Write headlines not headings

Headlines not headings

A common problem with presentations is people writing headings at the top of the slide rather than headlines.

This is from the brief that The Onion filed with the supreme court to defend a parody. It's a great example of using headlines to tell a story.

Sent to me by my friend James, thanks James.

November 01, 2022 |

From the slack

One of my little social slacks is regularly restocked with excellent music recommendations. Here are the latest selections:

The new Burial is perfect for when you're writing something menacing.

This gentle Australian groove psych also saw me through a few emails

It's always nice to come back to the James Baldwin's records.

This mix appears to be legendary and 9 years old. But I've only just found it. I'm so fashionable.

The best of Serge. Described as a nice dinner soundtrack

October 31, 2022 |

25 years

October 28, 2022 |

Continuous urban fabric

A little snippet of Edwin Heathcote from an old FT.

"The proportion of the United Kingdom classified as "continuous urban fabric" - ie cities is 0.1 per cent.

Another 5.3 per cent is considered "discontinuous urban fabric" (in which 50-80 per cent of the land is built on). The rest is mostly countryside. The UK might often be thought of as one of the more densely populated places to live. It is not. The densest? That would be Macau. Then Monaco, Singapore, Hong Kong, Gibraltar ... The UK comes in at number 50, eight places below Japan and just above Pakistan."

Interesting.

October 26, 2022 |

Zombie Christmas

I have embarked on another book project. I will tell you more when all the contracts have been signed and Ms Winfrey gives me the OK.

But one of the notions in the book is that sharing ideas in public is both useful in improving those ideas and a good way of getting ideas back. Declare that you're interested in something and people are wonderfully inclined to say 'hey, I've seen something related to that’. This is good.

It’s a bit like this. There are some people it's easy to buy gifts for. Those people have clear, defined interests. "I like owls!” And so their house is full of stuffed owls bought for them by nieces and grandchildren. Ideally of course they have more than one interest. Because there is such a thing as too many owls.

But if you don't declare an interest you risk getting nothing. Or bath salts. Or people leap on the one tiny clue you give them and pummel it to death. One Christmas our son was very keen on the TV show The Walking Dead. So he ended up with Walking Dead posters. Walking Dead apparel, mugs, everything. It became known as the Zombie Christmas and is a useful warning from history.

So I'm going to share some of the writing process on here. I’m going to declare some interests. 

There’ll be drafts of bits and pieces and perhaps some tales from the wordface. And I'm going to experiment with turning comments on for these posts. So if you want to join in please feel free. I suspect traffic is now so low that there won't be a big spam issue but we'll see. Posts will be tagged DI for reasons that will become clear when Mr Yentob signs the relevant releases.

Things that seem related to the topic of sharing ideas in public include:

Clive Thompson’s thought about the value of blogging: “Even if I was publishing it to no one, it’s just the threat of an audience”

And there’s that thing from (I think) the FT (which I can’t find now) about

But the thing I keep thinking about is from Hedda Sterne "The Surrealists tried to be agonistic, bizarre. I wasn’t like that. I didn’t think I had the kind of mind and power of thinking to change the world. I had a very great urgency to show, to share. The cat brings you in things, you know? It was that kind of thing. I discovered things and wanted to share them."

And of course there's all the writing and thinking that Matt Webb has been doing recently about Writing As Thinking/As A Generative Act. Which is related but not quite the same.

There's also something to be explored here about sharing ideas without exposing yourself. Not a thing that we worried about so much during Privileged Blogging 1.0 but which needs to be thought about now.

October 25, 2022 in DI |

The analogy that keeps on giving

October 24, 2022 |

a 6 person thumbnail team

I've been reminded again how really, really hard it is to do effective video on the internet. Obviously anyone can film something on their phone and stick it online, that's incredibly easy. But getting someone to see it is incredibly hard.

And people underestimate how hard it is because they see some stupid, cheap, badly filmed thing succeed and say - look that was cheap and badly filmed and that succeeded. But what they don't see are all the films they didn't see. The millions and millions and millions of them. The interaction of people and algorithm selects badly made things that have some other incredibly rare quality. An accident, a look, a moment, a personality. Stuff that your film probably doesn't have.

If you don't have that or want to significantly increase your chances of succeeding you have to work incredibly hard. For example: Mr Beast has a 6-person team making YouTube thumbnails. And I don't even know what a YouTube thumbnail is.

October 23, 2022 |

Positive

October 23, 2022 |

Older digital

Everyone I know seems to think their 'memory is going'. It's a thing people say. Even people in their 20s. But as I'm now in the second half of my 50s it's probably more likely to be true for me.

And I'm conscious that I use alarms and to-dos a lot more than I used to. It's not just about the cognitive off-loading of Getting Things Done. It's setting a task at the top of the stairs so I remember it when I get to the bottom. And I have a slight consciousness that this is a habit that will stand me in good stead when as my prospective memory does start to fade.

It also occurs to me that I'll probably never change some of my digital tools. I use Simplenote for simple notes and Things for things I need to do. I spent many years prospecting for exactly the right one but now I've developed muscle memory for these tools it feels like I should stick with them. I suppose the next quirk will be resisting updates.

October 22, 2022 |

Good old-fashioned artisanal curation

Things that seem connected:

Matt thinking about storefronts:

"You would take something like Shopify and make it so I could curate individual items in a MySpace-like environment, and the doorway is my user avatar. Something like that. You would see which of your friends were currently browsing. The whole purchase funnel would have to be managed within my homepage?

Like Underhill says, I would probably want live staffing. Something the generic big box infinite department stores couldn’t offer."

W. David Marx thinking about recommendation:

"Matthew Yglesias noted that the previous paradigm of recommendations involved teachers, older siblings, and surly record store clerks offering pedagogical introductions to even deeper examples in a specific interest area, whereas a capitalistic algorithm may point towards much more general, less sophisticated versions of whatever you liked."

And there's this too:

October 21, 2022 |

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