(image) So what are the most powerful, important, noteworthy stories of the past ten or so days? Read on to find out….
Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems – Newsweek
Julian Assange veers between wild eyed conspiracy theory and, well, level-headed conspiracy theory in this rather factless but quite compelling read.
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Today’s summary covers the past two weeks of worthy reads, with a strong dose of the Internet’s twin titans Facebook and Google. I’ve also been busy writing on Searchblog, so you’ll find three of my own pieces highlighted below.
Facebook’s new Atlas is a real threat to Google display dominance — Gigaom
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One of the great joys of my career is the chance to speak at gatherings of interesting people. Sometimes it’s an unscripted, wide ranging conversation (like during Advertising Week, for example), but other times it’s a formal presentation, which means many hours of preparation and reportage.
These more formal presentations are opportunities to consolidate new thinking and try it out in front of a demanding audience. Last month I was invited to speak in front of group of senior executives at a major bank, including the CEO and all his direct reports. I was asked to focus my remarks on how new kinds of companies were threatening traditional incumbents – with a focus on the financial services industry, as you might imagine.
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(image) This past week’s links are rife with people asking hard questions of Google and Facebook, and so much the better, I’d warrant. You don’t get to the lead position without raising questions. In fact, that seems to be the theme of the week – asking interesting questions – of our online services, our marketing, and our food (yes, our food). To the links:
How Facebook and Google are taking over your online identity – Quartz
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This week’s Else is brought to you by good design, which trumps good code any day. And by the Alibaba IPO, which kind of pissed me off (see below). Enjoy the links!
The UX App That’s Driving Design Everywhere, From Airbnb to Zappos – WIRED
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I’m easing back into this weekly Else column, or put another way, I missed last week’s Else due to preparations for NewCo SF, which I’m proud to say was a huge success. This week is Detroit, then New York, London, Boulder, LA, Palo Alto, but I get ahead of myself. For today, I’ll just focus on the best stories of the past 14 or so days. Much has happened in that time period, including Microsoft buying Minecraft, Alibaba filing for an IPO in the US, and yet another Apple announcement. I like the watch best, but in the shorter term, I think Apple Pay is the first mover. Bigger iPhones? Been there.
Why Apple Pay could succeed where others have had underwhelming results (ars) It all comes down to timing and getting the back end players to play nice. Apple most likely will have a hit on its hands – once they update the OS with the service.
A Cambrian Explosion In AI Is Coming (TC) THe author, former CEO of what is now Apple’s Siri service, predicts a new marketplace beyond search and the App store. Sounds like a place I’m interested in, given this: Early Lessons From My Mobile Deep Dive: The Quickening Is Nigh.
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Today scores of big companies are taking symbolic action to defend the essential principles of an open Internet, and I support them. That’s why, on your first visit here today, you’ll see the “spinning ball of death” up on the right. For more information about the Internet Slowdown, head here.
Recently I began a walkabout of sorts, with a goal of ameliorating my rather thin understanding of the mobile marketplace. If you read me closely, you know I’ve been more than frustrated with what I call the “chicletized world” of disconnected mobile apps. It’s rise was so counter to everything I loved about the Internet, I’m afraid as a result I underestimated its impact on that very world.
My corrective starting point – the metaphorical bit of yarn upon which I felt compelled to tug – was the impact of “deep linking” on the overall ecosystem. The phrase has something of a “dark pool” feel to it, but it’s actually a rather mundane concept: Developers tag their mobile apps and – if relevant – their complementary websites – with a linking structure that allows others to link directly into various points of entry into their applications. This is why, for example, you can jump from a Google search for “Tycho” on your phone to the “Tycho” page inside your Spotify app.
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This weekend I reviewed my notes from a few weeks of late summer meetings, and found this gem from a conversation with Mike Driscoll, the CEO and co-founder of data analytics firm MetaMarkets. MetaMarkets helps adtech firms make sense of the reams of data they collect each day (hour, minute, second…). Most of this data is meaningless without some kind of pattern recognition and interpretation, Driscoll told me. He then used a great metaphor, one that resonated given my post earlier last week that Writing is Code, Reading Is Visualization.
When we read, Driscoll noted, we both ingest the words and simultaneously “see” a story. Stories, of course, are how we understand the world. Reading pre-supposes that a story is being told – we don’t read texts full of random words and letters, literate texts are formed so as to impart knowledge. Reading presupposes literacy. We read the text and, assuming the writer is reasonably skilled, we “see” what the author intended – a narrative story is delivered and received.
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Else is back after an extended summer hiatus – thanks for taking the time off with me. I wasn’t sure if I was going to return to this newsletter, but its a good ritual for me to condense and annotate my daily and weekly reading habits, and enough of you have subscribed that I figured you might be missing the updates. I kind of was.
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