Overview: Content Strategy

Jon Stokes thinks "people are talking about this chatbot in unhelpful ways... anthropomorphizing ... [and] not working with a practical, productive understanding of what the bot’s main parts are and how they fit together."So he wrote this explainer."At the heart of ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) that belongs to the family o…

Wired's rules for using generative AI: "Not for images, yes for research, no for copyediting, maybe for idea generation". Meanwhile interactive book PromptCraft shows how to "get the most out of the creative man/machine communications... AI is like querying our collective intelligence".So how best to design an AI prompt?…

"the distributed/federated digital garden approach is the way to go for knowledge commoning... cribbing from ActivityPub's local, global, and 'those-you-follow' timelines... you could have local, 'those-you-follow', and global gardens... [with] some kind of liquid democracy", and interest-based groups, perhaps s…

Good history of design thinking."IDEO’s way of working: a six-step methodology for innovation called design thinking... Key ... was its replicable aesthetic, represented by the Post-it note:... Not too precious, not too permanent... promises a fast-moving, cooperative, egalitarian process", but is also "disruptive, startup-flavored …

"a modern version of del.icio.us meets Roam... a searchable, interconnected repository of the most insightful content on the Internet" - and a pretty interesting example of convergent evolution vis a vis myhub.ai

from Alice Albrecht, who "runs re:collect, a startup building an AI-powered thought partner:... advances in AI and cheaper compute lower the bar for getting from a creative idea to a final output... though, we still need to provide the initial seed... and ... judge whether we’re heading in the right direction. We’re still the creative direct…

Mermaid lets you "creating diagrams using simple markup language... for quickly jotting down a sequence of steps or a set of interconnected relationships. The above diagrams are created with just a couple of lines of code. Other types include pie charts, sequences, gantt, etc.

David's "journey trying to visualise relationships in my Obsidian notes" passed via various approaches, including d3, as he tried to create diagrams encapsulating relationships between nodes.He then stumbled upon the obsidian-excalidraw-plugin ... [which] automatically generate Excalidraw diagrams with its Excalidraw Automate featur…

When James West "joined a small wave of users granted early access" to the new Bing (I'll call and tag it "BingGPT"), powered by the same LLM behind ChatGPT, which is "a great party trick ... powerful work tool, capable of jumpstarting creativity, automating mundane tasks", he soon "noticed strange inconsist…

Starts with articulating I've been meaning to write for many years about the oncoming AI-driven content flood: "The dark forest theory of the web: ... life-like but life-less state of being online... overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait... algorithmically manipulated junk... eerily devoid of human life ... liv…

"Micro.blog can now cross-post to a Mastodon user account... Your custom domain on Micro.blog can now be ActivityPub-compatible, so that you can follow and reply to Mastodon users directly on Micro.blog ... someone can follow your blog posts".As a result "you can consolidate your identity and posts back to your own blog at your ow…

Proof that one of the myhub revenue streams exists: "pay once, and you get lifetime access to my growing list of notes from the books I’m reading. If you went out and bought all of these books, you’d pay around $3,000. If you then spent the 3-6 hours reading each book, and 1-2 hours taking notes on them, it’d take you anywhere from 800 – 1,60…

"I spent a few minutes in conversation with ChatGPT."This was both me kicking ChatGPT's conversational tyres and exploring its limits, both those it admits to and those it does not.Key takeaways from a first reading:Many, but not all, content creators are screwedFor "writers, journalists, copywriters, consultants, and even publ…

ChatGPT... is going to change our world much sooner than we expect, and much more drastically

"It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon."Provocative article, looking at the past 20 years as social networking evolved into social media - as I put it back in 2016, the evolution from social media (social as adjective) to social media, where the emphasis is on the noun."A social network is an…

A short experiment on getting the most out of podcasts by using speech-to-text engines to create rtanscripts. TL:DR:Welder’s excellent and free; Otter.ai’s got some amazing features, but it’s pricey; just forget Google.

A neural network to help web content authors efficiently and completely characterise their content using the site taxonomy. Accuracy improves with use.

A YANSS interview with Adam Grant, author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What you Don’t Know. Generally an "extensive exploration of how to rethink your own thinking", including his WorkLife podcast interview of Margaret Atwood on procrastination.(When annotating a podcast I really like a transcript, but there was none for this epi…

Basically this piece starts to unpack for me my ideas of what millions of Hubs networked together and processed by AI would offer the world in terms of content discovery:With "tools like Notion, Airtable, and Readwise ... people are aggregating content ... reviving the curated web. But at the moment these are mostly solo affairs... fragmented…

Pretty good explanation of ActivityPub from Darius Kazemi: "ActivityPub describes ways for social network sites to talk to each other... [from] sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat... [to] New York Times ... Spotify. Basically any site where individual "users" create content and other people can subscribe to it could be A…

A "How I use it" from Ivo. "Roam changed the game [by] ... treating the data as a graph ... [and] allowing blocks to quickly be nested, referred to, embedded, created from a piece of text in a block, appear in the sidebar, being searched and queried".Ivo developed a way of ontologising his Roam graph: "In the context of a…

"the underlying problem is stubbornly intractable"Great piece, although I'm unsure that "a great proportion of the variance in “knowledge management” effectiveness across individuals is genetic", it is true that:productivity geeks exist, develop their system and then try to sell it.speaking from experience, it is really, r…

"Hitting “publish” on this, my first blog post on Knowledge4Policy (K4P), is a special moment for me. I’ve helped create a few online communities for the European Commission (I launched my first in February 2002, so I just missed that particular anniversary), but K4P may be the most important."

To everyone who's ever asked "what's that poster to your left of your desk?", I bring you UsefulCharts' Timeline of World History, which came embedded in their eponymous book, received last Christmas."covering 3300 BCE - present... displays all the major empires, kingdoms, and civilizations throughout history in a sid…

A video presentation "based on David Hyerle's book Visual Tools for Transforming Information into Knowledge". Some key points:written notes and verbal information present knowledge linearlymismatch with our brain, which must convert this linear stream into a mental map - major effort. images are fast to convey, but low on detail mix…

Interesting colection of notes from Andy Matuschak:Peripheral vision: "My physical workspace is full of subtle cues... together give me a kind of “peripheral vision”: when I’m doing one thing, it’s easy for me to fluidly notice other nearby things... Software systems, by contrast, often lack this kind of peripheral vision.". I started he…

Great example of the use of comics to explain some of the more arcane aspects of information and interaction design,

"5 interesting things ... distilled from a helicopter view of trust from various branches of psychology, sociology, behavioural science and Responsible Research and Innovation."focus on others: "perhaps similar to love and happiness, the more doggedly trust is pursued for its own sake, the more elusive it may become", so turn y…

Another echo of one of my recent posts (Simplifying Zettelkasten by working out loud), but almost certainly published before: "One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” ... giving a lecture about the problems you’re pondering in the shower; it’s thinking out loud".Essentially this…

Andy Matuschak's daily routine and content strategy appear similar, but much more complex, than my own. It starts with something we share: "When my days don’t go well, it’s often because something derailed me in the morning, and I never really got back on track", and manages his day so that he spends the first two hours of the day f…