Damien Mulley

Oh, a very media heavy Fluffy Links this week.

Had a post in draft about the UTV annual report but last night the Sunday Times tweeted they had a story about the same in their Sunday edition. So I put the post live there and then. I was holding it for the Monday when it would reach more people but maybe I need to cop on given I keep talking about ignoring news cycles and the like and to get things out correctly and first yet here I was holding on to it.

And on that. An NPR journalist tweeted out some great information about the firing of New York Times editor Jill Abramson. First out the traps, great. Just tweets, no link to a holding page or page at all. So Vox “storified” the tweets instead of NPR and in a way got the traffic/views for it. NPR wrote a post about things they learned from this. Read it.

An internal report on the future of the New York Times and that was critical of their digital work also leaked out this week. At first a crappy scanned in version appeared, then a full proper digital version. This post highlights 30 points that everyone that works in digital and cares about the future of all types of media should read. To be honest for those already working in digital, this is already obvious. So lots of new unseen ideas for Irish media!

The home page is dead. Well actually, the home page compared to all traffic to your site is dead but it’s no without a heartbeat.

Meanwhile, Eoin Purcell isn’t hugely positive about the physical book market in Ireland.

via Rick. More media thingies. The Beeb are using Whatsapp and Wechat for news distribution to the public around the Indian elections.

Web app to allow you to connect directly and pitch stories to journalists. Just Reach Out.

Guardian highlights great iPhone photo apps that can really make your photos better quality. Catch more in a photo with them.

A very businessy Fluffy Links today.

Mixtapes, not dead, the media is different though. How teens discover music.

How easy it is to get a fake story in to the news. With every news org copying from each other, this is textbook media manipulation. Course social media will get blamed for it.

One sheeter summaries of books. Summarist. Only 3 books summarised so far

The Peripheral by William Gibson is on the way.

Wrote this back in 2010. The C words that get engagement.

Big fan of MediaRedef after Jim Carroll recommended it. Here Media/Forward suggests ways it can make money. Hint hint to other online and offline publications. Can an email newsletter make money? Yes it can.

The future from those that are building and investing in areas that will define it. Education really needs to be disrupted. Just in tim training and just in time certification please for business skills, old skool university education to ground us for life. All these college courses dictated by bureaucratic industries doesn’t help at all. Now we have a generation of those that can program in Java and have no idea how a programming language can actually work.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s biz partner points out three things that have made them successful over a whole generation of business.

1. Hire good people and trust them.
2. Quickly admit mistakes and scramble out of them.
3. Remove your ignorance by always learning.

8Radio back on air for a few weekends this Summer.

The 12 basic principles of animation from 1930s Walt Disney Studios. Yeah, 1930.

“Many of the ecological  principles found in adaptive cycles  could also be applied to  competitive market environments.” How markets really do follow the same path as natural ecosystems. The Slidedeck really is awful looking but the content is excellent so persevere.

How to make a really geeky Doctor Who style WiFi network name.

Really nice sentiment. Stop making more productivity tools and focus more on developing methods and systems for productivity. Then maybe write a blog post, a manual, a book?

a hammer, a lever, a text editor—assume little and ask less. The tool doesn’t force the hand. But digital tools for information work are spookier. The tools can force the mind, since they have an ideological perspective baked into them. To best use the tool, you must think like the people who made it. This situation, at its best, is called learning. But more often than not, with my tools, it feels like the tail wagging the dog.

Saying “I don’t” is much more empowering than saying “I can’t”. I don’t eat chocolate, I can’t have chocolate. One implies decisiveness, the other implies weakness. I don’t check work email after 9pm, I can’t check work email after 9pm. For me, my voicemail says “I don’t check my voicemail”.

Instagram blog post on The Long Room in Trinity.

The Twisted Celluloid film festival is on in the Triskel in two weeks time. Two Doctor Who movies! And Rubber is also showing. It’s about a killer tyre that makes people’s heads explode. Kinda.

NPR interview with one of the Godfathers of the iPhone.

Instagram gets all the boys to the yeard, I mean, gets the best engagement around.

But on Instagram, content that brand posted delivered 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook, and 120 times more engagement per follower than Twitter.

Squarespace’s CEO hires people based on trusting the right people. These people:

• Understand your definition of “good enough.”
• Are committed to the same outcome as you.
• Have the right cultural mindset.

The further growth of Snapchat.

Devil in the Details

The Oreo dunk in the dark tweet? Yeah it’s been done. Flash mobs, yeah they’ve been done, “CompanyX Staff is Happy”, oh do fuck off. I like the sentiment of this post. Plan to be reactive to an undefined moment. If you plan for a known moment, everyone else will be doing that too. Being original is quite an original thing to be, in any form of marketing. Move on from a win, let the other weaker crowds copy that idea then and enwrap themselves in mediocrity.

RHCP lyrics, Kedis talking about a City being a friend, a confidant. Some cities are a deep part of the identity of people.

Friend-washing. Like the term. Via Mat, Terence Eden on brands getting chummy with you on social media. Do your fucking job and then stop, less of the “bants”.

The only reason companies engage in friend-washing is to make you feel guilty when you want to leave them for another supplier.

One day Social Media intro course in Charleville on May 7th.

Interesting list of acquisitions by Apple. They mostly fly under the radar as they’re never really big ones.

Want to do this. Kayaking from day into night in West Cork.

This is doing the rounds. Eat some yeast by-product to prevent yourself from getting too hammered. So where can I get alcohol dehydrogenases?

Nice Slideshare. The emerging global web.

Economies where close to 3 billion people have yet to use the web, but thanks to mobile–won’t have to wait much longer to discover it. This presentation will introduce you to fascinating and innovative services that are re-shaping the web to serve the consumers of tomorrow. Driven by mobile, the power of personal relationships, and the breakneck pace of globalisation, these services provide a glimpse into the business models, opportunities and challenges we will face, when growing a truly global web.

Got a .training domain. DigitalMarketing.training – Let’s see how the single page site it’s on does in Google searches in the next while.

Stripe and subtle animations on a shopping cart page. Love it.

“86% of UK smartphone owners accessed social media last year, for roughly 26 minutes a day.” via Facebook Business.

via @elgrom “Ten things we learnt building the Android app Metro10.”

She was so good they bought her company. Maria Giudice, head of Product Design for Facebook, interview. Book.

Full Length Event – Building Paper

If you can get past the silly name the “Unfail unconference” on Saturday might be of interest.

Everyone gets a chance to talk about failures they have experienced in work and business with fellow entrepreneurs, tech developers, and digital marketers.

Fred Wilson talks about how Turntable.fm died. They had the data showing users stayed for about 3 weeks and then got bored. Do you have data like this with your startup?

17 unique places to find content for sharing. From Buffer.

Nice book report/summary of Ricardo Semler’s book “Maverick”.

Uh oh. Via Justin. Ryanair overhauled their website and forgot about links and redirects and more, causing them to plunge in search results.

“The polar opposite of traditional Fleet Street”

Must get to watch “The Writers’ Room” sometime. Sounds good. Via MediaRedef

France makes Nespresso play nice with other capsule makers.

Building Paper. 1 hour talk on how Facebook Paper was made:

The future with Elon Musk behind the wheel

Cool and Co, Cork based stationery company.

A book just on how to cook eggs? Yes, it’s such a core ingredient for so many things. It’s the letter E of food.

Data journalists and journalists in general. Get this e-book: Finding Stories in Spreadsheets

Startups: This is how design works.

Would you like profit with that? A masterclass in restaurant income growth.

Information overload screws with out ability to be aware/observe.

Newsdiffs for Irish news sources. (See what and when stories are changed)

The hard way, the not so hard way or Norway. One country looks after writers.

The Mac Pro. P O W E R.

What kind of careerist are you?

So here is this now, got a good reaction but now?

Go watch Muscle Shoals

Cork City, Once a Month. Nice sentiment from Bradley’s to get more people to visit the city centre. Cheaper multi-story parking will help too. 12 fucking quid for a few hours in town in some car parks. #CorkCityOnceAMonth

The Radio Station Formerly Known as Phantom, TXFM for short, relaunches, James points out some things that could have been done better. (Via JC)

Check out Katie Sweetman’s art on Etsy. I love a good art I do.

This change in Facebook’s reach might be a good thing if you you’re not a boring brand doing updates that aren’t very engaging though the equivalent of fart jokes on Facebook aka Paddy Power photoshops still seem to do very well.

More on that.

But really, do you have a customer strategy?

Restaurants should be able to offer apple wine as well as grape wine with the same licence? Emma Tyrrell suggests that proper cider could be seen as the Irish version of wine. Different ciders to go with different dishes perhaps? Cider makers get screwed though when it comes to excise. Emma would like change to happen.

NYT Now, nice app from New York Times. iOS 7 and above only.

Interesting backstory/history of the founding of GMail. I remember at the time thinking a gig of space would blow everyone out of the water and deeply mistrusting it for scanning all my email.

Another nice events web app. GetInvited.

Olbermann on Letterman