In this new supersaturated digital universe of infinite free digital duplication, copies are so ubiquitous, so cheap, free in fact, that the only things truly valuable are those that cannot be copied. The technology is telling us that copies don’t count anymore. To put it simply: When copies are superabundant, they become worthless. This is…… Continue reading The Future Of News (part 3)
Category: Innovation
The Future Of News (part 2)
The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future (by Kevin Kelly). Chapter 2 is about AI: The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services – cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything, and almost invisible except when it blinks off. This common utility will serve you as…… Continue reading The Future Of News (part 2)
The Future Of News according to…
I’m currently reading “The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future”. It’s by Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine and an internet pioneer in the 1980s. It’s brilliant and very relevant to the news industry. Here is a highlight from chapter one. You are not late … here is the thing.…… Continue reading The Future Of News according to…
How the Macintosh was born
Folklore.org has this great story about how the Macintosh team was super-charged by the prospect of achieving something great. “The original Macintosh was designed by a small team that worked long hours with a passionate, almost messianic fervor, inculcated by our leader, Steve Jobs, and the excitement that we felt during its creation shines through…… Continue reading How the Macintosh was born
Charismatic connectors are made not born
From Social Physics… “People can teach themselves to be charismatic connectors – they are made not born. The trick is to do what creative people do: they pay attention to any new idea that comes along, and when something is interesting, they bounce it off other people and see what their thoughts are; they also…… Continue reading Charismatic connectors are made not born
Making news feeds self-optimizing
The standard approach for self-optimising content is bandit testing – a sophisticated cousin of A/B testing. I suspect that on metro.co.uk we don’t get enough clicks for it to learn as fast as we need – we need our news feed to be fresh. Also, bandit testing is complex and doesn’t play nicely with caching.…… Continue reading Making news feeds self-optimizing
Why do big companies struggle with innovation?
Metro.co.uk is now part of MailOnline. Metro is MOL’s agile cousin… able to iterate and innovate faster. Quizes, games, polls and other interactives have all been live on Metro for months while MailOnline have only got as far as talking about them. In fact, this is one of the reasons that MOL wan’t to own…… Continue reading Why do big companies struggle with innovation?
The “Creativity, Inc” retrospective
@AndFinally had the great idea of having a retrospective on the theme of the awesome book Creativity, Inc. It’s about how to build a culture of inspiration. Here’s one quote from it: “A company’s communication structure should not mirror its org structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.” The flavour of the book…… Continue reading The “Creativity, Inc” retrospective
The secret science behind awesome teams
The book “Social Physics” unveils the latest research about great teams… Unexpectedly, we found that the factors most people usually think of as driving group performance – i.e. cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction – were not statistically significant. The largest factor in predicting group intelligence was the equality of conversational turn taking; groups where a few…… Continue reading The secret science behind awesome teams
Steve Jobs on creativity
Social Physics quotes Steve Jobs… Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty, because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new…… Continue reading Steve Jobs on creativity
How to rebrand content sites
Rebranding often goes hand in hand with a change in business strategy or content strategy. As my previous post discussed, big changes are risky. Incremental changes lets you validate you’re on the right track. Fortunately for content sites, content is relatively easy to experiment with. You can try out a new strategy on a small scale. We’ve…… Continue reading How to rebrand content sites