portfolio of strategy and consultancy work, workshops, speaking, making, and writing that span the fields of marketing, planning, content, and even into journalism. It probably…
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Beyond The Cookie
This Forbes piece was a fascinating insight into where tracking and targeting technology may be going. Cookies have become such a pervasive technology powering all kinds of tracking, personalisation and recommendation services including a healthy proportion of ad targeting on the web. When I used Ghostery I counted up to 30 third party tracking technologies being…
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Are You Creatively Satisfied?
What a great question. The short film above was made by the people at The Great Discontent ("a journal of interviews focusing on creativity, risk, and what connects us as artists") who set up a booth at the designer/developer gig Brooklyn Beta in NYC and filmed responses to the question from some of the attendees (including Tina…
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Converged Media Formats
I think it's fascinating how we're seeing the development of more ad products and formats that are specifically designed to take the context provided by activity in one place and apply it to enhancing value in another place. Google have really been the masters of this idea, taking all kinds of contextual data from one…
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The Rebirth Of The Newsletter
We all get too much email. But like Colin Raney (MD, IDEO, Boston), I still subscribe to quite a variety and number of newsletters. There's the usual industry ones. And they're OK for keeping up with stuff. But if I think about the ones that I actually enjoy reading, or find particularly useful, it's those…
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Post Of The Month – June 2013 – The Winner
A three horse race in this month's vote with a good early showing for Phil Adam's Digital Disintegration post and Martin Weigel's The Liberation of Magic, but after a slower start Dan Burgess' post on Consuming Our Way to Social Change finished strongly and ended up winning the vote. So well done Dan. You are entered into the Hall of…