The online field has been one of the mainstays since I started writing online in 2003. My act of writing online was partly to understand online as a medium.
Online has changed in nature. It was first a destination and plane of travel. Early netizens saw it as virgin frontier territory, rather like the early American pioneers viewed the open vistas of the western United States. Or later travellers moving west into the newly developing cities and towns from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
America might now be fenced in and the land claimed, but there was a new boundless electronic frontier out there. As the frontier grew more people dialled up to log into it. Then there was the metaphor of web surfing. Surfing the internet as a phrase was popularised by computer programmer Mark McCahill. He saw it as a clear analogue to ‘channel surfing’ changing from station to station on a television set because nothing grabs your attention.
Web surfing tapped into the line of travel and 1990s cool. Surfing like all extreme sport at the time was cool. And the internet grabbed your attention.
Broadband access, wi-fi and mobile data changed the nature of things. It altered what was consumed and where it was consumed. The sitting room TV was connected to the internet to receive content from download and streaming services. Online radio, podcasts and playlists supplanted the transistor radio in the kitchen.
Multi-screening became a thing, tweeting along real time opinions to reality TV and live current affairs programmes. Online became a wrapper that at its worst envelopes us in a media miasma of shrill voices, vacuous content and disinformation.
The split economy is used a term differentiate from the sharing economy. I first heard of it on the Robin Hood Snacks Daily podcast. The sharing economy has been discussed ad infinitum and is very popular. It encompasses high growth businesses like AirBnB, Uber and DoorDash.
The split economy is used to differentiate itself from the sharing economy. They have some elements in common. Like the sharing economy, the split economy focuses on maximising the utilisation of assets. The difference is that the consumer isn’t paying for a just a service, but also fractional ownership of an underlying asset.
An example would be fractional ownership of sports cars via ‘clubs’ :
Curvy Road
AutoXotica
Exotic Car Share
Fractional ownership of art:
Feral Horses
Masterworks
ArtSquare.io
None of these are necessarily ‘new’ business ideas, but they are now starting to get heat behind them.
Pacaso
Snacks Daily discusses a company called Pacaso. Pacaso buys high end properties and then divides it up into fractional ownership. They then charge a management fee to configure the home with personal pictures, a full fridge, fresh laundry and extensively cleaned. Its a sophisticated boutique experience, that is cheaper than full ownership, but with all the practical benefits.
Back in the day, Pacaso would have been described as a timeshare business. However the reputation of timeshares has been tainted by high pressure selling and criminality. Split ownership allows Pacaso to put distance between the timeshare sector and itself. It allows the business to ride the coat tails of valuations enjoyed by sharing economy companies.
I wrote a blog post back in February 2014 that highlighted 40 blogs that inspired me, revisiting this post I decided to write about 2021 blogs that inspire me. But first how did the original list hold up in 2021?
Original list in 2021
Name / Category
Description
Analysis
Wall Street Journal Corporate Intelligence blog
No longer exists, the link defaults to the Wall Street Journal front page.
Edge Perspectives with John Hagel
– No longer exists
Monocle Monocolumn
Monocle has kept the archive online, but the Monocolumn is no longer updated. It has been abandoned in favour of the Monocle Minute
The Asia Society have a blog which alternates between amazing photography from the region and analysis pieces with an academic / think tank type feel. It is still maintained
Still sporadically posted to by Robert Kelly a Korean-based professor of international relations, it has some interesting posts analyzing the complex relationships across APAC. In 2017, became better known when his children gatecrashed a television interview he was doing via Skype with the BBC
Bytes of China
No longer available
China Real Time
The blog has disappeared and now diverts to the WSJ’s Asian news section.
A ‘best of ‘ website that looks at different technology categories
What surprised me about the 2012 list is how many blogs covering different aspects of China in terms of the technology scene, culture and online life have disappeared or stopped being updated. Despite the fact that now, more than ever, they are needed.
Major media outlets have walked back from building blogs based on interest areas or personalities ( like a traditional newspaper columnist).
By comparison, I have a compiled an exemplar list of inspirational 2021 blogs. I look at more but that would be ludicrously long to compile.
Asian Sentinel is edited by a couple of veteran Asia based journalists. The content comes from a number of experts in the region in specialisms such as finance, economics and policy.
English language blog that collates Hong Kong celebrity news from Cantonese language media. It is was important for me to keep an eye on this when working in Hong Kong. It is also a good way to track the slow death of the Hong Kong domestic media industry.
English language version of a Japanese news site that focuses on ‘fun, weird, and intriguing news from Asia, particularly Japan’. It has some great Japanese consumer insight content including retail experiences
The South China Morning Post historically was the paper of record for Hong Kong. It’s medium-to-long term usefulness looks in question with the National Security Act and the Chinese government pressure for Jack Ma to divest media ownership
Colossal in their own words – “an international platform for contemporary art and visual expression that explores a vast range of creative disciplines.”
George Tannenbaum is a 40 year creative veteran in the advertising industry. His blog is a mix of smart thinking and ranting about ageism and other isms in the ad industry (there’s a lot of them to rant about)
France Telecom has a blog about the bleeding edge of technology. Alongside the usual 5G flag waving you’d expect from a major mobile network operator there’s some thoughtful content
Despite the name, covers technology and does some interesting business analysis. I really like the way everything is delivered in succinct bullet points
Porsche enlisted Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter (aka Bill & Ted) to promote their new electric powered sports cars. There is so much to unpack here.
I suspect Porsche wanted to target gen-xers (and more likely early millennials) with a mid-life crisis. They probably wanted something that was memetastic.
While I am in the right age group, I am not necessarily in the right income bracket, so I am not their target market. From my perspective, there was some interesting choices.
Bringing in Alex Winter alongside Keanu Reeves was to signal that this isn’t about the ‘cool’ Keanu of Point Break, The Matrix, Cyberpunk 2077 or John Wick. Instead its closer to the ‘Dad cool’ of Apple executives – not really cool at all, but it might be fun.
The film itself is shot in a style reminiscent of Top Gear, even going as far to feature former Top Gear US presenter Tanner Foust.
This didn’t make Porsche feel like the luxury good that it is. It didn’t make it aspirational to own a Porsche. And I think that’s a problem.
Netscape
Netscape Navigator was the first internet browser that I used on a regular basis. This happened whilst I was at college. There were a few other browsers SpyGlass which was bundled with some internet services (and eventually Microsoft Internet Explorer) and NCSA Mosaic. The word in the college computer lab was that Netscape Navigator was the one you wanted. My first copy was bundled on a floppy disk sellotaped to the front cover of MacFormat magazine.
This video goes into the rise and fall of Netscape.
TeamLab
Experiential agency TeamLab have come up with an amazing experience in central Tokyo sponsored by TikTok. It is held at the Rinkan Sauni in the Roppongi district of Tokyo.
Goddess of Spring
Disney’s Goddess of Spring is set to classical music like Fantasia. It was designed as a short and the study used these series of short films to experiment with animation techniques. This episode of ‘Silly Symphonies’ was the first time they had experimented with human animation. The techniques are gone into more depth here.
MacOS X
The modern Mac operating system is 20 years old this year. I remember getting it to run on the iBook laptop that I owned back then. MacWorld have put a potted history together on how the modern Mac operating system came into being here.
SITA | SITA statement about security incident – this gave limited and basic information – specifically your name, membership number and tier, seating preferences and a code corresponding to your meal preferences. – according to Cathay Pacific. It looks like this attack on SITA was more about tracking the travel of persons of interest around the world; so more likely to be a state actor rather than commercial motives. China is known to use this kind of data to track and harass its enemies
Jack Ma personifies the contradiction of China’s ideology | Financial Times – interesting end to the article, with a question about whether Goldman Sachs, BlackRock et al will be able to convincingly align themselves “politically, intellectually and emotionally” with Xi Jingping? How will the west regard Communist party cells in their management decision structures?
Tymbals : The Agency of the Future – I was reading this by Nigel Scott. I suspect that he’ll be right. My main concern as a marketer is the piss-poor job that the martech stack players do, supporting brand building. The fundamental problem is they only view things from a performance marketing perspective because engineers, programme managers and even the company CMOs don’t get brand. These are the people that brought us growth hacking. Their model is a secondhand car lot salesman.
Why the Europeans Don’t Have a Russia Policy – Carnegie Europe – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – the belief held by the older generation of German Social Democrats—and Christian Democrats—that Russia should not be isolated. This was the thinking behind Germany’s Ostpolitik, or Eastern policy, which was begun by the Social Democrats in the late 1960s. That policy was based not only on the idea of dialogue with Russia but also on the notion of Wandel durch Annäherung, or change through
Wave Goodbye, Hello MIPS as Chapter 11 Resolved | EE Times – still has a strategic focus on the RISC-based processor architectures. They are looking to support a mix of legacy MIPS technology and a new “standards-based 8th generation architecture,” based on the open source RISC-V processor standard
Wunderman Thompson Intelligence highlighted digital sustainability as a trend. The internet is the seventh biggest polluter in the world. Data centres energy consumption is comparable to that of the largest ships.
Web designers have been looking to do their part by designing leaner, faster web pages that take up less memory.
Samsung is looking at up cycling its smartphones providing longevity rather than built-in obsolescence.
https://youtu.be/m9AL266C0lc
Ecosia, Bing and DuckDuckGo sell themselves as a more eco-friendly search engine. Due to the level of ad targeting technology, a Google search uses four times as much energy per search.
Cryptocurrency mining consumes more energy than Argentina and is increasing. That doesn’t take into account the maintenance of a blockchain: the distributed database to support each cryptocurrency transaction.
Performance per watt
Digital sustainability isn’t necessarily a new idea. A veteran Apple user would remember the launch of Intel processors on the Mac at the 2005 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Jobs talks about the company’s focus on performance per watt as a key reason for the transition. Intel was thinking about processors for workstations and mobile computers, while the Power PC was being refocused on its minicomputer heartland and embedded applications.
The problem is that a lot of Apples current product designs from AirPods to MacBook Pros make up cycling all but impossible. Apple does have some interesting technology to recycle their own phones, but we don’t know how that will scale to create real digital sustainability. More related posts here.
