Damien Mulley

“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

Courses:
Damn Fine Print studio is doing a 4 week (3hrs per week) Beginners – Introduction to Screen Printing course in Smithfield. Might be fun to do?

8 week course on crime writing (fiction) with Declan Burke. One night per week, starting in May.

I didn’t know Sufjan did this. “a cinematic suite inspired by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Hula-Hoop”. Now I do.

The next thing was mobile. Mobile is now the last thing.

– The future is bright and uncertain. There is money in turning uncertainty into certainty.

Attending.io. Beautiful and very mobile friendly service for taking bookings for free events.

The Colleen/Jac Test. A way of testing a blog to see is it legit and worth working with. Handy points we could use at the Web Awards and Social Media Awards.

Are there at least two opinion pieces in the last ten posts and do they discuss something other than goods and services.

Another giving it away about a company purchase. Zuckerberg visits Oculus pre purchasing them. One would think this would be more common or those wooing would be more careful. Whatsapp sending legal letters/takedowns to third parties and now this,

Do you dare? Get someone to live critique your website.

iPhone app that allows you to read WAY faster than normal and still take it in.

The legendary Ideo have a new campaign/movement? Called Made in the Future. Might help you figure out what’s coming next from the people that are fiddling and trying to make things for what comes next.

“I think negative stuff is interesting the first time; you’ll never reread a negative article. You’ll reread a positive one.” says Malcolm Gladwell. Writers talk about their writing.

Valentino’s Major Domo is Irish. Of course.

It was the clients. They were awful. Why I left advertising. Big fan of the writing of Bud Caddell. His next venture sounds highly interesting.

Irish B&Bs, get your pages translated properly into German. Germans are big into visiting Ireland. Take advantage. I know Holger well, he’s dead on.

How to build your personal network from scratch. From the guy that built Circa. Small town, big town, doesn’t matter. Conferences are a handy way to do this.

The golden rule at all times is that you never try to get to a final conclusion in the very first interaction.
Take that awkwardness off the table and suggest an easy action to get the email out of their inbox

Mat has too many LinkedIn contacts and so do you.

Whoda thunk it Government unit spins out to become a commercial vehicle. Course it would be the “nudge Unit” of the UK Govt.

John Adams

Philip Glass – 06 – Pruit Igoe

The Back Page “festival” is a mighty impressive few days of events around sport.

Seamus Heaney, Billy Connolly, the Beeb. Five Fables. “Five medieval Scots fables, translated by Seamus Heaney, have been brought into the 21st century as enchanting animated tales for BBC Two Northern Ireland.”

Some post that all media orgs ought to look at. 10 growth hacks that helped Metro.Co.Uk go from 10 Million to 27 Million monthly visitors.

This could easily be used for adults too. A kids’ guide to how ads on the Web work.

Nice idea. Newspaper Blackout Poems.

Nice. You can now embed Medium posts and collections on your own website.

For the fella that pretends he doesn’t read my blog but does to steal stuff. When you don’t have the natural charisma, some tips on being an interesting person at a party.

Interviewly. Or they could make Reddit look nice by default.

Why dabbling can be a good thing.

Gerard Baker described many publishers’ moves in the arena as a “Faustian pact.” For those unfamiliar with German folklore, that’s a deal with the devil.

AdAge writing on the web and not realising their readers can use Google if they don’t know what something means. Fuck exposition, fuck treating your readers like morons.

It’s been a very busy week at Fluffy Links HQ and it seems we were looking at far too many business articles so we’re very BIZNEZZ this week.

True Detective fan? 100 year old book that the show “kind of” has found inspiration from. Book is public domain too.

Learning to write, with William S. Burroughs!

30 seconds no more, no less, can change your personal and business life.

Free audiobooks. Lots and lots of them.

EA has internal programmes to find their next leaders. Interesting way of sustaining a business for the long term.

How to make yourself work when you just don’t want to.

“No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.”

As mentioned in the latest Radiolab podcast.

Vladimir Martynov – Schubert-Quintet (Unfinished): Movement II

Tiny Telephone Exchange – Victory

Stevie G has done so much for music in Cork and Ireland. Genuine trailblazer and lest we forget, did a lot for upcoming generations when usually told to fuck off from loitering outside the local Centra.

Giving teenagers and young people a voice is probably the most satisfactory and fulfilling thing you can do in some ways, and it doesn’t seem long ago when myself and my friends were kids and didn’t have that voice.

Snapchat recruitment example. Still not a single college in Ireland using it for recruitment purposes.

Wearable devices already exist. Via Russell Davies.

If the world breaks, you know why it did. This seems like the start of an epic sci-fi novel.

Nostalgia. Sylvain Chauveau does Depeche Mode.

I so want a Garda Cortina.

Ditch college and change the world. This happens to a tiny tiny tiny amount of people. Still. Elizabeth Holmes has tech to run 30 lab tests from a single drop of blood.

They did it. Control your washing machine with your phone/over the web.

Equally usable for cafés, restaurants and other businesses. Ten things theatres can do right now to save themselves.

Krakow – Hilary Hahn & Hauschka

At the recent UCC Journalism conference (where RTÉ told us with great pride how they’re gatekeepers and won’t allow us to see silly celeb stories on the news), a student asked for advice on starting out in journalism. This was the advice I gave.

1. Start.
Don’t wait for anything in particular. Just start writing now.

2. Pick something you think the media isn’t covering.
Something the media isn’t covering that you think they should? As per this post, you write it. Media has finite resources and the work journalists are doing is increasing while their pay is not. There are going to be gaps. Fill that gap.

3. Your writing is going to be shit to start with. So what, you’ve started.
10,000 hours is what makes a lot of people go from average to talented. It doesn’t occur naturally for most. Work work and work. Read and write then read and write some more. And stop with the excuses. The worst thing for your writing is to stop writing. Runners don’t wait for the “right” race to train.

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it? – Philip Pullman

4. Become obsessed about a topic you have a genuine interest in.
Read everything about it. Oh God, you’re one of those people at a party. Did I know the Ecuadorian yellow parrot has …? Remember bands we idolised and how we knew everything about them? Even the stuff that would never appear in a pub quiz? Become that person for a topic. When you write about the topic your passion and knowledge should stand out because of that obsession. Read every angle about the topic. Pro, con, neutral, rumour. You are now the knowledge base for this topic. You should now be able to create timelines and linkages and more for that topic. Observe from outside, how you write and structure content about the topic. Maybe use this as a model for other topics then? Obsessions teach us a lot about how to research and get a feel for things.

5. Pick a fight.
In terms of getting attention, it works well. But be justified. If someone is misinformed then call them out with proof. Rebuttals, corrections and more can work well. Be level headed the whole time. No personal insults. See the next topic too.

6. Know your defamation laws.
Irish defamation law is a motherfucker. Designed to make rich people keep the masses down while making lawyers nice and rich. Know the limitations the law says your writing has to have. Do remember though that you will get bogus threats too that you should stand up to.

7. Look at available information sources.
FOI is great for this. The eTenders website is too. Data journalism is a nice new area of journalism. It’s a new name for what has always been there: Proper research and seeing a story where others don’t. Kildare Street. Even Daft.ie are good places to get information. Learn how to sift through data and tell a story

8. Write for people you know
Write for your mother, father, granparent, friend. Anyone can copy and paste from a press release or rob from the Irish Times and the Indo for their churnalism site. The value is not in who is fastest to repost a press release, it’s in crafting something that has a start, middle and end and that has added value to the life of someone by the time they’ve finished reading your piece. Having someone pictured in your mind as you write focuses you on how to communicate the information to them, how to write it in language they understand.

9. Know how to write killer headlines.
Use Twitter as a platform. Look at stuff in the Irish Times, Independent and give them better, catchier headlines and see what ones you create get the clicks on Twitter and Facebook. This headline guide from Upworthy is great.

10. Pitch and Collaborate
It’s never too early to pitch ideas to features editors. Start with local publications and see will they take your content for free. Again, look at topical issues and look at gaps and pitch for that gap. Yeah you work for free but now you’re published. The more places you are published, the more people will take you seriously.

Done your FOIs? Gotten juicy stuff? Pitch the story to a journalist and see will they write it with you. Get your name in the by-line in a paper then. This actually happens, not a lot but it does.

11. Read stuff on content and how to write
This list from me might also help in terms of new forms of content. Media changes, be there for the changes instead of catching up. Fail fast but fail cheap instead of failing slowly.