Reddit have interviewed geek heroes. In each interview they discuss their formative moments for a series of videos on YouTube. The complete playlist is below. Steve Wozniak aka Woz is one of the geek heroes highlighted . It’s a a quality interview with the Woz on form on various topics. You can read more about Woz here.
Why Is Vice Ditching Its Anti Smoking Past To Work For Philip Morris? | Co.Create – Vice has big marketing and media groups as shareholders including WPP. More tobacco related posts here. It will be interesting to see how the anti-smoking lobby reacts to it. There is something larger going on in the tobacco industry as it tried to push into vaping and heated tobacco products.
Nielsen COO Steve Hasker on Total Audience Measurement and Snapchat Deal | Adweek – interesting article on TV measurement
Vice Media Web Traffic Plunges 17% in February, Sunk by Risky Strategy | Variety – one month’s of comScore’s data doesn’t make a trend
Vice CEO Shane Smith to agencies: ‘We like you.’ | Digiday – might have something to do with their dramatic drop in website traffic… Vice has lost its outsider positioning and become part of the mainstream that it kicked against for so long. Still Shane Smith has done well out of it
More valuable brands in China | Shanghai Daily – Huawei ranks highly. Huawei is a client of WPP who own the company that created the brand ranking. As with many of things your mileage will vary considerably.
The Laughing Cow explores the true value of family time | Marketing Interactive – interesting positioning of the Laughing Cow brand. It’s classic FMCG thinking but with a twist
Gamasutra – Now’s the time to get into VR – but be realistic about its returns, says Palmer Luckey – the thing to keep an eye on is if e-sports athletes find an advantage in VR within a gaming environment. It will be interesting to see how various technology hurdles are handled. Making true VR content requires news processes, new approaches to narrative and storytelling. Will the cost of non-gaming content in VR be worthwhile? Lastly, lean back content is tremendously important as well, expect headsets to be used as ‘virtual screens’ for traditional content as a killer app. Not all that computing power will be needed. It will also work with small single person households were a 65 inch TV isn’t practical
I posted part one in this two-part series of ‘part of my process’ posts on my blog. Part one covered Hemingway, Pinboard, Terminal and IFTTT. In this post I will cover tools that I use for content discovery and publication.
Right Relevance
Right Relevance is a web service that recommends content from social channels. It is based on areas of interest. Klout provides a similar function as part of its social measurement service. I could write a whole blog post about what’s wrong with Klout’s measurement approach. But their content recommendation function is alright. I have found from experience that Right Relevance tends to provide better quality recommendations.
For specific subject areas there are ‘subreddit’ threads at Reddit. Certain subject areas like technology have special purpose sites: for instance techmeme and Slashdot. I have included some more geek orientated options at the bottom of this post
Newsblur
The way I explain RSS to my non-tech forward friends is by an analogy. RSS is the web’s analog of a ticker tape machine. In Western’s that is the machine which put incoming messages on a strip of paper. While outgoing messages went out in Morse code on a telegraph key. In the stock exchange or newsroom; continuous computer paper replaced the thin strip of paper. A teletype machine or computer printer would print messages as they came in.
RSS sends updates from websites in a way that applications can collect the content up. Different services present it in different formats like an email type interface or digital magazine. Most people were familar with RSS from its use with Google Reader. When Google Reader shut down, it didn’t kill RSS. Instead a cottage industry of RSS readers sprang up to replace it.
My RSS reader of choice is Newsblur. Newsblur has several benefits. You can train it to filter your feeds based on author or key words over time. The unread posts can be uncovered with one click and read if you still need to.
It provides three different views
Newsblur has a good in-browser interface. It provides integration with both Pinboard and Buffer. It also supports Reeder, a popular desktop RSS reader for OSX.
Newsblur has a native application for both iOS and Android. A third party wrote a free native application for Windows phone. In the past there was also support on Symbian, Maemo and BlackBerry. You get a lot for your $24/year subscription.
Buffer
Buffer is the social publishing tool that I use. It provides similar benefits to Hootsuite, but is much more user friendly. Buffer also has a transparent pricing model compared to Hootsuite. It integrates in my process via IFTTT. Buffer has a native app for iOS and an in-browser interface. It integrates into sharing functionality within iOS and Newsblur. It is the end point in my automated plumbing for social content publication.
It has good basic analytics built in. I use ‘The Awesome Plan’ which costs $102/year.
Weiyun
Weiyun is a cloud file storage and sychronisation service like Dropbox. The key differences being, it is only available in Chinese and it provides 1TB of storage for free.
Weiyun has Android, iOS, Windows and OSX applications.
Here is a presentation hosted on Slideshare that highlights the tools discussed in today’s ‘part of my process’ post.
More everyday tools in part three.
More information
Right Relevance website
Klout – ignore the measurement, but stay for the content recommendations
Reddit
techmeme – curated by a mix of algorithms and an editorial team
Hacker News – based on a community who find interesting geeky stuff around the web
Newsblur (once you subscribe it provides you links to the different mobile apps)
Reeder – a third party RSS reader for OSX which supports Newsblur
Weiyun English interface
How to use Weiyun
If You Want To Keep Using Your Kindle, You Might Need To Update It Immediately | Gizmodo – will this break the reflashed Kindles that were popular in China? It also shows the impermanence of cloud content and the constant battle that companies face like Amazon with reflashed Kindles being put on to rival e-book stores in China. More on Amazon here.
Downloading MP3s From Spotify is Easy But Feels Dated | TorrentFreak – which brings us to the digital equivalent of recording from the radio and not buying a recording. Expect the record labels to go apeshit
Xiaomi founder says time for world to copy Chinese innovation, Technology/Digital News – AsiaOne Digital – Compared with their US peers which are chiefly driven by tech advances, Chinese Internet enterprises place tons of emphasis on user experience, marketing and rapid solutions, which are helping us gain unique edges
What Obama doesn’t get about encryption | The Kernel – not exclusively an Obama problem either
Video ads: What works and doesn’t work with younger users | VentureBeat – the author seems surprised that young people would be skeptical towards branded content. It was the same with generation X. Why would it be any different now?
More Devs Now Use OS X Than Linux, Says Survey – Slashdot – and less than half use Windows
Half of China’s Ad Spending Will Go Toward the Internet This Year, GroupM Says | Ad Age – (paywall) but measurement still an issue. Partly because highly regulated TV is so boring to watch
Yahoo, Facebook in Ad Partnership Talks Over Tumblr — The Information – (paywall) that’s a shockingly low figure, but then I guess Yahoo! sales team won’t be selling to brands that care about millennials
Ariadne Capital takes legal action against PR firm over Wikipedia edits – Business Insider – breaks the terms of service
I use a range of tools including Hemingway as part of my content creation process. This came out when I had a meeting with some junior marketing agency staff last week. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss content strategy across different clients. In the end an good part of the conversation went into process and content creation.
Given that conversation I thought it might be fruitful to flag up some of the technologies that I use.
Hemingway
I use Hemingway ( a web application and a native OSX application) to write. Hemingway has two writing modes:
Editing mode looks at your copy as you create it:
Hemingway is like having a sub-editor sitting on your shoulder at the point of creation.
Writing mode clears the real-time editing functions to the right of the screen. It allows me to get content down as a stream of consciousness. It allows me to get ideas down before I lose the train of thought.
You can then switch to editing mode to go back and clean up your copy once you have it down.
The OSX version allows you to save documents down as a HTML file, from which you can cut and paste into a destination. It just works whether its a presentation, document, WordPress or social platforms.
Pinboard
Pinboard is a social bookmarking service that now costs $11/year. It allows me to store links and notes about websites that I find of interest.
Pinboard is a web service so my bookmarks go where I can get a web connection.
I use a bookmarklet that sits in the chrome of my browser. Every time I come across something that might be of interest, I click on the link and complete a simple form.
I use Pinner for iOS on my iPhone. It integrates into the system level sharing functionality. I can create bookmarks on the move as well as at my desk.
Terminal
The Terminal app in OSX allows direct access to the power of the operating system. It is also unforgiving. Getting a command wrong can have serious consequences.
There are a few things that I can do faster in terminal than via other methods. From checking differences in documents, to batch processing file archiving. To get you started here are two examples that you can try: to see if a website is up to getting a weather forecast.
I have a copy of UNIX in a Nutshell from O’Reilly Media on my bookshelf. I use this as a back-up when I can’t remember the proper syntax or a command. I can also recommend Learning Unix for OS X: Going Deep With the Terminal and Shell also from O’Reilly Media.
IFTTT
At the beginning of 2007 Yahoo! launched an experimental product called Yahoo! Pipes. It was flakey, it was unreliable but also revolutionary. Pipes was an easy way to stitch together services without programming expertise. After years of flakey service it was shutdown by Yahoo! in June 2015.
Pipes inspired another service IFTTT. IFTTT stands for ‘If then, then that’. It is a simple cause and effect framework that allows for the automation of actions over the web. These cause and effect formulas called recipes. It supports a range of web services and apps. Most of the discussion around this for Intenet of Things automation. I use it to automate my web content content.
More in part two.
I pulled part one together in a companion presentation.
More information
Hemingway OSX application
Pinner app for iOS
IFTTT – (If Then, Then That)
Books
Learning Unix for OS X: Going Deep With the Terminal and Shell by Dave Taylor
UNIX in a Nutshell by Arnold Robbins