"So for the uninitiated who have not yet grasped what Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are, you ought to catch up. This is not something that should be ignored and there is a vast array of resources that explain the concept. In this post I’ll try to make sense of the Block Chain Protocol and the emerging ecosystem that is growing on it." - Bloc…

"The most striking research results in AI came from the field of deep learning, which involves using crude simulated neurons to process data... often focuses on images... our instincts about privacy must change now that machines can decipher images." - Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence from 2014 | MIT Technology Review

"But in our Information Architecture courses, we invariably get asked about a few persistent questions that many designers from a variety of backgrounds seem to struggle with. Like most design problems, these questions rarely have an absolute, black-and-white answer. But there are specific considerations that can help you answer these questions a…

"Our hope with adaptive content is to tailor content to a customer’s experience, behavior, and desires... a culmination of ... experience maps, storyboarding, empathy maps — and what we’ve been saying for so long about creating an experience... ... we all believe that our experiences should be more interactive. Why? Smartphones." - 16 Stats That…

Here's a conundrum for you. And a probably quite dangerous post for me.

"Machine learning can help by finding those hidden patterns you probably didn’t even know existed, so you can tune your marketing campaigns accordingly.... DataPop relies on semantic search and natural-language processing to infer connections between what consumers enter into the search window and what they really want, and then on machine learn…

"Kimono Labs is a data-scraping tool that offers a simple way to create an API for any website in just minutes." - 9 Startups That Made Life Better In 2014 - ReadWrite

Excellent intro to "Contextual intelligence: the ability to understand the limits of our knowledge and to adapt that knowledge to an environment different from the one in which it was developed. ... The most difficult work is often the “soft” work of adjusting mental models, learning to differentiate between universal principles and their specifi…

Fairly typical piece on integrating social media into organisations to improve customer service, employee productivity and sales. These points have been made before, but this article brings them together well and provides plenty of links to the underlying research, which makes it useful if you need to supporting arguments for change management. -…

"In this gallery are our favorite graphics of the year. " The Best Science Visualizations of the Year | WIRED

"We are currently witnessing a re-architecture of the web, away from pages and destinations, towards completely personalised experiences built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content ... the result of the rise of mobile technologies... from many pages of content linked together, towards individual pieces of content aggregated togeth…

"Google Analytics lets you create custom segments, dashboards and reports to find the information that’s most relevant ..." - How to Use Google Analytics Custom Segments, Reports and Dashboards | Social Media Examiner

"Q. Is it realistic to think that a European public sphere could ever be created? TGA: My view is that we should try, but we shouldn’t ever kid ourselves that this is going to be like a national public sphere. Apart from anything else, we speak different languages, which is a huge barrier. The key for me, in continuing to make the argument for …

"Blockstream is working on technology ... to secure other kinds of assets, such as contracts or ownership of stock.... building on top of it using what are known as “sidechains.”... Blockstream has developed a way to safely move bitcoins back and forth between the blockchain and sidechains in order to add new functionality to Bitcoin transactions…

“focus groups are supposed to ... source ideas that need to be researched.... No one buys shoes, cooks dinner, votes, banks, or even buys movie tickets sitting at a table under florescent lights while engaged in a moderated group discussion." or seek to understand the EU, for that matter. - Focus Groups Are Worthless — Medium

"Here is the science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions every day:"

"research into network science has begun to shed light on how synchronization happens and how we can make our enterprises function more effectively.... Great overview. Of particular interest to I-Labs: - "research helps explain why it is so hard for enterprises to adapt to new challenges... leaders need to treat new initiatives not as mere organi…

Personally I've been creeped out by all this since reading the Filter Bubble, but apparently I'll be feeling less lonely about it next year. Great image here: "Think of a world in which your phone constantly checked in with the central phone company to decide which of your relatives it should allow you to call, and to jumble their sentences aroun…

"... Both outlets are trying... to crack the task of making a viable online outlet for in-depth, narrative journalism of several thousand words, paid for by readers. They are the most recent, but far from the only, entrants into an overcrowded genre." Good overview of the intense innovation and first failures in the oversaturated longform marketp…

"With 95% confidence we conclude that an increase in ranking “the intranet search helps me find the information I need” results in a higher valuation of the respondents intranet as a whole. The impact for the same question related to menus was statistically insignificant." Not quite the deathknell for information architects and resellers of stic…

"handing over a key component of your relationship with readers to Twitter and Facebook is a mistake... suggests to readers that their comments and interaction aren’t worth the trouble" [If] "Comments are broken ... that’s not the fault of readers — it’s the fault of publishers for not seeing their relationship with their readers as being of valu…

GE's FastWorks is "a framework for entrepreneurs, building on “The Lean Startup” ... an approach to developing new products that came out of “Agile” software development... It’s now being tried in manufacturing since GE and others believe that rapid learning cycles with customers will reduce the risk that you build something you can’t sell." Star…

"If your schedule is filled with Time Debts, then it doesn't matter how hard you work. Your choices will constantly put you in a productivity hole. ... Email is a time debt that most people participate in each day. If you send an email now, you are committing to reading the reply or responding with an additional message later. Every email you sen…

"information consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently ... instead of reaping the benefits of the digital revolution we are intellectually deprived by our inability to filter out sensory junk... we are collectively wiser... but individu…

"Frugal innovation is more than a strategy. It denotes a new frame of mind: one that sees resource constraints not as a liability but as an opportunity — and one that favors agility over efficiency. Frugal organizations ... create good-quality solutions that deliver the greatest value to customers at the lowest cost... we have gleaned five valuab…

"While many journalists have lost faith in the future of their trade, venture capitalists are taking the opposite view.... providing big chunks of funding to online news providers, such as BuzzFeed, Vice, and Vox. Some of what these publishers put out is mere click bait, but they also produce serious journalism... subscription-based journalism ..…

"a smart contract is a contract that enforces itself. ... a computer program that can be run on hardware which automatically executes those conditions." Good intro to what can - and can't - happen once you have bitcoins. - DAOs Are Not Scary, Part 1: Self-Enforcing Contracts And Factum Law – Bitcoin Magazine

"It can actually have a tremendous impact on visitors perception of your website, whether they can easily find what they are looking for, and ultimately whether they purchase what you are selling." Pretty sell-focused, but there's no better force to refine an information architecture than assigning a value to each click ... and each bounce! - Ho…

"Here are 14 of some of the most recent changes to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+ and Instagram that social media marketers can benefit from."

An interview with Jim Bankoff, who just raised another raised $46.5 million in funding for Vox Media ("the fastest growing Web brand of 2014"), caught my eye.