Author Archive

Fluffy Links – Wednesday September 11th 2013

Wednesday, September 11th, 2013

Omit needles swords. In mug format.

Happy 4th birthday this week to the amazing archive that is Irish Election Literature.

The Q Camera. All social, all the time.

Don’t stop in your startup until you learn. Nice advice.

Designly is out and prices unveiled.

Storyful plugin to save hours of not-very-fun searching in social media.

Is the baby born yet? App for that, naturally.

Lobbying and tobacco. Ireland.

Testing in Google. Course there’s a blog for that.

Creative people share what creativity is about.

RuPaul, Henry Rollins. Awesome inflective stuff.

Fluffy Links – Monday September 2nd 2013

Monday, September 2nd, 2013

Lovely tool made by @Bon allowing you to do nice easy embeds of YouTube videos or Tweets on your WordPress blog.

Wu-Tang Christmas jumper. I want but it won’t arrive before Christmas. Ah c’mon.

How Twitter is used in Ireland.

Beautiful Javascript graphing tool.

The march of social media killing letter writing. In 1871.

Anyone bought a Little Printer?

Trump University. Scamtastic.

Petition to name hurricanes after climate deniers. Yes yes yes.

Superb Cork Opera House lineup for Winter. Patrick McCabe original too!

I love this. This fella just went and bought the rights to the Ireland matches so he could see them and now doing distribution deals.

Another nice use of Vine.

Businessy Links

Wednesday, August 28th, 2013

Lots to take away from this piece about teens and social media.

  • While waiting to turn 13 to join Facebook, Instagram and Twitter came along.
  • Parents are on Facebook now, putting off teenagers.
  • Facebook is too complex.
  • Teens want to see trends and jump on them.
  • Too many in-feed marketing messages.

Some great lessons learned and shared by Niamh on her Kickstarter drive for her Bacon cookbook.

James Altucher. Some handy one-liners on running a startup. Sell it for cash is repeated a lot.

Got a new website where you want interactions and user generated content? Seed it yourself to start with. Fake it til you don’t need fakes.

This piece on Marissa Mayer is a love-bomb with criticism lobbed in at the end for “balance”. I did like this bit on why she took a job from Google:

“The turning point for me,” she says, “was realizing that I would learn more at Google, trying to build a company, regardless of whether we failed or succeeded, than I would at any of the other companies I had offers from.”

Facebook really seem on the way to dominate in mobile ads.

Fluffy Links – Thursday August 22nd 2013

Thursday, August 22nd, 2013

Simple english to explain something complex. Like the Saturn V rocket. This can be applied to so many things these days.

West Wing fans. Have a geekgasm at these Twitter interactions.

Want to sponsor the 2013 Web Awards? Better get in early.

Culture Night Cork 2013 details.

Yeah, you can now smell like Play doh. Sure.

So EdgeRank is a thing from Facebook that calculates who sees your updates and for how long for. They’re tweaking what happens now and you ought to read what the consequences will be. This almost *ducks* seems like SEO for Facebook posts. More.

More innovation from newspapers please.

A big boy did it. T-shirt.

Maybe a lesson for those that want celebs to Tweet about them? What happens when Jamie Heaslip tweets about you.

Scraping for journalists. Nice nice.

Hive

Fluffy Links – Monday 19th August 2013

Monday, August 19th, 2013

An 80 recipe Bacon cookbook. Bacon popcorn! Sign me up.

I’m doing an Online PR workshop in Limerick (August 29th) and in Dublin (September 2nd. Few places left.

The massive variations in pricing of A4 paper in Ireland. It’s genuinely interesting and some differences!

Laura Gaynor’s exam/results diary.

All the words from A Christmas Carol. On a t-shirt.

How to promote your app. Some great pointers here.

Mindfulness at work. Some handy tips.

You can compete with Walmart and can treat your staff right too. Howdy Ryanair!

The future is already here. Take a pic of your keys, get replacements 3D printed.

A song from the 50s, covered by Bjork on her Debut album, this is it even better in Unplugged format:

Zuckerschool

Saturday, August 17th, 2013

A summary of Zuckerberg at Startup School 2012.

I really like this quote from 17.34 in the video:

I never really understood the psychology of deciding you want to start a company before you understand what you want to do

Too many want to be in a startup and work on some half-arsed and not-remotely-considered idea instead of letting it distill in their heads, figure out how they are going to make it and then build something around this structure. Some great insights from Zuckerberg and it really seemed they had insane focus even from day one.

Fluffy Links – Tuesday August 6th 2013

Tuesday, August 6th, 2013

Really good post from Treasa on women in tech in Ireland.

Twitter CEO’s language to describe Twitter and elements of Twitter: “Multiplier”, “Conversation is the canvas”, “Live reach”, “Realtime media viewing”, “complimentary” and “social soundtrack”.

This is interesting. Sharknado had the best ratings ever when it was aired again, again. The third viewing had the best ratings. 1.4M when shown first, then 1.9M when on repeat then 2.1M. Hype and chatter and people going along with how insane and silly it is? Rocky Horror for this generation?

“You couldn’t trust any of these three guys to go down to the corner grocery for a pack of cigarettes”. Bruce Sterling on Assange, Stallman, Manning and Snowden and how utterly the world is changed because of what they’ve done.

Really handy graphics production tech that you can use in your newsroom.

Beer intake in the States is going down. Wine and spirits are on the rise.

How to write a screenplay script.

Data behind good Twitter and Facebook posts. What works…

A shirt from some of the same material as spacesuits. Geeky but how useful?

o2 UK will allow you to get some account details if you Tweet them with certain hashtags. Wonder what the data protection issues are around that?

David Ogilvy cheat-sheet.

Fluffy Links – Thursday August 1st 2013

Thursday, August 1st, 2013

Zoo owner says Zoos need to go.

If Ireland built a Jaeger (For Pacific Rim fans)

Video editing and other video skills for Smartphone users. Nice idea especially as these devices get better.

I find this intriguing. Gawker will allow you to sub-edit their articles so you can change the headline and some context of a piece and then share it with your friends. Great for buy in to a piece. And so more traffic.

Google, now that they’re an ISP are not fully for net neutrality. As they get older they get far more conservative.

Tramp Press is born and are looking for submissions.

A tumblr of women replying to Sheryl Sandberg’s “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” question.

BBC finally seeing more mobile than desktop usage on their sites.

Wallace and Gromit come to the National Concert Hall in October.

Great great video from Thinkhouse on tattoo culture in Dublin. Nice to see agencies produce their own media. Warning, may make you want to get a another tattoo.

7 words

Tuesday, July 30th, 2013

An idea totally ripped off from NYU’s Journalism School where they ask guests to summarise themselves in 7 words. I asked a few people for their 7 word bios and got great results.

Liz Nolan, lover of chocolate and music, presenter on Lyric FM:

Failed cynic, fusspot mama, insatiably longing for…?

*

Allan Cavanagh caricature artiste:

Drawing faces since hand could clasp pencil.

*

Kathryn Reilly, Sinn Féin Senator:

Ballyjamesduff born and raised. Senator. Nickname: Biddy.

*

Pat Phelan, CEO of Trustev, Corkman:

I solve problems on a global scale.

*

Dylan Collins, man of many tech investments, foodie:

Blows up companies while listening to rap.

*

Rick O’Shea, yer man on the radio, Twitter addict:

Wifey
Books
Kids
Food
Travelling
Vino
Universitychallengemastermindonlyconnect

*

Fiona Kearney, Director of Glucksman, super-awesome Cork person (again):

Curious about this and other worlds. Lover.

*

Annette Clancy, consultant, creative, OIB: original Irish blogger:

Curious, creative about what lurks under the surface

*

Suzy Byrne, and trouble is never far away:

Nosey Feminist passionate about rights and wrongs.

*

Liam Geraghty, documentary guy, hand in everything including puppets:

Wields a radio mic like a lightsaber.

*

Jim Carroll, the original Irish Times blogger that makes lists that infuriate. *ducks*

I ask questions that no-one else asks

Media in your timeline – The GIF Economy

Monday, July 29th, 2013

Media Producers, you need to up your multimedia game.

It’s amazing to see the GIF have a resurgence in the past few years, with the past 18 months especially interesting.

Some media producers are adapting and adopting it, most have no clue of the value of short multimedia content.

Twitter’s Vine video app, where you create six second videos uses the GI format. I notice that GMail is now supporting GIFs in emails. When I get emails now from General Assembly, their images can be animated:
General Assembly email

This multimedia piece on the Silk Road via train from the New York Times is beautiful, useful and it’s going to be very hard for the likes of the Huffington Post or BuzzFeed to rip that off. Note the use of large images, a subtle background and 15 second video/gifs to share information. Look at the way the photos have a line going to the map that moves as you scroll. Wow.

Timelines:
And why GIFs and short videos now? Tumblr is certainly a reason, this talk from SXSW suggests so. Them, IMGur and Reddit were the driving forces and I guess it became apparent that even a short GIF is dense with information. It’s all in the game yo or all about the uninterrupted timeline yo. Our lives are revolving around timelines. The Twitter timeline/feed, the Facebook timeline.

We spend more time in the timeline and less time elsewhere. This journey through constant hits of information seems to mean we don’t want to be pulled away from it for too long. Continuous partial attention. Not sure how well researched the six second video length from Vine is but it works very well. Short enough to not distract me from the work of scrolling down, long enough to add a lot of rich context that conditions me to know this format is worth looking at again.

Richer data please
When time is precious, we want richer data. As in the education/learning industry, text can work to pass on information but sights, sounds and text allows us to learn faster as we can process more data. Text is good, text with images is better, text, images and sound is better again. Video is better than images alone. Vine shows this and now Instagram video. We all know changing the angle in a photo can change the message entirely because we only have so much context. A very short video is immensely better than a photo of the same thing.

Vines are 6 seconds, Instagrams are 15 seconds. Vines auto-play and loop. Instagram videos are rumoured to auto-play in Facebook timelines soon and oh, how funny, Facebook will be unveiling a new 15 second video ad format that auto-plays in a timeline. Slide 12 and slide 18 from Mary Meeker’s state of the net slidedeck shows the surge in video consumption and production. Vine is doing well too.

Consider how much text is needed to explain this 5 second video?

Tying shoes

So videos are best? Well, maybe not. We don’t have the time for long videos if the game is shorty snappy bursts of information. It’s suggested that your marketing or otherwise video needs to be short to maintain attention. I think Twitter and Facebook has distorted this and pushed this way down. Quick, rich data please. Vine is being used a lot now.

We’ve moved from text and a few photos to videos, away from videos to infographics, to short videos and GIFs. People might be really put off a timeline in Facebook or Twitter that looks like Lings Cars but 1 billion dollar Tumblr shows that certain demographics don’t mind it too much.

Hopefully more media outlets will embrace these new formats from infographics (becoming a bit too abused) to Vines/Instavideos to GIFs. I’m not a sports fan but now and then read sports news, I’ve spent time marveling at great goals displayed as GIFs on Backpage Football as I want the money shot as quickly as possible so I can go back to things that might interest me more. Finally, the best thing about GIFs is I don’t need flash, I don’t (yet) see shitty overlay ads on them, I don’t have issues with plugins crashing or chugging along videos not fully loading.

Backpage Football

Via la GIF.

I found the following two pieces after writing this that are worth checking out. One from Kathleen Sweeney and one from The New Yorker.