1. "This should be a red flag for any product or solution, whether digital or analog, that isn’t minimally complex. If you’re making the customer do any extra amount of work, no matter what industry you call home, you’re now a target for disruption. Because of the Internet’s scale and the speed of change in the world, the Innovator’s Dilemma has mutated over the years into a pernicious, methodically destructive force, leaving any company that is even the slightest bit more cumbersome, costly, or inefficient to be beat out by a newer, more streamlined competitor."
    The Simplicity Thesis

  2. My life in social media.

    My life in social media.


  3. "That won’t be visible to you in your analytics, but what reader of the Internet has not felt that pang: “This site doesn’t really value me or my time.” You can get a page view spike that’s actually a negative for your brand. And the more the slideshow spreads because of a clever headline or just because the topic is hot, the farther that brand damage spreads. Congratulations! You juiced the stats with an invisible poison!"
    The Pernicious Myth That Slideshows Drive ‘Traffic’

  4. Jonathan Zittrain’s Keynote At ROFLCon 2012

    If you spend time working on, thinking about, or trying to understand human behavior and the internet, this keynote is a must-watch. Jonathan Zittrain put together an amazing hour on the meme culture, and how/why things become what they become on the Internet. Take 50 or so minutes to watch this, I promise it’s worthwhile.








  5. scheuguy:

    This is fantastic. (h/t @gardnersmitha)

    Fantastic.


  6. Digital Media Loss Aversion

    One of the things that I love most about working in the digital corner of the advertising world, is the ability to create and deploy programs with incredible speed. But why is it that we are always so quick to launch programs, yet so slow to kill the ones that don’t work out as planned?

    The theory of loss-aversion may speak to this. We’re psychologically wired in a way that makes a loss feel much worse than a gain of equivalent value.

    Kahneman and Tversky stumbled upon loss aversion after giving their students a simple survey, which asked whether or not they would accept a variety of different bets. The psychologists noticed that, when people were offered a gamble on the toss of a coin in which they might lose $20, they demanded an average payoff of at least $40 if they won. The pain of a loss was approximately twice as potent as the pleasure generated by a gain. Furthermore, our decisions seemed to be determined by these feelings. As Kahneman and Tversky put it, “In human decision making, losses loom larger than gains.” 

    More here.




  7. Jason Fried: Why work doesn’t happen at work


  8. Transcendent Social Media

    I’ve been thinking a ton about bridging the digital/social/real worlds lately. I love stuff like this, where online tech comes to life in offline arenas. Those that think about social media (or shit, even just media in general) as being contained within the obvious spots, are missing the possibilities out there.

    Through its new “Fashion Like” initiative, C&A has posted photos of a number of the clothing items it sells on a dedicated Facebook page, where it invites customers to “like” the ones that appeal to them. Special hooks on the racks in its bricks-and-mortar store, meanwhile, can then display those votes in real time, giving in-store shoppers a clear indication of each item’s online popularity.


  9. "Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience (insider jargon: “UX”), Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever — a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life. The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life — that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise."
    When Your Favorite App Sells Out (NYTimes)

  10. This remains one of my favorite product names ever. (Taken with instagram)

    This remains one of my favorite product names ever. (Taken with instagram)


About me

Boston guy, creative thinker, digital doer. I'm an advisor at Custom Made and Vice President, Digital/Social Strategy at Hill Holliday. Thoughts are my own. More on me here.