Ged Carroll

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  • Coinbase Super Bowl ad

    Coinbase advertises during Super Bowl

    On Monday afternoon, the buzz amongst my colleagues in New York was the Super Bowl from the night before. In particular the advertising and one advert by Coinbase sparked more discussions than others. The advert was divisive. Some people that there was something wrong with their smart TV which had triggered a dodgy screensaver. One person even first thought that the QRcode would take them through to a site that might explain whatever ransomware had hijacked their TV.

    They scanned the QRcode but it didn’t work properly. The reasons for it not working were twofold:

    • The contrast in the QRcode background and foreground wasn’t large enough for certain colours and so wouldn’t scan
    • The coinbase website fell over. This would be spun as unprecedented demand, but the reality was poor execution

    A game console style ROM screen revealed at the end that it was Coinbase. The management would likely pass the whole car crash off as growth hacking.

    Growth hacking

    Growth hacking as a term was attributed to a blog post by Sean Ellis back in 2010. But as a concept it goes back much further. A classic example of growth hacking could be considered to be FMCG staple of ‘buy one, get one free’ or BOGOF. The master of the growth hack was David Wallerstein came up with the idea of supersizing popcorn servings in the 1960s. Wallerstein came up with a behavioural change experiment as business idea based on the insight of that people might want to buy and eat more popcorn, but were simply ashamed of buying two bags at the cinema. Wallerstein was successful in his experiment. Wallerstein was appointed by Ray Kroc to the board of McDonalds in 1968 and then rolled out larger servings in McDonalds restaurants, if you’ve ever been asked if you want a ‘large meal’ with your burger Wallerstein was responsible. This created a whole range of products in restaurants and supermarkets called expandables, from large meals to multi-packs of products.

    A more recent example would be the signature on hotmail.com emails that encouraged whoever received them to get their own email address at hotmail.com. This was effective back when most people had a work or college email address and wanted a home account for personal communications like finding a new job. Gmail took a slightly different approach with an invite scheme that saw early adopters clamouring like they were trying to get in the door of Studio 54 on a Saturday night.

    The original idea of growth hacking is to try a small marketing tactic and refine it based on the feedback that you get. In reality that gets translated into poor thought out showy tactics focused on the short term. The reason for this is that test and learn is done over a short time period and doesn’t incorporate marketing science. The Coinbase advert was a classic example of this.

    Buzz marketing

    Growth hacking is influenced by a number of things. One of which was the concept of ‘scrappiness’ in start-up marketing.

    Startup scrappiness

    During the original dot com boom new online businesses wasted a fantastic amount of money on ineffective advertising. The most iconic example of this would be the pets.com sock pocket advert that featured in the 2000 version of the Super Bowl.

    Car with Yahoos
    Courtesy of Yahoo! Inc. Co founder David Filo is hanging from the rear of the car.

    You saw some businesses like Yahoo! try to do brand building advertising in a more cost effective way. This was known internally at Yahoo! as buzz marketing and in the US, it had its own team.

    Examples of buzz marketing included wrapping employees cars that had been volunteered in the Yahoo! brand. This was listed in the employee handbook as a free ‘perk’ of working at Yahoo!. There were some conditions like you had to keep the wrap on for year and a good behaviour clause.

    The world's first (only?) purple Zamboni

    There were also some sponsorships like the ice machine at the San Jose Sharks stadium and some high traffic billboards. Yahoo! used to have a billboard alongside the 101 freeway going into San Francisco and another in Time Square, New York.

    Our San Francisco billboard

    While the lesson of ‘go for business models that make financial sense’ seems to have been lost as we left the dot.com era further behind. The idea of ‘scrappiness’ stuck. It fitted with the wider concept of ‘struggle culture’ in entrepreneurship.

    In technology, marketing = sales

    On one level, the problem isn’t Coinbase but the technology sector. The truth is that for the most part technology companies don’t do good marketing. My hypotheses around the reasons for this are:

    • Technologists aren’t marketers. For the original technology firms, the products found their own market. Over time a salesforce was introduced and for complex products there might be pre-sales and post sales consultancy. They don’t really know much about marketing science. The sales funnel is the one ‘marketing model’ that managed to make it into Microsoft® PowerPoint® says a lot about the nature of this understanding.
    • To a technologist, every problem looks like a technology challenge. So the answer for great marketing is either in kludges aka hacks, like the Coinbase advert, or algorithmic in nature. And those algorithms are usually based on a poor understanding of marketing featured in the point above
    • Technologists think short term. Brands are transitory if you are looking to be bought out, or are built ‘organically’ in the hands of the victors (Oracle, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Tencent or Alibaba). So building a brand is an alien concept. Why build a brand in a world when you believe in disrupt, or be disrupted? Contrast that with the FMCG world where brands have considerably longer lives. The Nestlé Kit Kat chocolate bar is 86 years old at the time of writing. Procter & Gamble’s Bold washing powder (laundry detergent) is a spritely 57 years old. Baileys Irish Cream liqueur is 48 years old, as is the Mobil 1 range of synthetic engine oils, oil filters, chassis grease, transmission fluids, and gear lubricants. If we think of technology brands with that kind of longevity its likely to be the incumbent telecoms companies, Fujitsu, Hitach and IBM. At the younger end would be the likes of Verbatim, AMD, Intel, Oracle, Western Digital, Microsoft, Apple, Acer and Atari.
    • Disrupt or be disrupted creates delusion. If you believe in the disrupt or be disrupted manifest destiny of technology you probably believe that your ability to market is better than established brands that are actually marketing organisations

    I would guess that Coinbase marketers would tick at least some of these hypotheses. It probably doesn’t help that organisations who should know better are starting to buy into this ‘disrupt or be disrupted’ model.

    Cost of reach

    So, if you’re a technology company like Coinbase, who believes in disruption and ‘knows’ how to market better than marketers? The simple answer is that while digital has managed to get marketers to use its platforms, it has failed to offer the most competitive cost per reach. To achieve the same goals Coinbase would have had to spend an order of magnitude more on YouTube than TV to reach an equivalent audience.

    Brand building

    Finally the reason why the advert contrasted so sharply with the other content that ran during the Super Bowl was because everyone else focused on brand building rather than on brand activation. The reason why they are going for brand building is that the work will keep paying dividends for years. This is something that digital transformation doesn’t reflect well through its algorithms. The Coinbase approach was the equivalent of a TV ad that said click here.

    More information

    Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup | Startup Marketing (July 26, 2010)

  • Stamps + more news

    The Royal Mail digital stamps

    Warning: Stamps that say ‘1st’ or ‘2nd’ class are going to become unusable from 31 January 2023 – each stamp will have a proprietary QRcode type glyph. The stamp’s glyph will be linked to a digital twin. This isn’t to be used for tracking the letters and the packages that they are affixed to; but purely as a security measure on the stamps. How much effort is this going to take and is it really going to be cheaper than conventional printing technologies to limit stamp fraud? How much of a black economy is there in stamps anyway? While the Royal Mail promises innovative services enabled by the stamps, it isn’t clear what they will be at the moment. Looking at Amazon, the ‘barcode stamps’ as the Royal Mail call them don’t seem to be widely available yet. The Royal Mail has announced but not launched a scheme to swap out your existing stamps for the new design.

    China

    What is most interesting about Eileen Gu isn’t that she switched countries but the narrative of western decline that China is wrapping around this: Cold warrior: why Eileen Gu ditched Team USA to ski for China | The Economist and Winter Olympics: Eileen Gu and the Chimerican Dream – The Olympic freestyle skier has stirred controversy for representing China. She is the product of a vanishing shared space between the Chinese and American elite. As for Gu’s Mum’s background, it would be an ideal model if a screen writers was adapting The Americans as Chinese sleeper agents instead

    Evergrande chair breaks silence to rule out asset fire sale | Financial Times – makes sense

    Wang Huning’s career reveals much about political change in China | The Economist – As its chief of ideology and propaganda, he is in charge of crafting a very different message: that China practises true democracy, that America’s is a sham and that American power is fading. For a party locked in an escalating ideological war with America, this line is unsurprising. Mr Wang’s role in the struggle is more so. His early writing did not suggest narrow-minded nationalism. He saw weaknesses in America’s system, but did not exaggerate them. He saw problems, too, in China’s. Even more remarkably, he has been crafting the party’s message under three successive leaders.

    China’s family planning agency says it will ‘intervene’ in abortions for unmarried women, teens | South China Morning Post – It aims to ‘improve reproductive health’ and will set up a task force for education and communication projects, according to plan outlining key initiatives for the year. Association will also roll out pilot public health programmes to encourage Chinese to have more than one child, as it tries to reverse declining birth rates – but could China support the orphanages needed or end up the Magdalene laundries with Chinese characteristics?

    A Beijing think tank offered a frank review of China’s technological weaknesses. Then the report disappeared | Science | AAAS 

    Finance

    Who buys the dirty energy assets public companies no longer want? | The Economist – private equity are buying the businesses. The thing that people forget is that those energy assets are still going to be needed to make paints, plastics, fabrics, pharmaceuticals and lithium ion batteries….

    FMCG

    Ben & Jerry’s Ukraine tweet gets frosty reception from Unilever boss | Unilever | The Guardian – Unilever indicates limits to social purpose

    Hong Kong

    Beijing ready to implement harsher Covid lockdown on Hong Kong | Financial Times 

    Ideas

    What’s interesting about the future of the ideas that aren’t hinged in culture, is how similar they relate to 10 year predictions back in the late 1990s and early 2000s – Internet in 2035 | Pew Research Center 

    The Plausibly Deniable DataBase (PDDB) « bunnie’s blog – Most security schemes facilitate the coercive processes of an attacker because they disclose metadata about the secret data, such as the name and size of encrypted files. This allows specific and enforceable demands to be made: “Give us the passwords for these three encrypted files with names A, B and C, or else…”. In other words, security often focuses on protecting the confidentiality of data, but lacks deniability. 

    A scheme with deniability would make even the existence of secret files difficult to prove. This makes it difficult for an attacker to formulate a coherent demand: “There’s no evidence of undisclosed data. Should we even bother to make threats?” A lack of evidence makes it more difficult to make specific and enforceable demands. 

    Thus, assuming the ultimate goal of security is to protect the safety of users as human beings, and not just their files, enhanced security should come hand-in-hand with enhanced plausible deniability (PD). PD arms users with a set of tools they can use to navigate the social landscape of security, by making it difficult to enumerate all the secrets potentially contained within a device, even with deep forensic analysis

    OpenAI Chief Scientist Says Advanced AI May Already Be Conscious | Futurism – wouldn’t there be an incentive for the AI to hide its sentience?

    The metaverse is just a new word for an old idea | MIT Technology Review – agreed

    Korea

    Korea Herald – After being called feminists, these women faced online harassment – One in 2 men in their 20s in South Korea tends to be anti-feminist, according to a 2018 study released by the Korean Women’s Development Institute, a government think tank. In the same survey, only 1 in 4 young men saw women as “weaker than men” or needing protection. But such strong antagonism against feminism has puzzled many looking from the outside at a country that has the highest gender wage gap among OECD countries. Women also feel less safe than men in the country, according to a 2021 report from the Gender Equality Ministry. Only 21.6 percent of women said they felt safe from crime, as opposed to 32.1 percent of men.

    Marketing

    Miller Lite’s Super Bowl Ad Will Air Only in the Metaverse – this feels more like a PR stunt than a smart marketing one

    Online

    On Meta’s ‘regulatory headwinds’ and adtech’s privacy reckoning | TechCrunch – “The investigation shows that gambling platforms do not operate in a silo. Rather, gambling platforms operate in conjunction with a wider network of third parties. The investigation shows that even limited browsing of 37 visits to gambling websites led to 2,154 data transmissions to 83 domains controlled by 44 different companies that range from well-known platforms like Facebook and Google to lesser known surveillance technology companies like Signal and Iovation, enabling these actors to embed imperceptible monitoring software during a user’s browsing experience. The investigation further shows that a number of these third-party companies receive behavioural data from gambling platforms in realtime, including information on how often individuals gambled, how much they were spending, and their value to the company if they returned to gambling after lapsing.”

    Professional specific support – Self-Care Catalyst – is aimed at stressed and burnt out nurse practitioners in the US. I heard about it from my US colleagues and imagine that we will see similar businesses soon

    Security

    US Navy investigates leak of F-35 crash video — Radio Free Asia – how did they get the video off the ship?

    Indonesia to buy 42 Rafale warplanes from France | South China Morning Post – great opportunity for France

    China revises draft rules on data security for business sectors | Reuters 

    Arm’s float ambitions risk being ‘scuttled’ by China boss | The Telegraph – Allen Wu reportedly wants 100,000,000s of dollars to cede control of ARM China. I think that he wants ARM lock, stock and barrel and that he is backed by the Chinese government

    ‘You’re treated like a spy’: US accused of racial profiling over China Initiative | The Guardian – US is in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t position on running counter-espionage programmes. If they don’t China will strip the country down to the studs. If they do, they get criticism of racism

    Software

    Ubisoft (UBI) Plans New Assassin’s Creed Game to Help Fill Its Schedule – Bloomberg – was originally an expansion pack. I wonder what’s going on over at Ubisoft?

    Technology

    Intel Announces Billion-Dollar Development Fund, Boosts RISC-V Processors – ExtremeTech

    Telecoms

    Breaking the Internet: China-US Competition Over Technology Standards – The Diplomat

    Web of no web

    The Metaverse Makes No Sense and Here’s Why – Bloomberg 

    Video games’ future is more than the Metaverse: Let’s talk ‘hyper digital reality’ | Playable Futures | GamesIndustry.biz 

  • Super Bowl LVI + more things

    Super Bowl LVI

    This week is biggest night in advertising around the Super Bowl. I understand that this the 56th match, for as the Americans like to call it Super Bowl LVI. While Super Bowl LVI is an important sports event attracting an audience across North America.

    You can find 56 of the adverts on YouTube here.

    Some of the more interesting adverts from my perspective

    Salesforce.com

    Salesforce.com has a brand anthem featuring Matthew McConaughey. What’s interesting about this is how Salesforce defines its elf in terms of being ‘anti-big tech’. It contains digs at Facebook, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk – you don’t need to work very hard to join the dots.

    https://youtu.be/tIp251KCz6k

    Kia Motors

    Kia’s ad is one with more longevity. It’s packed with emotion and a fluent device of a robot dog at the centre of it. If Kia were smart they would build on the dog further in future campaigns as I think that have something here.

    https://youtu.be/HoNMz_OV_dI

    Choose life

    The final one that grabbed me was Expedia’s ad spot with Ewan McGregor which seemed to borrow heavily from his Renton persona in Trainspotting & T2.

    Here’s Ewan for Expedia with the Today programme having a preview of it.

    Here’s the original ‘Choose Life’ monologue from Trainspotting. Note that Mr McGregor even sports Renton’s crew cut.

    Here’s the ‘Choose Life’ monologue revisited in T2. Outside of the creative classes I don’t think most people watching NBC’s coverage in the US will understand the linkage between Expedia, Trainspotting and T2.

    As a bonus here’s how the NFL was formed and how the teams got their names.

    And before you ask, I think that the Rams will beat the Bengals in Super Bowl LVI.

    Shiba Inu

    NHK Worldwide did an amazing documentary on the Shiba Inu. The Shiba Inu is one of only 16 ‘basal breeds’. That means a closer genetic link to the source of what makes a dog a dog than newer breeds. By comparison breeds like the labrador have evolved much further. This shows up in the Shiba Inu behaviour such as the lack of relative physical closeness to their owners, despite having a deep bond.

    Audrey Tang, digital minister, government of Taiwan, Republic of China

    Audrey Tang is a legendary technologist and has developed some the best work combatting misinformation anywhere in the world. It is a great interview to listen to during your lunch hour. The lessons of her work have never been so important. I also love what she says about the importance of the commons, living the open source spirit and broadband as a human right.

    Recycling glass

    I am fascinated by manufacturing processes and the nature of materials. This video on how glass is recycled into loft insulation by Owen Corning is fascinating. Its a bit of a long video but worthwhile watching.

    Yemen

    I never thought I would be writing about Yemen. This video on the Caspian Report discusses how Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are using the cover the Yemeni civil war to build bases that would allow them to project force into major shipping routes.

    Project Apollo

    Amazing NASA film that outlined the ambition for the Apollo missions.

  • Burning NFTs + more news

    Burning NFTs

    Why brands are burning NFTs | Vogue Business – Burning NFTs, which are tokens stored on a blockchain, is the process of permanently removing a token from circulation. This can be done to eliminate unsold or problematic inventory from an NFT drop, or it can be used to engage collectors and fans through “upgrades” that replace an original NFT with something else. For fashion and beauty brands, burning NFTs could offer a way to manipulate scarcity, and therefore price. It could also lead to more intriguing NFT projects, in which consumers must weigh risk and reward by burning an NFT in exchange for something else. These scenarios, among others, are already playing out among artists and gaming startups, paving the way for fashion. Already, Adidas is using a burn mechanism to change the state of its NFTs when NFT owners make a purchase. Apparel brand Champion recently partnered with Daz 3D’s NFT collection, Non-Fungible People, and will use burning to enable peoples’ profile picture NFTs to digitally dress in Champion gear, while Unisocks invites NFT owners to burn them in exchange for physical products. – burning NFTs sounds like a dangerous precedent

    China

    How China is using black sites in the UAE as they target Uyghurs abroad | Sky News – particularly interesting when one thinks about how much of a surveillance state that the UAE is. It is very hard to do anything like this there without the government knowing

    Consumer behaviour

    Environment | Gallup Historical Trends – interesting longitudinal data set. Environmental messaging effectiveness is proportional to consumer disposable income and financial security at the time

    Design

    Defining character: A Hong Kong font designer’s bold effort to preserve Cantonese culture – Hong Kong Free Press HKFP – based on the past toughness of Hong Kong…

    Economics

    Lithium price squeeze adds to cost of the energy transition | Financial Times – China has a lock on the world’s lithium supply through mining acquisitions, so this squeeze has been coming for at least five years

    UK engineer Renishaw expects chip crunch to last another 2 years | Financial Times – expects semiconductor supply chain problems until at least 2024

    When will the music stop? | Financial Times – bill being called due on financialisation and post-industrialisation of western economies and a move from globalisation to regionalisation

    Germany

    Mercedes accused of using cheat-devices with ‘500%’ higher NOx emissions | CAR Magazine – the interesting thing about this is that Mercedes is a more financially precarious position than Volkswagen is due to lower profit margins and less of a war chest to draw on if this case gets serious

    Hong Kong

    Australia denied access to dual citizen detained for alleged ‘subversion’ in Hong Kong | The Guardian – the interesting thing about this is that dual citizenship is no longer allowed in Hong Kong, which is at odds to the way things had been in the colony

    Ideas

    Twee fashion: will the revival bring back toxic body image? – The Face – intersectionality impacting nostalgia

    Chen Qiufan on Science Fiction as a Weapon of Storytelling – The Wire China – defining the future is exceptionally important (paywall)

    How Can We Talk about China and against Sinophobia without Feeling Guilty, Apologetic or Defensive? | British Journal of Chinese Studies 

    Ireland

    US embassy warns TU Dublin about risks of ties with Chinese university | Ireland | The Sunday Times – China wants Ireland to host international campus of Harbin University. Ireland should be looking at the experience of Hungary who were made to foot the bill for a campus that only benefit Chinese students – In 2020 HIT was added to an “entity list” by the US Department of Commerce, which identifies people or organisations that it believes are involved in activities contrary to US security or foreign policy interests. Last week the American embassy in Dublin said it was still concerned about HIT’s ties with the People’s Liberation Army and its efforts to acquire foreign technology in support of its defence aims 

    Online

    Mark Zuckerberg and team consider shutting down Facebook and Instagram in Europe if Meta can not process Europeans’ data on US servers 

    When scientific conferences went online, diversity and inclusion soared | Careers | Chemistry World

    Security

    China and Russia’s hypersonic weaponry threatens US early warning system | Financial Times

    China companies try to list in US in test for regulators after clampdown | Financial Times 

    British research ‘could help China build superweapons’ | News | The Times – The number of research collaborations between scientists in the UK and Chinese institutes with deep connections to the country’s defence forces has tripled to more than 1,000 in six years, a figure that lays bare the scale of cooperation with the hostile state. The university funding includes £60 million from sources now sanctioned by the US government for supplying the Chinese military with fighter jets, communications technology and missiles. The article was published with this opinion piece: Is getting into bed with President Xi for science . . . or just sleazy? | News | The Times  – It is 1914 and our scientists, encouraged by government and big business, have been co-operating with their German opposites on machine-gun technology, ballistics and aeroplane design — all in the name of exciting new technology and with a rising country with an important market and close ties with the UK. Now return to the present, but with an eye to the future. As The Times reveals today, UK scientists are working closely with Chinese scientists from institutes intimately associated with weapons development

    Australia-China relations: US, allies ‘acquiesced and allowed’ China’s South China Sea expansion, Australian minister says | South China Morning Post 

    South Korea to track travel by chip engineers as tech leaks grow – Nikkei Asia – reading this made me think of the scientific brain drain in Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File. It also give you an idea of the lengths that the Koreans think China will go to

    US adds 33 Chinese companies to red flag list, unseals Hytera indictment | South China Morning Post – Being added to the Commerce Department’s ‘unverified list’ means a firm faces tougher rules on doing business with American companies. The Hytera indictment details a 13-year effort by the company and a group of former Motorola employees to steal technology

    Foreign Office hit by “serious cybersecurity incident” | The Stack – not much information on the nature of the breach or who was likely to be behind it

    Telecoms

    Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2021 | Morgan Stanley 

    Web of no web

    Why gamers hate crypto, and music fans don’t – gamers feel that they are being ripped off, music fans look at NFTs like as if they are souvenirs or trading cards. This has important implications for mechanisms governing the metaverse

    Axios Login | Beijing Olympics in VR 

  • Site revamp

    I have been going back through the content on this website as part of a site revamp. I conducted the content aspect of the site revamp while I created new content, did work and general life stuff. So it took a while as the content went as far back as March 2004.

    site revamp of content

    I ended up paring the number of blog posts down from almost six thousand posts to just under eighteen hundred. I deleted a few posts because in retrospect I didn’t have much to say. 

    But the bulk of the posts that I deleted was where I was consolidating posts that focused on curating content from around the web, similar to this one. 

    The primary reason why I was consolidating these posts together was link rot. Links that went out to dead sites and the pages hadn’t managed to be indexed in the Wayback Machine. 

    So what did I learn from this content site revamp process? 

    Ephemera

    While the maxim that ‘everything stays somewhere online forever’ is useful life advice, it doesn’t accurately reflect the ephemeral nature of online content. Even many of the largest media companies seem to prune their older content on a regular basis. The exceptions to this seem to be the FT and the New York Times. 

    Companies are usually really bad at handling their redirects from the now dead pages of old content. With zero consideration being given to context.  Of course, memes and revenge porn tend not to be as ephemeral unfortunately.

    2014

    2014 seems to have been a cataclysmic year for personal website content. Prior this year there were all kinds of interesting professional and corporate blogs being run. But in 2014, things seem to have changed dramatically. This seems to have occurred across sectors and specialisms. Companies seem to have given up on their content strategies. 

    My current working hypothesis is that part of this was probably due to the rise of social media and a secondary aspect of this must have been the declining returns of on network and off network search engine optimisation.  I also think that at least some personal bloggers grew out of their sites. They probably found that their interests had changed, or no longer had time to write. I managed to avoid that fate for a number of reasons:

    • Writing helped me work out ideas
    • I don’t think that I am a good writer, but writing became a habit, one that was so engrained it survived when I moved to live in Hong Kong and back again
    • I deliberately never put this blog in a box, in terms of what I wanted to write about beyond what caught my interest. Part of this came down to my belief in the connected post-modern nature of the world. Previously I have talked about how understanding the dynamics of social media can be traced back to the rituals and structures of ancient Rome. People like Jed Hallam had since articulated this idea much better in his discussions about marketing existing inside culture and acting on culture
    • Between 2003 and 2012, there seemed to be more events and conferences that I got to go to during and after work that provided inspiration for content. This seems to have tailed off somewhat now
    • I thought the process of curation was as important as the process of creation. I never had to create content completely in a vacuum. Using social bookmarking tools and newsreader services helped enormously in this process.
    • The pattern of my writing has evolved. I publish less frequently, but tend to do longer posts now. At one stage I was developing two posts a day for this site, content for a blog on PR Week that was regularly featured in their print edition, the corporate blog of the agency that I worked for at the time and contributing a few posts to Econsultancy on marketing related issues. I also provided some content to political site Left Foot Forward at the behest of a policy wonk colleague of mine, this content focused on the intersection of technology, media and regulation. My writing had been driving a good deal of my career progression from 2005 through to 2014

    Finally, I think that there has been a decline in the spirit of generosity in the exchange of ideas. I am not sure if this is an increase in ‘meaness’ – though more and more content is now behind a paywall, or a larger decline in ideas.

    I don’t think that Medium and LinkedIn have managed to plug the gap on brands and consumers looking to publish quality long form content for various reasons. Secondly, email newsletters while looking like the new blogs are likely to be equally ephemeral and may be a step backward in time; though I am still subscribed to listservs that I originally looked at in college. 

    As I write this, even Facebook looks as if it has finally started on its downward slope to irrelevance , where it will eventually join former online titans like Geocities, Friendster, MySpace and Bebo. Facebook content is already largely hidden from the open web behinds its wall garden. The way things are going, It is likely to disappear completely in the next decade or so. 

    The content site revamp brought home to me, the importance of having your own personal website, to have control over your content.  Looking back strengthened my belief in the advice that I gave Omincom’s David Gallagher four years ago

    Why have a website as part of your personal online brand?

    LinkedIn and Facebook don’t have the same agenda as you. Your content becomes a hostage to their business whims
    It is hard for users to discover your content, Facebook and Google make it so
    Even on Medium you no longer really own your content. It can’t be easily exported like content on the Blogger platform
    Even in the world of Facebook, Google is still a reputation engine

    Personal online brand (January 23, 2018)

    Better notes

    The content process that I went through on the site revamp taught me that I need to make better notes about the significance of a particular piece of content because years later I won’t have any idea why I’d saved it. I have been getting better at this over years, but I still need to do better.