We all have the same amount of time but how we choose to use it makes all the difference.
Our division president, who had a tightly-wound Northeastern disposition, had hired some folks to do landscaping for his yard. They would show up, do good work, and then disappear for several days. This drove my boss crazy. Finally he could stand it no longer and confronted the worker. “Where do you go on all these days when you disappear?” He asked.
“Fishing.” The worker replied proudly.
“Fishing?” my boss queried. “Well, why are you only working three days a week?” he asked.
“Because I can’t get by on two,” the worker explained.
Now both of these gentlemen have the exact same amount of time in every day. But they make radically different decisions about how to spend it....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
A timely and heartfelt post from Mark Schaefer about social media, time management and the choices we make on how to spend our most important finite resource - time.
The tick tock until the big content marketing software shakeup is under way.
... Content marketing success is about the wizard, not the wand.
You can buy the best software in the world, but if you don’t have smart, dedicated marketers to operate it, the outcome will be middling, at best. All modern marketing software (of any stripe) requires labor to make the magic happen. That makes the true cost of software ownership not just licensing and training costs, but salaries and benefits, too. It’s another reason why I’m not sure SMB will embrace content marketing with the same fervor as they have social media. Many of those companies have only recently finished swallowing the new software and personnel expenses needed to “get good” at social, and now they are expected to do it again with content marketing?...
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Jay Baer reflects on the state of the content marketing industry and where customers of its software may be. A thoughtful post worth reading by software makers, content marketers, PR, advertising and marketing pros. 9/10
...But it wasn’t until 1999 that Tim Berners-Lee, who had invented the World Wide Web and launched the first webpage on August 6, 1991, coined the concept of the Semantic Web — a seminal stride toward cultivating wisdom in the age of information, bringing full-circle Otlet’s vision for an intelligent global network of organizing human knowledge. Much like Johannes Gutenberg, who combined a number of existing technologies to invent his revolutionary press, Berners-Lee was simply bringing together disjointed technologies — electronic documents, hypertext, markup, the internet — to create a new paradigm that changed our world at least as much as Gutenberg’s invention. But how, exactly, did we get there?
Maria Popova profiles 100 ideas that changed the Internet from the mouse to the GIF, by way of the long tail and technology’s forgotten female pioneers..
Kids today with their selfies and their Snapchats and their love of literature.
Millennials, like each generation that was young before them, tend to attract all kinds of ire from their elders for being superficial, self-obsessed, anti-intellectuals. But a study out today from the Pew Research Center offers some vindication for the younger set. Millennials are reading more books than the over-30 crowd, Pew found in a survey of more than 6,000 Americans.
Some 88% of Americans younger than 30 said they read a book in the past year compared with 79% of those older than 30. At the same time, American readers’ relationship with public libraries is changing—with younger readers less likely to see public libraries as essential in their communities....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Yes, if you can trust the research and the interpretation, Millennials are reading more than the previous generation. Now, if we only knew what they were reading. ;-)
Last Christmas, infamous file leaker Edward Snowden delivered a two minute broadcast across the UK with a harrowing message regarding the digital invasion of privacy. He warns:
"A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves – an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought."
As a latter Millennial I’ve grown up with all of this technology around, and personally participated in the rise of social media; we we’re the first to adapt to this new format of expression. Long before the Googles and Facebooks of Silicon Valley found a way to proficiently profit off of their free services, we enjoyed unfettered interconnectivity. Sure, internet speeds were painfully slow and websites were clunky, but we didn’t care; we were riding the wave of the future.
Fast forward a decade – our temporal trend is now ubiquitous. It’s almost hard to recall a time when I didn’t have a smart phone, or Facebook, or Gmail. And nowadays these services are just so prim, so neat, so integrated with every facet of my life – not a day goes by where I’m not immersed in the cyber realm. The greater part of my life is experienced online....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Here's a very thoughtful essay on privacy, trust and the future. Highly recommended 9/10
This is more than just intellectual snobbery. Knowledge has a point when we start to find and make connections, to weave stories out of it, stories through which we make sense of the world and our place within it. It is the difference between memorising the bus timetable for a city you will never visit, and using that timetable to explore a city in which you have just arrived. When we follow the connections – when we allow the experience of knowing to take us somewhere, accepting the risk that we will be changed along the way – knowledge can give rise to meaning. And if there is an antidote to boredom, it is not information but meaning.
If boredom has become a sickness in modern societies, this is because the knack of finding meaning is harder to come by.
There is a connection, though, between the two. Information is perhaps the rawest material in the process out of which we arrive at meaning: an undifferentiated stream of sense and nonsense in which we go fishing for facts. But the journey from information to meaning involves more than simply filtering the signal from the noise. It is an alchemical transformation, always surprising. It takes skill, time and effort, practice and patience....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
The internet promised to feed our minds with information. What have we learned? That our minds need more than that. Good reading with your coffee on a Saturday morning. 9/10
This is so true. The analogy of having to memorise a bus timetable for a destination that you will never visit sums up the uselessness of information that we cannot use! Today, there is a surfeit of infomation, most of which is useless, and then we are under the constant pressure to process all this information. Filtering of the uselful from the useless often requires much effort. and to process large amounts of information requires skill. Unfortunately, the human brain has its limitations unlike the computer processor-you add up cores to it and it can multi-task! Life in the information age is perhaps the most significant stage in the history of mankind, and this is already shaping our future like no other age has done, not even the age of the Industrial Revolution!
From retro juice cartons to floral fashion campaigns, these botanical marketing examples look to nature for inspiration. Drawing from the fashion world's recent obsession with botanical prints, this list of marketing strategies aims to influence consumers with the help of vivid visuals and transparent packaging designs.
Whether turning to vibrant floral imagery or focusing on a product's natural ingredients, reputable companies are choosing to affect their consumers with this bold and eye-catching branding concept.
These botanical marketing examples include food and beverage packaging designs that are adorned with plant graphics along with fierce fashion campaigns that are lensed against floral backdrop vignettes....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
More creative with your coffee, inspiration and photography the Trend Hunter.
The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, as the electrical engine was the vector of technological transformation of the Industrial Age.
This global network of computer networks, largely based nowadays on platforms of wireless communication, provides ubiquitous capacity of multimodal, interactive communication in chosen time, transcending space. The Internet is not really a new technology: its ancestor, the Arpanet, was first deployed in 1969 (Abbate 1999). But it was in the 1990s when it was privatized and released from the control of the U.S. Department of Commerce that it diffused around the world at extraordinary speed: in 1996 the first survey of Internet users counted about 40 million; in 2013 they are over 2.5 billion, with China accounting for the largest number of Internet users.
Furthermore, for some time the spread of the Internet was limited by the difficulty to lay out land-based telecommunications infrastructure in the emerging countries. This has changed with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, in 1991, there were about 16 million subscribers of wireless devices in the world, in 2013 they are close to 7 billion (in a planet of 7.7 billion human beings). Counting on the family and village uses of mobile phones, and taking into consideration the limited use of these devices among children under five years of age, we can say that humankind is now almost entirely connected, albeit with great levels of inequality in the bandwidth as well as in the efficiency and price of the service.
At the heart of these communication networks the Internet ensures the production, distribution, and use of digitized information in all formats. According to the study published by Martin Hilbert in Science (Hilbert and López 2011), 95 percent of all information existing in the planet is digitized and most of it is accessible on the Internet and other computer networks....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
The Internet is the crucial technology of the information age. This global network of computer networks creates a multimodal and interactive communication. What an impact! Thoughtful reading with your coffee .
We are about to launch our second product (HookFeed), but it’s not our second launch. We’ve been doing countless mini-launches (alpha versions) for months now with both HookFeed and Minimalytics — and we keep making the same damn mistake:
Giving users too many choices…Below, I’ve illustrated our mental excursion from key iteration to key iteration across both products in search of simplicity.
TLDR: We’ve been reminded (brutally) that as product people we need to make the hard choices up front if we want any of our products to succeed. The vocal minority isn’t usually right and ultimate flexibility isn’t really what people want or need....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
If you're an entrepreneur or start up, and you can only read one article this week, this is the one! Joelle Steineger tells how she and her partners overcomplicated the hell out of both of their products. The results were disastrous and just as difficult to avoid the second time around. Great business storytelling and lessons. Highly recommended. 10 / 10
The fuzziness of quantum physics causes a lot of problems, from maliciously changing time-of-flight calculations between satellites to mucking up Newton’s beautiful, all-seeing physical models of the universe. Yet, when it comes to topics as airy as the New Physics, incorporating genuinely insane ideas like negative mass and, yes, time travel, that very fuzziness can become a boon to researchers. Within the open and unknowable possibility space provided by the behavior of quantum particles, we can shovel in all manner of poorly understood concepts and phenomena, and that might not actually be such an irresponsible thing to do. By taking quantum mechanics into account, some physicists think they may have solved one of the oldest puzzles in the history of abstract physical thinking: the grandfather paradox.
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Who knew? A new experiment in causation could help end one of the oldest blemishes on the face of modern physics: the paradox of time travel.
1) No one knows you exist.You make a great product. But the world isn’t holding its breath waiting for you....
But when you look at this way, things look different: Goliaths have more meetings, more committees, and more red tape. More ideas being killed by research, more to lose by taking risks, and more outdated business models that they are stuck in. More rules, more regulations, and more good people leaving. So who cares if they never run out of photocopier paper?
Use your strengths: your speed, your instinct, your passion. Back your ideas with hard work. And yes, love can and does scale. Good luck.There has never been a better time to be a maker.
Thank you, Internet. You have levelled the playing field.
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Hiut Denim shares a business philosophy that is fundamental, enduring and important! An absolute must-read for business, small business, marketing, PR and, well, anyone who is thoughtful about how they do business. 10/10
Those topics are among the nine TED talks corporate communicators should watch. The others discuss even more pertinent issues, like how to get engineers to cut back on jargon, and how your body language not only affects how others see you, but how you see yourself.Without further ado, here are the talks. Let us know if you have any to add to the list....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
If you want to know the secret behind employee engagement, how Disney writes unforgettable stories and whether texting is ruining English, watch these TED talks.
The gradual radicalization of Douglas McAuthur McCain, we're told, is reflected in his social-media timelines. This week, NBC News reported that McCain, a 33-year-old from Minneapolis and San Diego, had become the first American to die in Syria while fighting for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), in clashes with other rebel fighters.
(On Thursday, Fox News reported that a second American from Minneapolis may have been killed while fighting for ISIS in the same battle.)
"Until early last year, a Twitter account linked to McCain included mostly mundane messages to friends about basketball—how the Lakers suck, comments about the Chicago Bulls—with only a few messages about Allah or Islam," NBC noted. "Then the account went silent for more than a year."
McCain, who converted to Islam in 2004 and also appears to have used networks like Facebook and MySpace, fired up his feed again in mid-May—around the time that ISIS was publicizing its control over the Syrian city of Raqqa with public executions, and just weeks before the group launched its military offensive in northern Iraq....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
The Atlantic looks at how the extremist group turns social networks into propaganda echo chambers.
Some confusion is obvious on the set of NBC's "Today" show, regarding the Internet and the @-sign. This is reportedly footage from between segments that was not originally aired, and apparently dates to January 1994, around the time of the Northridge earthquake (that occurred literally five minutes from where I'm sitting, and which I remember very well indeed).
Both the video and audio of this clip were in terrible shape when I received it recently -- I've cleaned up both as much as possible, though the quality (especially hue distortion) still definitely isn't anything to write home about.
Don't laugh too hard at Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric. It's easy to forget how relatively recent a phenomenon the Internet is for most persons who use it today!
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Very funny clip and reminder how far the internet now reaches into our daily lives and business.
For my part in the 2014 Future of Storytelling Summit, I had the pleasure of collaborating with animator Drew Christie — the talent behind that wonderful short film about Mark Twain and the myth of originality — on an animated essay that I wrote and narrated, exploring a subject close to my heart and mind: the question of how we can cultivate true wisdom in the age of information and why great storytellers matter more than ever in helping us make sense of an increasingly complex world. It comes as an organic extension of the seven most important life-learnings from the first seven years of Brain Pickings. Full essay text below — please enjoy.
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Maria Popova offers her thoughts on navigating the open sea of knowledge after seven years of Brain Pickings. She accompanies her essay with. an interesting animated video worth viewing. 9/10
While some people have successfully 3D printed buildings, others have taken the same approach to the car manufacturing business, as a company has just come out with a car called the Strati that's t...
This is much inline with my readings on the zero marginal cost society. Being able to print your own car may not be practical of cost effective today but once it is and car 3D models are available free or low charge on the web, where will the car industry go? I understand why Tesla is building huge battery manufacturing plant as they may have seen that providing key components may be the future of the car industry?
The next time you see someone greeting a little girl, pay attention to what they say to her. “You’re so pretty!” “I love your dress!” “Look how beautiful you are!”
While these things are kind and well-intended, “pretty” does nothing but fade and lay the foundation to keep desiring that which we first received reward and praise for.
(So here are 30 other things I hope I’ll tell my daughter one day, things I hope she’ll want to be praised and rewarded for more than what she looks like.)....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
What a wonderful reminder of the things that matter and the qualities we should encourage with our children.
Signs of Disruption. So what is happening to foreshadow this new age of design and making? The signposts are strong and telling.
The way you can produce things—intellectually and physically—is changing. Crowdsourcing and vast global, open collaboration is reaching new heights. Attitudes toward IP are shifting, too. With Elon Musk as a prime example, inventors and designers are opening access to patents and IP sharing, helping to drive even further innovation where everyone shares their insights and competes on ideas.
How is all of this being fueled? Infinite computing and increasing amounts of computational access from the cloud, social, and mobile technologies provides growing access and empowerment. The winners will be chosen based on who accomplishes the best idea, not who owns it...
Jeff Domansky's insight:
In the technology industry, new advancements are often thought to bring along a “revolution” where things will “never be the same.”
With music festival season and summer (finally) upon us, many clothing companies are showcasing their warm weather lines with bohemian fashion shoots. If you are looking for inspiration for how to showcase your free-spirit style this season or for outdoor festival outfit ideas, these hippie-inspired looks are a great starting point.
Whether you have an adventurous soul and a wild heart with fashion sense to match or you just want to fit in at Bonaroo next week, these romantic editorials showcase the ongoing tribal trend in fashion. Incorporating florals, fringe and flowing fabrics is characteristic of boho style. Between boyfriend jeans and tomboy-esque themed looks and romantic lace dresses, boheman fashion shoots are ubiquitous these days. A nomadic sense, earthy hues and lots of layers are also important....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Here's a little creative with your coffee from the Trend Hunter.
The Cambridge classicist Mary Beard weighs in on the ancient art of joking....
Dear Laughter Lovers,
Have you ever wondered why I always start my newsletter with that salutation? Well, wonder no more. It’s because “laughter lover” is the English translation of philogelos, the Greek word that serves as the title of the world’s oldest joke book.
In last week’s magazine, there was a fascinating Profile by Rebecca Mead of the noted Cambridge classicist Mary Beard. What especially interested me was the mention of Beard’s most recent book, “Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up,” which is published by University of California Press. (She is incredibly prolific, so by the time you read this she may have an even more recent book.)
Coincidentally, I had just finished reading this title, which I found to be as enjoyable as it was erudite. It includes a chapter on the Philogelos. I contacted Professor Beard to see whether she would write a bit about it. Being the agreeable sort that she is, she said yes. Take it away, Mary.
A few years ago, the English standup comic Jim Bowen presented a show with jokes that were based entirely on the one surviving ancient joke book, the Philogelos. It’s a collection of some two hundred and sixty short gags, written in Greek; it probably dates, in the form we have it, to the fifth century A.D., but some of the jokes go back centuries earlier.
I particularly like the one about the thuggish, philistine Roman who destroyed Corinth in 146 B.C. When he was overseeing the transport of the precious antiques that he had looted from the city, he said to the ships’ captains: “Don’t break anything, or you’ll have to replace it.”
Bowen’s show was apparently successful, or, at least, it was widely reported as such in the U.K. press, which at first sight was a bit worrying for those of us who think of laughter as much more a cultural than a natural human response. By and large, the rules of laughter (at what, when, when not, et cetera) are something we learn—we’re not born with them. So how come people still laugh at the jokes in the Philogelos almost two thousand years later, in a completely different culture, one whose rules of laughter we ought not necessarily to intuit? I have various explanations for that, none of which involve abandoning my basic position on the cultural aspect of laughter and joking....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Punchlines. that are more than 2000 years old? Yes, they're still crazy after all these years according to Bob Mankoff, columnist at the New Yorker, and classicist and Cambridge professor Mary Beard. They share a hilarious look at humor from the Greeks and Romans and why it's so enduring. Need a little humor and creativity with your coffee? Highly recommended. 10/10
...So, why the distaste for a change that would benefit many of them? It’s simple: Twitter’s uncurated feed certainly has some downsides, and I can see some algorithmic improvements that would make it easier for early users to adopt the service, but they’d potentially be chopping off the very—sometimes magical—ability of mature Twitter to surface from the network. And the key to this power isn't the reverse chronology but rather the fact that the network allows humans to exercise free judgment on the worth of content, without strong algorithmic biases. That cumulative, networked freedom is what extends the range of what Twitter can value and surface, and provides some of the best experiences of Twitter....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
It’s the Human Judgment of the Flock, Not the Lone Bird, That Powers It writes Zeynep Tufekci. This is important insight for all Twitter fans and serious users. Recommended reading 10/10
Gisele Bündchen kicks butt in a new ad breaking today for Under Armour's "I Will What I Want" campaign by Droga5.
The supermodel and wife of NFL quarterback Tom Brady (a fellow UA athletic endorser) also shows off her kung fu and yoga abilities at iwillwhatiwant.com/gisele, which will stream real-time comments from social media.
Leanne Fremar, executive creative director for UA's women's brand, gave Adweek a sneak preview of the 60-second film, which rolls out Thursday on YouTube. Look for the raw, real video to go viral—much like the previous one with Misty Copeland, which has been watched nearly 6 million times.
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Very creative ad and innovative integration with Twitter.
Think Nike: just do it. Think Apple: Hello. Think EA Games: Challenge Everything.
If your campaign speak keeps going and going and going like the Energizer Bunny, you may wear people out before they catch up with your this. Make it simple. Get on your Harley-Davidson until you can define your world in a whole new way.
Thinking big about speaking simply is power.
Complexity is difficult. Complexity will drown in the noise.If you can’t speak simply about whatever this is, take a step back, think bigger about simplicity. Do something different with this. Look at the heart and soul of this. Simple will rise above the noise.
Think Big. Speak Simply.
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Lisa Pool reminds marketers of the most important element in marketing and communication. Simplicity.
On a Tuesday last summer, Erin Mandeville was at a CVS buying medicine for her five-month-old baby, Gabriel. Close to 4PM, she noticed her infant’s eyes roll back in quick succession. It was the first of Gabriel’s many episodes of infantile spasms that would follow.
Spasms or epileptic seizures can be catastrophic for young children. Doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital tried every route and medicine to help Gabriel as his seizures progressed aggressively....
A hemispherectomy is "one of the most challenging operations in pediatric epilepsy surgery," says Dr. Joseph Madsen, director of the epilepsy program at Boston Children’s. A dress rehearsal is beneficial even for the most highly experienced surgeons. "This is a printed version that the surgeon can hold, cut, manipulate, and look for things," he says, holding Gabriel’s printed brain in his hand. For surgeons-in-training, the simulation is a blessing. "No one wants to be the first person to get a hemispherectomy from a surgeon, ever," he adds.
The 3D print of Gabriel’s brain was developed by the Simulator Program at the hospital. The model is printed in soft plastic with a precision of 16 microns per layer; blood vessels are set in contrast color for easier navigation. Gabriel’s parents were privy to the process and anticipated complications. Gabriel’s subsequent surgery earlier this year took close to 10 hours, and went according to plan....
Read this story and research other uses for 3D printers to evaluate whether they are really worth bothering with. Bring Ideas to your next computing class.
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A timely and heartfelt post from Mark Schaefer about social media, time management and the choices we make on how to spend our most important finite resource - time.