Overview: Digital Transformation

"platform focused solely on professional publishing... open source tools for independent journalists and writers ... sustainable business around a free core application, funded by a premium platform as a service to run it on... non-profit foundation ... can never be bought or sold... [all] revenue reinvested into the product and the community. All…

First a definition of (the importance of) "Interoperability – the thing Facebook uses to slurp stuff in from the open web – is the key to self-determination." Without it:you're trapped: "leaving Facebook means leaving your communities, your relationships... your presence on Facebook is the reason someone else can’t go...you're stuck with sub-optim…

Subconscious is "a creative oracle that helps provoke ideas. It also captures those ideas, and remixes and resurfaces them, provoking more ideas... in a feedback loop that powers a flywheel of divergent creative thinking."Whereas spaced repetition tools like Anki "close feedback loops to help memorize facts", Subconscious will "close feedback loop…

Analysing the impact of cultural diversity on corporate performance by feeding half-million Glassdoor reviews through a "Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling" machine learning algorithm: "the “bag of words” approach... inductively infers categories... a statistical model that looks for words that tend to co-occur."Step 1: feed 1 million sent…

Although this looks like someone looking for problems because of the apparent near-future success of "solutionism", some good points here: we need "an institution that will know what ... regulations to suspend (eg libraries and IPR) ... to fully leverage the potential inherent in digital technologies for the public good."Recent success on privacy …

The “Brussels effect:... When the European Union comes up with some new tech regulation, it can quickly spread around the world"...To draft its proposed AI regulatory approach, the EC "created a 52-member “high-level expert group” ... collected further input via an “AI alliance” ... published a white paper" to which 1,250 groups and individuals …

Great piece on the implications for creators of the shift to algorithmically managed content platforms."Vine was an entirely new cultural platform ... Twitter had unwittingly enabled the creation of a true subculture... [but] didn’t know how to make money from it... in contrast... TikTok has prospered because it generally seems to understand wh…

"AI Dungeon ... used text-generation technology ... OpenAI to create a choose-your-own adventure game inspired by D&D... algorithms crafting a personalized, unpredictable adventure".This is a huge creative playground: over 20,000 players each day; one player "claims to have written an estimated total of more than 1 million words with the AI’s hel…

Good short history: "design thinking ... has spread from products to services to just about anything in business... often used as shorthand for a magic potion approach to innovation and creative problem solving... end up being a theatrical thing that people can point to and say, ‘oh we did that.’ "So it's one example of how "organizations fall int…

"A framework for building enduring products"Level 1 is to focus on growing uses completing the core action, which forms the product's foundation, usually correlates with retention. So design features which optimise for people completing the core action. Level 2 - retain users by creating accruing benefits: customer usage improves their UX mountin…

"first mile of a product’s user experience is almost always an afterthought. The welcome/tour, the onboarding, the explanatory copy, the empty states, and the defaults ... the “top of your funnel” for engaging new users... increasingly neglected over time despite becoming more important ... products built for a tech-savvy ... early adopters must …

"Focusing on individual features and experiences is good, but you should never forget about the position you’re trying to hold." Know "Which problems are good fits for you and which ones are bad fits?" so you don't build features for problems which are incoherent with your position.Snickers can’t take a feature request to be “more melty” and win .…

The image is bad - it's a graph, not a grid, unless you can somehow make a negative investment. Anyway, the model distinguishes "between basic and differentiating features.. improving certain aspects only serves to maintain basic expectations, whereas improving other aspects can delight customers with less effort"Basic features should be met beca…

"the most efficient way to operate during the earliest phases of a startup lies in between a formal business plan and unstructured iteration... documenting your initial product/market fit hypotheses, systematically validating each of the most uncertain hypotheses, and continually iterating on and updating [them] ... through customer validation, MV…

How to measure & optimise for product/market fit? Use this leading indicator: "just ask users “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” and measure the percent who answer “very disappointed.” " You need at least 40%.Article goes through the process step by step, and comes with an interactive tool:A) Ask people who've used the pr…

Sets out a solution to the "TiVo problem": essentially, TiVo had the innovative product but not the content to operate it on. This usually ends badly for the innovator, who gets screwed by the incumbent, who has the distribution (eg ComCast). Despite the example, Tivo "did not fail... a patent troll of sorts... collected more than $1.6B in patent …

Interesting longread on " Why the internet remains a tool of American hegemony", pointing out that " The internet was built by the U.S. military at the height of the Cold War and privatized into corporate America at the peak of anglophone neoliberal hegemony."There was a moment of freedom, when there were "millions of different internet pages. But…

Andreessen Horowitz on sales channels, because "products often fail because the company chose the wrong route to market... A properly designed sales channel is a function of the product that you have built and the target... you wish to pursue."Presented as a function: the channel (c) is derived by a function (f) - distribution design - which proc…

"GPT-3 ... generates tweets, pens poetry, summarizes emails, answers trivia questions, translates languages and even writes its own computer programs, all with very little prompting"It's surprised a lot of AI researchers, but also "often spews biased and toxic language" and isn't always convincing. It's a universal language model that's "learned f…

roughly 1 of every 1,000 pieces of content ... violates ... rules on hate speech... even with artificial intelligence and third-party moderators, the company was “deleting less than 5% of all of the hate speech posted to Facebook.”...civic integrity team... charged with protecting the democratic process and reducing misinformation ... recently dis…

Approach to visualising Wikipedia category pages and their interconnections.

Given the myriad problems posed by social media platforms - content moderation, disinformation, censorship, privacy, anti-trust - this article "proposes an entirely different approach... that enables more free speech, while minimizing ... trolling, hateful speech, and large-scale disinformation efforts... also might help users ... regain control o…

Not the only interesting piece on Trump viewed from ancient Greece."this election was something like a census of American Idiots... " defined using the classical Greek meaning of “people who are consumed only with self-interest". Any society with too many such idiots would be "consumed solely with self-interest... [and] cease to be a democracy" a…

What did I learn about learning as I explored using Zettelkasten idea and knowledge management to write five newsletters about disinformation in the 2020 US elections?

"A serendipity engine on the Twitter sidebar".A "second brain" provides easy access to all the resources you've ever Liked or ideas you've ever Thought. @ExGenesis' Threadhelper brings a subset of this (just Tweets) right into the twitter UX - it looks brilliant.Check out the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voCpNvldCjk&feature=emb_logo

Today's social platforms' business models are not inevitable, but because we see them as such we constrain "the solution space we consider for combatting mis-/disinformation, polarization, and promotion of extremism... we need to consider what technologies [and] digital media to have a productive role in democratic societies".Hence this essay, whi…

With more than a dozen congressional candidates appearing on ballots in November, Qanon is mainstream. While it looks like a lot of other conspiracy theories, this research provides a fascinating look at how the conspiracy's "Bakers" co-create their knowledgescape."QAnon doesn’t simply offer readers insider insight into current events, but also pr…

This article had me hooked from Line One - "Remember when the internet used to be fun?" - because I do. It tracks how "ironic, meme culture" (d)evolved from when "There was an assumption that everyone in the room “got it,” that they understood who was being satirized—the racists and the homophobes—and that everything was just for lulz." through th…

538/IPSOS: Americans unimpressed with the president’s performance, but very few people changed their minds - shifts within margin of error. Biden wiped Trump in ratings of both performance and policy, with net favorability for Biden growing from 26 to 33 points.

pink slime: shadowy, politically backed “local news websites” designed to promote partisan talking points and collect user data... a network of 450 intricately linked sites ID's in Dec 2019 is now 1200 ...largest 2 networks: 90+% are algorithmically generated stories from publicly available data sets or by repurposing legitimate sources - the few …