One Question is an event which is all about exactly that: offering the opportunity to explore and maybe answer one simple question each time. It brings out the deep and creative thinkers, and gives delegates the chance to delve into a contemporary topic rather than experience yet another skim-show-and-tell endemic in marketing events. The nex...

​Variety ​ magazine this morning reports on Amazon Channels, a service where customers can order TV channel subscriptions  direct from the Bezos empire, as part of their Prime subscription. It may not be well-known, but it has collared 55% of the TV channels market in the US: Sources at participating video providers have long told Variety...

This is a typically excellent  ​Bloomberg Businessweek ​ piece on  Jürgen Schmidhuber and his formidable AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) startup Nnaisense, based in the south-eastern, Italian-speaking city of Lugano in Switzerland: The modest, quiet office doesn't look like a buzzing AI superpower, but Schmidhuber's team regula...

​Overpopulation has bubbled up as a topic in recent years, but is now becoming  ​de rigeur ​ in contemporary visual fiction: In Steven Spielberg's 2018 film Ready Player One, the inhabitants of a metropolis of slum housing escape into a VR landscape called the OASIS, where they can live with a freedom denied them in their cramped reality. Alex...

I tell you, I've been so EXCITED this week - so flapping, so beside myself, so  unnecessary! -  that I've barely been able to concentrate enough to cobble together the few hundred links needed (noone needs them, but let me lie to myself one last time) to make Curios happen. It was TOUCH AND GO, I tell you.  I imagine you're really ex...

​Just as you were getting used to using emojis and Twitter-derived slang without feeling slightly uncomfortable about it, along comes a whole new dimension of emotional signifiers ("emotes") from the users of Amazon's gaming website Twitch. Emotes have their ups and downs. Some, like Kappa, are used to help people communicate with one another durin...

A piece of email-based fiction hits  ​Electric Literature:  ​a beautifully-written exchange of texts between... well, you'll just have to read it.   As accusations of sexual harassment and abuse playout in the court of social media, the context for Lynn Coady's "Someone is Recording" changes daily, possibly hourly. The story is hyper...

​There's plenty of fanfic online, with book series such as Harry Potter giving fans the ability to extend the fictional world with their own imaginations. This excellent article on Kotaku details how someone has done the same with the FIFA series of console/computer football games. The article interviews wwesmudge, who has spent many years building...

This is a really nice article, although the basic tenet is pretty obvious: people have more friends (which, in part, is due to Facebook and other social media using the term "friends" and stretching its definition) but the quality of the interaction is much less than, say, 25 years ago. "You've got enough friends, a new one is bad for you," says a ...

​Ustwo founder Jules Erhardt has written the third in the series of the company's  ​State of the Digital Nation ​ tomes on what life would be like in the (near) future. It's all about agencies, clients, and the marketing sector in general, so many of you will find something in it. (And, at 69 minutes long in Medium read length terms, it's chun...

​You can now do pretty much everything you ever wanted, and learn anything, and meet anyone, online. But does that lead to a paralysis of choice, and that scarcity invites luxury - the ability to waste time on just a few known sites? In the decade since I took that computer class, the web browser has taken over the entire computing experience. Ther...

The Roomba has had a bad press ( some would say rightly ) for a while, so hacking it to bits seems like the best course of revenge... in the nicest way possible. Taking its cues from the DJ Roomba device in  ​ Parks & Recreation ,  This is a cracking, fun article: tinkering, failure, and finding fun things to do with IOT devices. ...

​Calvin once said to Hobbes:  ​" Verbing weirds language " ​. What their creator, Bill Waterson, would make of the absolute nonsense that purports itself to be contemporary advertising slogan writing is a mystery. However, here's a general view: it's bullshit . Look at some of the examples in this article: Baffling slogans have become the new ...

Anil Dash on the base technologies and services underpinning the web as we know it: At a time when millions are losing trust in the the web's biggest sites, it's worth revisiting the idea that the web was supposed to be made out of countless little sites. Here's a look at the neglected technologies that were supposed to make it possible. Anil ...

Just 46 days after revelations that Cambridge Analytica harvested millions of Facebook profiles to predict and influence voters in the US election and Brexit referendum, the data analytics company has announced it will close. So too will its parent company, SCL Elections. Some may see this as a victory in the fight against covert or unacceptable me...

The abrupt news that Martin Sorrell will step down as head of his advertising empire raises many questions for his 200,000+ staff, but also for the advertising industry as a whole. Anybody who has dealt with Sorrell (myself included) will be in no doubt of his ferocious grip on numbers, his ability to rapidly read and retain the bigger pictures eme...

I went to the seaside last weekend. It was LOVELY, apart from the racist graffiti (residents of Broadstairs - you're right, it  is  OK to be white, and literally NOONE is attempting to tell you otherwise! I promise! Also, looking around, I'm not 100% convinced that it's you who need to worry about being unwelcome) and the seemingly endles...

Pi-Hole is a network-level ad and tracking software blocker. Rather than a package such as AdBlock which sits on the client (ie the user's web browser), Pi-Hole intercepts any attempt at calling an ad from the web page back to the ad server, thus preventing an ad from being shown. It's prevention rather than cure-level. Anyway, Bloomberg has writte...

Marco Gillies is a researcher and lecturer on virtual reality at Goldsmiths. He has written a long and considered piece on the effects of VR on children, but there's enough in there that anyone interested or involved with VR should have a read. Enter your quote here...VR has been touted as an " empathy machine " because it allows us to experience w...

Jim Carroll, the former Chair at BBH, has written an excellent piece about why slogans are good for advertising, citing contemporary politics as a comparator for their effectiveness. Like any well-crafted copy, the best political slogans define how we feel about an issue; compress it into something clear, precise and strong; find fellow feeling wit...