Technology is superior when humanity is woven into its DNA. I’m newly fond of saying, “Everyone is working on Artificial Intelligence, what about just, Intelligence?” Jelly sprung from the question, “What would search look like if it were created today?” We knew mobility and good old, human experience would be defining factors.... Enter your quest…

Facebook introduced new APIs for messaging through Facebook Messenger. ... bots are legitimately cool and promise to revolutionize how we interact with services. And it’s a piece of cake to get one up and running.

one magic formula after another to save the business of news. Citizen journalism... "Brand You"... Viral headlines... Aggregation, curation, explainer journalism, explainer video, branded content, text bots, video, branded video, branded virtual reality video…each fueling the hope that here, at last, was the way to make news profitable again... n…

the next big thing in news - constructive journalism...not only analysing problems but also exploring potential solutions. It's about trying to examine what's going right in the world - and why - rather than focusing purely on what's going wrong... People don't want more news, they want better news. Constructive journalism provides an alternative.…

Charities have such a huge range of positive stories to tell and practical solutions to offer on so many of the big issues we face today, but too often they’re taking place under the radar.Constructive Voices will link up journalists and charities and equip both to approach news in a more constructive way, directing journalists to charities which …

The United Nations is to call for the world's media to take a more "constructive" and "solutions-focused" approach to news to combat "apathy and indifference"... the Constructive Voices programme run by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations... an online resource designed to help journalists find case studies that provide practical solut…

Video will not save your media business. Nor will bots, newsletters, a “morning briefing” app, a “lean back” iPad experience, Slack integration, a Snapchat channel, or a great partnership with Twitter. All of these things together might help, but even then, you will not be saved by the magical New Thing that everyone else in the media community is…

Very few ... are capable of regularly creating compelling videos ... as social platforms look to saturate their feeds with video... they’re essentially competing for the same limited set of good videos. So those who create the ​quality​ stuff can demand payment. In recent weeks, those payments have begun flowing. For Facebook... people are simpl…

I haven’t yet met a single bot that actually does ANYTHING better than a great UX... that actually does ANYTHING beyond a narrow scripted interaction. They all seem OK inside a script (in English), but become super-annoying very fast, when moving out of their pre-designed limits. So I decided to deploy a chatbot, without building one, just to see …

When a Vox Media Slack user sends a direct message to simbot specifying a seed article URL and a number of desired results, then the bot would return a ranked list of articles that are most similar in content to the article found in the provided URL. two main applications for the bot ... enable editors ... on social media... to discover related…

You can now chat with all sorts of bots through a number of messaging services... The trouble is that computers still have a hard time understanding human language... but chatbots are still prone to confusion and misunderstanding... The best commercial chatbots will most likely be those that recognize their own limitations... There have been no …

Picture a nightmarish future in which half-witted “conversational user interfaces” drive us insane with mindless conversation and misunderstandings...chatbots may be incredibly annoying. And things may be even more annoying if app designers fail to appreciate the significant challenges that remain with using computers to parse and respond to natur…

bandwagons are bad for your health, as illustrated by the impending death of content marketing and the gathering backlash against Slack (Slacklash? BackSlacksh?) and (already!?) chatbots.

this addiction has been killing my sanity and sapping our productivity as we simply used Slack for too many things... we would add more channels in a desperate attempt to allow people to find the important information they needed while avoiding the noise... All of these interactions would happen in Slack, despite there being many other tools tha…

What are chatbots? Why are they such a big opportunity? How do they work? How can I build one? How can I meet other people interested in chatbots?

thinking of videos as pieces that can stand on their own, not “the way to slightly better monetize an article page"... There’s usually no reason to watch an interview. It’s better in text or as a podcast.... the Vox team works like independent YouTubers.” For any given video, a single person is responsible for the entire production process, from …

gadget “blog,” Circuit Breaker, that will live primarily as a Facebook page, with posts appearing in the Instant Articles format... the best of old-school blogging together with a sophisticated, aggressive modern platform distribution strategy... It’s not (yet) possible to be an Instant Articles publisher if you don’t have a web source from which…

recent “bot-mania” is at the confluence of two separate trends... agent AIs steadily getting better... the US somehow still hasn’t got a dominant messaging app and Silicon Valley is trying to learn from the success of Asian messenger apps... The thesis, then, is that users will engage more frequently, deeply, and efficiently with third-party s…

your market of digital narcissists is only going to become more elusive... Micro-moments happen when a customer demonstrates intent by reaching for his or her phone to act on a need in real time. They unfold through a variety of common "I want" scenarios that help people take steps or make decisions as to what to buy, do, know, etc... The third w…

content ... will continue to become the commodity... simply too much of it... the effort it takes to make sure that content will travel far and wide makes for considerable effort. Many will do this well but more will fail... If brands cannot create culture from scratch—they can co-create it with the right partners ... to do this at scale, they mu…

it only takes few weeks before you receive a full diagnostic report providing you with new levers to accelerate the development of your organization. Your employees invest less than 10 minutes completing a user-friendly questionnaire that they can do from their work or home computer, tablet or smartphone – we will do the rest.

at #EuroComm16... “Beyond Engagement.”... how uncoupling the IC function from a focus on Employee Engagement survey scores could have a liberating effect on the function and the profession, and potentially on employees and their enterprises as well... We weren’t here to praise the Employee Engagement Survey. We were here to bury it... In giving …

The potential – or, sadly more accurately, theoretical – political power of social media is to provide an important public forum in which those of diverse opinions can freely interact, rather than living in political enclaves inhabited only by those who reinforce what everyone already believes. The truth is that those entrenched political division…

redefine the opinion poll, comments sections, and metrics around social conversations, all at once... the site presents various issues across the categories of culture, politics, entertainment, and sports that have been generating online debate and offers visitors two opposing hashtags to vote for on the site or share on Twitter for a 48-hour peri…

“In five years time, I want News U.K. — The Sun and The Times — to be as well known for its video content as for its newspapers” ... 70 percent of The Sun’s articles have some video component... a main driver for the video verticals is to appeal to advertisers and brands who want to sponsor videos... It will continue posting several Live videos a…

Digital media companies are caught in the "crap trap," mass-producing trashy clickbait so they can claim huge audiences and often higher valuations... This era is getting flushed away... A content revolution is picking up speed, promising a profitable future for companies that can lock down loyal audiences, especially those built around higher-qua…

What Twitter has always been good at is allowing people to jump into any relevant conversation they want. Users can share thoughts and funny videos, but also have others engage with it in a public environment. This cocktail party aspect is where Twitter shines. Now it looks like the “cocktail party of the internet” might also be becoming the high …

And after running a record-breaking crowdfunding campaign — which brought in $1.7 million in 30 days — and building a community of 47,000 paying members (at €60 or $65 a year), The Correspondent wanted to address the next big issue: Journalism sees little return on its successes... in addition to the online journalism platform where our journalist…

What happened when I was invited to “do a Rápido” at the IABC’s conference in Rotterdam earlier this week.