Wouldn’t it be great if your government had a conversation with you instead of just talking at you? - The White House / Me

"Here's what should you should read and listen to in order to make sense of it all." - What To Read (And Listen To) On The 'Officially Unstoppable' Iran Nuclear Deal - Digg

Masterclass time. From the Google Blog:  we’ve taken the Google logo and branding, which were originally built for a single desktop browser page, and updated them for a world of seamless computing across an endless number of devices and different kinds of inputs (such as tap, type and talk).

Too many of us are overscheduled, overconnected and overstimulated by all the noise, interruptions and complexity of current society... Epic performers, A-Players and World-Builders ... run their days under completely different mindsets and rituals than those who get trapped in the groove of “being busy being busy.... Here are 4 of the game…

"the nerds ... were at the bottom. At the top were "jocks," ... My kids have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. The coolest kids they know are nerds. Their heroes are nerds. Their favorite billionaires are nerds... But while nerds have taken over pop culture and technology, there's one area they haven't mastered: politics." - Tech nerds a…

My first subscribers, surveyed last week, were equally split between the diverse formats and styles of my first four editions, so here’s a 5th.

A study by Weber Shandwick shows that professional women in Europe are just as ambitious as their male colleagues (22% versus 25%) which is not the case among Americans. Professional ambition is not a given for women... We are always judged as “too much” or “not enough” but never “adequate”." - “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhe…

I'm launching a enewsletter to ensure I absorb something from the social media firehose.

Not only are lobbyists often blamed for the rot in our political process, so too are the corporations who hire those lobbyists. And the media is often eager to simplistically separate the good (those who don’t hire lobbyists) from the bad (those who do)... Environmental Working Group and the Center for Food Safety ... raised more than $42 milli…

The digital counterrevolution is underway in Europe... Jean-Claude Juncker has stressed the need for European competitors to the Silicon Valley giants. Juncker’s election was widely credited to the efforts of an influential press baron: Mathias Döpfner... Corey Pein interviewed Döpfner for CJR in October... A month later, Axel lost a round whe…

If the rules are approved, Google may eventually have to pay newspaper and magazine groups whenever links to their content are shown ... Similar copyright rules ... have so far backfired ... In Germany, Google removed many local organizations from its news service, which led to a drastic fall in online traffic to some newspapers’ sites. Local publ…

"Four years ago, I lost everything — my life savings, all of my company’s assets, even my sense of self-worth. The business I had poured my heart and soul into had failed, and as I curled myself into the fetal position on my living room floor, I thought I wanted to stay there for good. But something kept me going — and that something led me to…

"More than anything else, though, I think this event was about powerful stories — sharing stories, relating to stories, showing support after stories, and encouraging things to happen as a result of stories..." Rich picking here - e.g.,  “For every man that thought I was a secretary, there was a woman that called me a b****.” - The Stories o…

Oh my, how patronising. Nothing here about the genuine benefits that curation brings. Everything is painted with the same sneering brush in a world where everything is wrong is driven by narcissm and neoliberal capitalism. Still, definitely worth a read: "how did curating, a highly specialized line of museum work involving the care, accessio…

I have been under the impression for quite a while that eventually one of the large content marketing platforms...  will develop social media capabilities ... that content marketing would be the parent, and social marketing would fit underneath it. What Sprinklr is trying to do is flip the script on that, where social media becomes the parent a…

nobody works in the Brussels Bubble. Sure, people go to conferences, click on clever PowerPoints and meet for coffees to strengthen their networks, look busy writing emails and may contribute to a paper or two if they can get a consensus in their organisation. But by work, I mean to actually make something. - Brussels: A town where nobody works…

Self-management builds on the foundation of transparency. I don't think self-management works without being transparent ... we're now moving to a model where small teams own specific areas, and people don't need to worry about fixing and contributing to each and every problem in the company... the more self-managed you are as a company the m…

Our interactive graphic offers a real-time snapshot of the race, using media attention to track the fortunes of the presidential hopefuls... explore the graphic and view a running picture of how the candidates are faring on television during the election season, or drill into the numbers by network using the explorer dashboard. - Media Cover…

What does it mean for companies to know everything about us, and for computer algorithms to make life and death decisions? Should we worry more about another terrorist attack in New York, or the ability of journalists and human rights workers around the world to keep working? How much free speech does a free society really need? - The End of th…

Something for the bloggingportal reboot, courtesy @ronpatz: "quantitative text analysis has provided useful tools to extract policy positions from text or estimate sentiment of political speech, the application of such techniques is hitherto limited to monolingual contexts. We present a possible solution to this problem by presenting a reliable…

Authenticity: one of them hot button topics.... because we crave human connection in a technology-driven world? Is it because the Internet has become so saturated with bogus people spewing bogus content and using bogus titles?... we asked our community of digital creatives. Here’s what they said:" My favourite: "Authenticity is ... about bei…

The future of the web is "push-based", meaning the web will be coming to us.... the web will disappear into the background much like our electricity or water supply.. content, products and services will find you, rather than you having to find them... What people really want is to tune into information rather than having to work to get informat…

any of our thread-connected notes that travel around the web will carry all the related notes with them. Clicking into a note lands you at the top of the thread page, where you’ll see a brief overview of the blog conversation and, pinned right below, the note you clicked to see. If other notes were published later in time, clicking on the red box …

You really have two types of people you can leverage to aid your target marketing and social strategy efforts: - Influencers: Popular, well-respected, quasi-celebrities in your industry/space that share and engage in relevant content, and have a large audience and an engaged following. - Advocates: Vocal evangelists who are already a big fan o…

If you already have a blog, consider posting new or old blog posts on Medium. This is what I do, and it’s helped breathe new life into old work.... - WHY MEDIUM IS GOOD FOR YOUR WRITING CAREER — Personal Growth — Medium

"Innovation is exploding in every direction. With all of these “smart” things — smart cars, smart phones, smart watches, smart glasses — it’s a designer’s job to figure out the best way to deliver content in such a vastly connected world. The projects you’re working on at this very moment will be interacted with on devices that didn’t exist wh…

Good intro to WaPo's Clavis recommendation engine ... "technology that figures out what stories are about, categorizes them by topic, and assigns each a series of keywords. It runs that same process on the Post’s readers and identifies their presumed interests based on stories they’ve read. Clavis then pairs readers with stories... the Post imp…

The New York Times has caught the newsletter fever.... a total of 33.... Whereas its past newsletters tended to be extensions of its newspaper sections, its newer launches like Booming, NYT Living and Well encompass broader themes... The Times also is going in the niche direction, too... E-newsletters have had a resurgence in popularity lately …

The biggest reason the Walled Gardens are winning is because they have a superior user experience, fueled by data... we first must build websites and applications that exceed the user experience of Facebook, Apple, Google, etc. Second, we need to take back control of our data.,, create a "personal information broker"... the user can control wha…

What does the rise of digital distributors mean for the Open Web?... is there a point at which distributors create enough value for publishers to stop having their own websites? If distributors are capturing market share because of a superior user experience, is there a future technology that could disrupt them? And the ultimate question: who will…