One of my favourite writers (offline and online) on his personal content strategy, first taking aim at the "tawdry and mercenary" version of "“why writers should blog”... the story goes, “and build a brand ... to promote your work.” Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception.&qu;…

Interesting piece on the reverse side of the network effect: the more people leave, the faster the remainder leave. So what will make people leave?Gen Z want privacy, hate bullying/speech, don’t like ads and think "Facebook is for moms and grandparents""Millennials Are Ready to Ditch... too old to bicker with strangers... [and] stil…

This article absolutely nails why I can't stand LinkedIn anymore, describing the site as completely performative, and the "LinkedIn newsfeed ... as a vast wasteland... almost entirely filled with marketing gurus, salespeople talking sales, and recruiters and “career coaches” offering the same job search tips over and over".Why? Beca…

Analysing the impact of cultural diversity on corporate performance by feeding half-million Glassdoor reviews through a "Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling" machine learning algorithm: "the “bag of words” approach... inductively infers categories... a statistical model that looks for words that tend to co-occur."Step 1:…

A "perverse downstream consequence for debunking... being corrected by another user for posting false political news increases subsequent sharing of low quality, partisan, and toxic content".Looks like evidence for the backfire effect: "Direct correction ... backfires by making people feel defensive or focusing their attention on so…

Google's attempted “privacy by design” rebrand "may conflict with its core business". Features launched include:people can quickly delete the last 15 minutes of their search historya photos folder locked with password protection reminders on location tracking in Google Mapsimproved password manager integrated into Chromekeeping a h…

Although this looks like someone looking for problems because of the apparent near-future success of "solutionism", some good points here: we need "an institution that will know what ... regulations to suspend (eg libraries and IPR) ... to fully leverage the potential inherent in digital technologies for the public good."Recent…

The “Brussels effect:... When the European Union comes up with some new tech regulation, it can quickly spread around the world"...To draft its proposed AI regulatory approach, the EC "created a 52-member “high-level expert group” ... collected further input via an “AI alliance” ... published a white paper" to which 1,250 groups a…

Good history of the digital ad industry, from 3rd-party tracking cookies through to today's data-brokered behavioural advertising profiles:"Digital advertisers have steadily transformed the internet into a surveillance machine from which there is no escape... argue that ... universe of on demand digital content has created a crisis of at…

Great piece on the implications for creators of the shift to algorithmically managed content platforms."Vine was an entirely new cultural platform ... Twitter had unwittingly enabled the creation of a true subculture... [but] didn’t know how to make money from it... in contrast... TikTok has prospered because it generally seems to understa…

Common complaints about social media platforms "sound contradictory. They’re:accelerators for extremism that simultaneously uphold suffocating consensuswastes of attention and should play a smaller role in people’s lives; however, they also need to be improved, refined and purged of bad actors, advanced surveillance machines ... routinely s…

"AI Dungeon ... used text-generation technology ... OpenAI to create a choose-your-own adventure game inspired by D&D... algorithms crafting a personalized, unpredictable adventure".This is a huge creative playground: over 20,000 players each day; one player "claims to have written an estimated total of more than 1 million word…

"social and psychological forces that make people prone to sharing and believing misinformation ... are on the rise" - not so much created by bad actors, but exploited by them. Why?“cognitive and memory limitations, directional motivations to defend or support some group identity or existing belief, and messages from other people and pol…

"Europe deserves a forum where passionate Europeans share, debate and package ideas into policy proposals their fellow Europeans can vote on in 2024." But the CoFoE simply shows the hallmarks of previous efforts, like "the “New Narrative for Europe”, a kind of weird uncle to the Conference on the Future of Europe" created by Ba…

Good short history: "design thinking ... has spread from products to services to just about anything in business... often used as shorthand for a magic potion approach to innovation and creative problem solving... end up being a theatrical thing that people can point to and say, ‘oh we did that.’ "So it's one example of how "or…

"the fourth wave of online education...: “Cohort-Based Courses,” ... the first to tap into the essential nature of the Internet: that it is open-ended and interactive."Takes you through the first 3 waves:MOOCs, from 2008: overcame the “How to get content online,” problem "by converting traditional course materials into digital form …

"We wanted MoodleNet, a new resource-centric social network for educators, to be federated... a decentralised network to empower global knowledge sharing and collaboration... we realised ActivityPub... would be perfect ..."They realised it would be useful to create "a ‘hello world’ starter project ... enable developers to build Ac…

"ActivityPub gives applications a shared protocol and syntax that they can use to communicate with each other... [but] writing software that implements federation logic and data structues has been technically challenging"Bonfire provides developers "a kit that manages the data and federation out of the box... enable end users to dep…

"Almost unbelievably, scepticism is highest among healthcare workers."Examines both the specific mistakes and the general antivaxxer European setting undermining the vaccination campaign.Specific mistakes: "by publicly trashing [AstraZeneca], the commission undermined trust in the vaccines... compounded by confusion over the vaccine…

"I am an Asana Certified Pro ... recently moved my team from Asana to Clickup [so]... highlight the pros and cons of both"Both based on lists, both provide Boards. For team communication they're "pretty on par". But views are better on Clickup - you can embed views from other apps - it's cheaper and it has Goals: &quo;…

"Bridgit extension enables users to organize, share, and ultimately monetize their research... to create bridges that connect ideas on web pages (represented by content snippets)... any Internet user can connect information on an idea-to-idea basis that aggregates into an Internet of ideas ... A bridge is a bi-directional, co-locatable conc…

Pretty cool spatial video conferencing platform:create a 2D world with rooms, events, etc.users move around it, and can video-conference with whomever's nearbytest server: https://topia.io/welcome

early adopters are not innovators, but are "willing to experiment... [but] they're not guinea pigs" make them feel they're getting something special, earlythey "are willing to work with your minimum viable product if it solves their problem" Give them something to test. But their reputation is on the line, so prove yo…

"User friction ... prevents a user from accomplishing a goal in your product... three levels: interaction friction, cognitive friction, and emotional friction"Interaction friction: do usability testing."When cognitive load is high ... there is significant cognitive friction ... encompasses all aspects of the experience that result …

"A framework for building enduring products"Level 1 is to focus on growing uses completing the core action, which forms the product's foundation, usually correlates with retention. So design features which optimise for people completing the core action. Level 2 - retain users by creating accruing benefits: customer usage improves t…

"first mile of a product’s user experience is almost always an afterthought. The welcome/tour, the onboarding, the explanatory copy, the empty states, and the defaults ... the “top of your funnel” for engaging new users... increasingly neglected over time despite becoming more important ... products built for a tech-savvy ... early adopters …

"To create offerings that people truly want to buy... home in on the job the customer is trying to get done... Jobs are multifaceted... never simply about function... powerful social and emotional dimensions... the circumstances in which customers try to do them are more critical than any buyer characteristics" - so identify jobs curren…

"Focusing on individual features and experiences is good, but you should never forget about the position you’re trying to hold." Know "Which problems are good fits for you and which ones are bad fits?" so you don't build features for problems which are incoherent with your position.Snickers can’t take a feature request to …

The image is bad - it's a graph, not a grid, unless you can somehow make a negative investment. Anyway, the model distinguishes "between basic and differentiating features.. improving certain aspects only serves to maintain basic expectations, whereas improving other aspects can delight customers with less effort"Basic features sho…

"the most efficient way to operate during the earliest phases of a startup lies in between a formal business plan and unstructured iteration... documenting your initial product/market fit hypotheses, systematically validating each of the most uncertain hypotheses, and continually iterating on and updating [them] ... through customer validatio…