Facebook’s Notify is live and ready for your iOS consumption.
Apps are moving quickly to be “invisible” and only interact with us in the notification space that is agnostic of the former modes of app badges and alerts.
If you think this is just a ploy to flood your phone with news you might be semi-interested in throughout the day, you’re wrong.
Notifications are the next interface of computing.
Elisabeth and Merianna talk about the power of collaboration, especially during NanoWrimo. They talk about how much confidence is instilled when you connect into a network of people. They also discuss how women writers have been made more of an appearance in the publishing world and why that is.
The post Thinking Out Loud 89: Camaraderie Over Word Counts appeared first on Thinking.FM.
Thomas and Sam discuss the role of N.C. State as an upsetter along with the role of religion in presidential politics with talk about private and public hermeneutics of the 2016 candidates (and the weather in Tallahassee).
The post Thinking Religion 57: We Can’t Stop and We Won’t Stop appeared first on Thinking.FM.
“The goal of Facebook Instant Articles is to keep you on Facebook. No need to explore the larger Web when it’s all right there in Facebook, especially when it loads so much faster in the Facebook app than it does in a browser.
Google seems to have recognized what a threat Facebook Instant Articles could be to Google’s ability to serve ads. This is why Google’s project is called Accelerated Mobile Pages. Sorry, desktop users, Google already knows how to get ads to you.”
Source: How Google’s AMP project speeds up the Web—by sandblasting HTML | Ars Technica
“Speeding up the web” is a wonderful sentiment, but Google, Apple, and Facebook are well aware of the impending transition to a post-mobile computing interface that will transform how we see and interact with advertising.
Google AMP, Facebook Instant News, and Apple News are stop gaps to make a few more dollars on a rapidly transitioning medium (web advertising) as it exists in its current state.
Saving this for when we look back in 10 years on the first mainstream uses of VR in much the same way we fondly look back at web pages from the 90’s today…
“Today, The New York Times takes a step into virtual reality. NYT VR is a mobile app that can be used — along with your headphones and optionally a cardboard viewing device — to simulate richly immersive scenes from across the globe.”
Source: NYT VR: How to Experience a New Form of Storytelling From The Times – The New York Times
“It’s all about the data. Under the hood, the Amazon store has a few unusual features. Every book has a shelf tag that includes a capsule review from the website, a star rating, and a barcode. There are no prices listed. To get the price, you scan the code with the camera of your smartphone and the Amazon app. If you don’t have a smartphone or the app installed, an associate can do it for you. This brings up the product page for the item you’re looking at, with full reviews, specs and pricing.”
Source: Amazon’s Retail Store Has Nothing To Do With Selling Books – Forbes
Price is the main motivating factor in most purchasing decisions under $50, so it’s interesting to see that Amazon is trading off that variable with the need to scan a code with its app on your smartphone in order to give you the information.
There’s a very good reason Amazon wants to do that, of course… if you have the app installed on your smartphone and use it in their store, they are able to (in relative real time) offer up a more customized, or personal, shopping experience to you based on what Amazon knows about you. If you’re online in 2015, that’s probably a good deal, especially for Prime members with Echo’s and a long purchase history like me and my family.
Variant pricing will initially surprise consumers. “What do you mean he gets to buy that Star Wars book for $2 less than I do?” will be a common refrain. Amazon knows my wife and I have a little boy due to arrive any moment now (or they should based on our recent purchases), and they know I’m a Star Wars fan based on my Amazon Prime Movies streaming, and purchase of toys and collectibles for our kids (*cough* … ) or the frequent amount of times our 5 year old asks Alexa to play the Imperial March from the soundtrack.
So, psychologically there’s a great deal more involved with a purchasing decision than price point.
As we move towards a cash-free and digital transaction based economy (thanks, Apple and Android Pay!) and continue to contribute both our data and our purchasing habits to recommendation engines, it will be more economically efficient to move towards a market where goods and services are based on context and situational awareness (Uber’s Surge Pricing, for example).
“Showcase Stores” such as Best Buy get this. Even the weekly grocery store discount ads in the newspaper circular (for us old folks) will follow this lead and require an app or an interface not based on universal pricing in order for the “cost” of something to be displayed. Our nearly automated financial markets full of nano-second timed transactions carried out by bots are already there.
Time for advertising and marketing to catch up.
It’s going to be a fun decade ahead.
“Hey Alexa, play my Beatles mix. And order more newborn diapers.”
You can say a lot with a heart. Introducing a new way to show how you feel on Twitter: https://t.co/WKBEmORXNW pic.twitter.com/G4ZGe0rDTP
— Twitter (@twitter) November 3, 2015
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
“We are changing our star icon for favorites to a heart and we’ll be calling them likes. We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use, and we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers. You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite.”
Source: Hearts on Twitter | Twitter Blogs
Interesting connection between Twitter and its rebranded hearts with the concept of “secondary orality:”
“In the era of electronic media it is difficult to keep the distinction between oral culture and literate culture, since there are more and more hybrid forms of culture that spread on the internet. The secondary orality character of applications like Twitter is a manifestation, a consequence of humans’ desire to group, not out of a survival instinct but as a deliberate, rational act of re-integration, as statement of self-consciousness and declaration of identity within neo-tribal cultures.”
Source: Liliana Bounegru | Secondary Orality in Microblogging
When people ask me how Twitter is different than Facebook (or Pinterest, Instagram etc), I like to present my admittedly boiled-down take on the phenomenon of secondary orality in a trans-literate global culture.
“Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average,” read the blog post, attributed to the OneDrive Team. “Instead of focusing on extreme backup scenarios, we want to remain focused on delivering high-value productivity and collaboration experiences that benefit the majority of OneDrive users.”
Source: Microsoft Kills Unlimited OneDrive Storage, Downgrades Paid and Free Options – Digits – WSJ
I’m not a OneDrive user, but I have made statements just like this as a middle school science teacher…and seriously, did Microsoft not see this coming?
“Downtime is an opportunity for the brain to make sense of what it has recently learned, to surface fundamental unresolved tensions in our lives and to swivel its powers of reflection away from the external world toward itself. While mind-wandering we replay conversations we had earlier that day, rewriting our verbal blunders as a way of learning to avoid them in the future.”
Elisabeth and Merianna follow up their conversation from last week about the importance of protecting your content. Then, they recount their experiences at recent conferences and how they are learning that they need to be tougher with the authors they work with in order to help authors put their best work into the world. They also talk about upcoming NanoWrimo and their plans to write, write, write!
The post Thinking Out Loud 88: Toughening Up appeared first on Thinking.FM.
“CHURCH: Stop preaching downloaded sermons from other preachers. If you found it online, so can the congregation. People want to hear your take on God’s Word, not a re-heated sermon from someone else.”
Source: Bigger Fixes Nothing (7 Unexpected Steps Toward Church Health) | Pivot | A Blog by Karl Vaters
Saving these for later… and for clients.
So true.
“Looking forward, we feel this is best seized by taking on new opportunities to fully realize our vision for ebooks. With that, we will be taking steps to sunset the existing Oyster service over the next several months. If you are an Oyster reader you will receive an email personally regarding your account.”
Source: oysterbooks
Hmm… never a good post to make on a Friday night before Halloween… I wonder if it was poor uptake, Amazon Kindle Unlimited, or just market economics of the ebook subscription model?
“With the help of James Jubilee, a former American arms control officer and now a senior science and technology coordinator for health issues in Kazakhstan, Dr. LaPorte tracked down Mr. Dey through the State Department, and his images and documentation quickly convinced them of the earthworks’ authenticity and importance.”
Source: NASA Adds to Evidence of Mysterious Ancient Earthworks
Get to writing, someone. I want to read this book and how humanity is shaken to its roots by startling revelations about our species’ history…
“Our kids, who already face enormous pressure in life, should never be subjected to state-sponsored violence while in school. For this young girl, Spring Valley High School should’ve been a refuge.”
Source: KING: S.C. teen assaulted by deputy is a recent orphan – NY Daily News
“One thing is clear: Giving has changed, says JoAnn Turnquist, president and CEO of the Central Carolina Community Foundation. “People want to feel ownership of how their dollars are being used,” Turnquist says. Previous generations, Turnquist says, “were brought up to give to institutions, organizations that had secured the community’s trust,” she says. “The donors trusted that their dollars would be used appropriately.” “Move forward to 20- and 30-somethings that are tech savvy, get their information differently, from peers and online — they are motivated more by peer influencers,” Turnquist says.”
Source: Flood Shows How Charity Has Changed – Free-Times.com
And churches wonder why “giving” is down among members and supporters? It’s because churches aren’t keeping up with the “how” part of stewardship and giving and being inflexible.
“In our constantly developing world, we have to learn to adapt to change. The fact that we are so dependent on the internet is scary. But the fact that you, as an adult, are struggling to keep up with us and the internet, does not give you the right to say that the way we are learning and growing up and socialising is wrong and we need to go back to how you used to write letters to your friends or call them using the home telephone. Neither way of living and socialising is better, just very different, which I think is the main cause of the older generation not tolerating the use of our phones.”
Source: Dear old people: why should I turn off my phone?
Anecdotally, I’ve always found that it’s the people / teachers / ministers etc who complain the most about “young kids always being on their phones” that leave their phones’ ringers on (at full volume) and have no problem answering a call (after a few rings, of course) and having a very loud conversation despite the context or their situation.
“But Google isn’t just trying to create more Serial fanatics on Android. No, it wants to reach people that have never listened to podcasts. And it wants to broaden its media offerings in the fight with Apple, the frequent go-to platform for media producers.”
Source: Google Brings Podcasting to Play Music Streaming Service, Android | Re/code
I’m excited to see podcasting continue to expand into the “mainstream” of public consumption. Hopefully, NPR doesn’t suck all the air out of the room.
If you’re a business, group, church, school etc… you need to be podcasting. Get in touch if you need help (we’ve set up and continue to manage many podcasts for clients).
And support indie podcasters for a healthy podcasting ecosystem… like the fine folks at Thinking.FM.
“Part of this will entail a shift in advertising to permission-based advertising: asking the consumer whether she wants to see an ad — which would be asking her if she wants to receive information — for a particular brand at the current time. The consumer will have the choice: yes, I’m in the supermarket and I want to see the weekly specials; or no, I’m driving and I only want to receive breaking news that’s relevant to my family. She would no longer be forced to page through or scroll through irrelevant ads to reach what she needs.”
Source: Notification: The Post App World Revealed – Ad Tech Daily
I’ve been doing a ton of work and research in what comes “after” mobile… meaning, what advertising and marketing looks like now that our mobile devices are being used more than our laptops and desktops.
Your iPhone will look dramatically different in a few short years. I don’t mean the physical part. I mean the part you’re interacting with at the level where you once opened an app to check your latest Facebook Like notifications or new emails. There will be little-to-no reliance on that grid of apps that you belovedly call your homescreen.
I’ve been using my iPhone and Android phones this way the last few weeks and it’s been transformative. I could never go back to relying on opening apps from a homescreen to receive, process, or even create information (more on that soon).
Google, Apple, and Facebook all understand that the “future” (as in the next few years) will be dominated by notifications.
Just to think, Twitter had it right with Track all those years ago. Shame they double clutched the ball.
Native / content – advertising / notifications win… adblockers plus notifications plus better ad technology means branding and advertising will conflate. It’s going to be wild. Put on your VR helmets!
Discovery marketing = notifications.
“This story came out of nowhere and had me looking at other resources for answers. First, I didn’t really know that Ezra and Nehemiah were. And now, Nehemiah — a name I couldn’t spell in my notebook without writing out each letter looking at the Bible — and he was speaking to me. I flew through the pages.”
Source: A Catholic reads the Bible, week 22 – CNN.com
Whatever your religion, non-religion, perspective, or theology… go read the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.
People often look at me strangely when I tell them they are two of my favorite things in the Bible, but when I taught Old Testament at the college level we’d always spend way too much time with these books. Both (once the same) are very overlooked yet important for understanding our current situation, the development of Judaism, early Christianity, historical geography, and broader issues of colonialism.
Amanda Palmer did an AMA on the /books subreddit yesterday on the topic of her book The Art of Asking, so the Thinking.FM hosts pulled a Superfriends on Friday night and recorded 90 minutes of thoughtful discussion about Palmer’s tactics and the nature of the artist in an age of self-promotion.
I think it’s an interesting conversation that anyone seeking to go out on a limb and chart your own path (whether as a businessperson, artist, speaker etc) should consider:
“On this special episode of Thinking, Sam is joined by Elisabeth, Thomas, and Merianna (the other Thinking.FM podcasters) for a roundtable / Superfriends discussion of whether or not Amanda F. Palmer is a marketing genius. Along the way, they discuss the right and wrong ways to promote yourself whether you’re an artist, musician, author, professor, or civilian.”
“It feels weird admitting this, too: We as a Buffer marketing team—working on a product that helps people succeed on social media—have yet to figure out how to get things working on Facebook (especially), Twitter, Pinterest, and more.
And that’s super scary to admit.”
Source: We’ve Lost Nearly Half Our Social Referral Traffic in the Last 12 Months
Brutally honest (but incredibly smart) post by the Buffer marketing team. If you don’t know, Buffer is one of the services out there that allows you to easily share your content from one place to another by hooking everything up together. It’s a great service (I use competitor dlvr.it here but I do use Buffer with a few clients).
So often I have these sorts of conversations with existing or potential clients that have to do with the dwindling returns on using Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn to try and get more pageviews back to a site or newsletter.
Part of the problem has to do with the nature of metrics and how things are changing, part has to do with the maturity of social media, and part has to do with the realization of businesses that if you really want to get a vast number of clicks back to your site, you’re going to have to pay for them (organic reach via social is all but dead if you’re not willing to invest in a social media manager or a consultant like me… just saying). Social media has changed and evolved. Social media is not an umbrella. You can’t blast out a post to Twitter and Facebook and wait for the clicks to come.
… and you shouldn’t be waiting for clicks.
“If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you’ll be ahead of 95% of writers. And it’s so easy to do: just don’t let a sentence through unless it’s the way you’d say it to a friend.”
Source: Write Like You Talk by Paul Graham
Elisabeth, Merianna, and Sam talk about the commodity of content and how authors should disseminate that information. They advise authors that they shouldn’t help the rich get richer, but help build their own audience.
The post Thinking Out Loud 87: Own Your Own Content appeared first on Thinking.FM.
Thomas Whitley and I are really enjoying doing this podcast… we missed last week’s episode and it felt (to me) like a big part of my week wasn’t complete. As I said on another podcast that had me on as a guest today, we don’t really think of Thinking Religion as a podcast as much as it is a conversation we’d be having anyway. Thomas and I are just letting you be voyeuristic and listen to a little snippet of that much longer weekly chat (our chats routinely go 2-3 hours, so this 45 mins or hour of a produced show is one conscious part of that).
It’s probably why we don’t have guests on as well.
Anyway, it’s a good listen (I think):
Elisabeth and Merianna talk about their upcoming conference and why they continue to work in the field of publishing. They also talk about what makes you an expert and when you can call yourself an expert. Elisabeth reminds them both that: “That’s what we do, make it possible for people to get published.”
The post Thinking Out Loud 86: 10,000 Hours Worth of Expertise appeared first on Thinking.FM.
