Roxanne Shante + more

1 minutes estimated reading time

The new Roxanne Shante biopic looks amazing and you know the soundtrack is going to be good. Roxanne Shante was like a breadth of fresh air in the early rap scene. She had an amazing technique and was well able to cut male competitors down to size. Roxanne Shante is a legend despite her limited profile.

Dr. Penelope Boston: “Seeking the Tricorder: The Hunt for Extraterrestrial Life” | Talks at Google – YouTube – interesting challenges in terms of identification, methodology and analysis. The trial-corder like the Star Trek communicator has been inspiring technologists for decades. More on innovation here.

The South China Morning Post have launched a news site for an international audience focused on the Chinese technology sector – Abacus. Given the amount of blogs that used to cover the China tech sector that have disappeared, this is a welcome addition. Its a nice looking site, it has great interactive design and a good editorial team. My one complaint is that it doesn’t have an RSS feed which is a real bummer.

Unsupported | The Greatest Stories Retold – interesting attempts at really short form storytelling. It doesn’t work well in Safari as a web browser. Something to provide creative inspiration for those 15 second ad spot scripts.

Re-evaluating Media is a piece of research put together that tried to rebalance expectations on more traditional media. Whilst there was room to land meaningful points (TV is better at mass reach for a given CPM), and there is an argument to be made for a media neutral approach where the media mix fits the communications problem to be solved. Instead they made bigger leaps and had a methodology that was optimistic at best – this became the focus of debate among people that I knew. There are arguments to be made about the wider role of brand building which would better help traditional broadcast advertising more.