New Is Old

Innovation or ceaseless novelty?



In the future, your password will be your biggest secret.

The key to creativity is simple. Recombination.

Bill Clinton is a vegan



Few things are worse designed than voicemail

Old model: Manufacture, then sell. New model: Sell, then manufacture.

Cheat codes are a massively overlooked and underused outlet for creativity in game design.

Sustainability describes society’s ability to carry on going. Don’t underestimate the importance of economics in this process.

Today we pay to be online. Tomorrow we’ll pay to be offline.

Pinterest = digital hoarding

Despite its immense power to expose, the internet is pretty shady about how it uses your data.

There’s a raft of new communication tools, but the etiquette hasn’t caught up yet.

4G mobile web WILL happen and it will mean access to rich retail-time media anytime, anywhere

Social media urges you to cultivate an audience. That’s why you have one eye on your Twitter followers. It’s audience anxiety.

Google used to be the first page I visited when I went online. Now it’s Facebook. Google is a tool. Facebook is your friends and family.

The internet is a massive R&D centre for the real world.

Monetising social media means making money out of relationships. Awkward.

The firefighters of tomorrow will be scientists.

Can someone explain what the fuck http://hexnet.org/ is

What businesses need to do is let the youngest staff in their organisations run their Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest and Twitter pages.

Future cities = tight-knit villages shaped around demographics: old people in one, singletons in another, young parents in another etc. I imagine each village as a hexagon with permeable boundaries. So single parents would live in between Parentville and Singletown.


Tim Hwang ‏ @timhwang
Fun: sudden liking and comment-bombing other ppls ancient Facebook posts/photos, forcing all the content back into public stream. Startling!

The Kindle is “something expensive that forces you to do more of whatever it is you think you should be doing more of.”

Six hours a month on Facebook is good. Six hours a day is better. Only one medium has that kind of pull: TV.

Yes, that’s right Doritos, I am very keen to subscribe to your YouTube channel. Just let me poke this rusty spike into my face first.

Bears repeating: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” — Simone Weil

One of the fundamental tenets of capitalism is convenience. Too many internet companies forget this.

Science is the only news

“The archivization produces as much as it records the event.” — Derrida

The #Romney family misspells its own name in the world’s most epic Freudian slip. http://pic.twitter.com/a2K7xDYC

As soon as you execute an idea, it dies.

Many start-ups end up upended by upstarts.

There appears to be an inverse correlation between the complexity of governance and the simplicity of political campaigns.

Facebook won’t let me create a page called “Leave Facebook when it IPOs” #censorship

Ebooks are cheap, so why not make tons of them and see what works?

EAT is just another Pret and Pret is just another Subway and Subway is just another McDonald’s

Many traditions that symbolise Scottish national identity were invented after, not before, its union with England.

The more we can automate, the more human we can be.

Laughter, anger, tears or shock. If you want to go viral, pick one or more of the above and set the taps running.

For economies built on credit, “never in the history of mankind have so many owed so much to so few”, takes on new relevance.

Community is networked individualism.

HIT: Health Internet of Things: a comb counts your hairs, a toothbrush checks your teeth, a toilet analyses your…

#TheKickstarterQuestion: Imagine your product doesn’t exist. Now imagine seeing it on @Kickstarter. Would you buy into it?

The unexamined tweet is not worth tweeting.

Celebrities will call the shots of the US election later this year. Not politicians.

An immigrant’s dilemma: don’t work and ‘sap benefits’, or steal jobs from ‘real’ Britons. 

Brownwashing. When companies dye packaging brown to look recycled.

It’s funny how quickly the Facebooks, Apples and Googles feel like the Walmarts, BPs, and Tescos.

The quicker something becomes popular, the quicker it becomes unpopular. By that logic, you now hate Lana Del Rey.

One overlooked medium is the ringtone. Why don’t McDonald’s give people discounts for using the ‘I’m lovin’ it’ ringtone on their phone?

Smartphones put every shop in the world in your pocket at all times. Even when you’re blind drunk.

What happens if I wear both self-tanning and skin lightening products?

Saying something ‘is dead’ is dead.

“It could be that sometimes our greatest freedom may be to choose freedom from freedom.” NY Times

Disconnection is amputation.

Picturing a future where the poor are made to eat their ice-creams in winter and put their heating on in summer (See dynamic pricing)

Innarchy: an internal, insatiable desire for anarchy.

Design and sell your own Converse trainers? These ‘social commerce’ initiatives look more like pyramid schemes to me.

Go into Google and type ‘define an english person’

Start-ups are like bands. Those in them will look back in twenty years and wonder, ‘what was I thinking?’

#Likejacking - When consumers like a Facebook page to get something like a coupon from a brand and then quickly unlike it.

In the 1950s, about 30% of firm value was intangible; today it is closer to 62%.

Facebook makes you needy. One of the most popular trends of Facebook this year was ‘Like My Status’.

Self-publishing or self-absorption?

Britain’s exports are increasingly centred on ideas and intellectual property.

Books never used to need charging.

“Being first to launch a new technology is less important than being first to envision its greatest untapped market potential.” HBR

The Milo Criterion - products must mature no faster than the rate at which users can adapt.

In a globalising world, ‘local’ it exists more as an emotional reflex than a rational pursuit.

If UPS is planning to deliver 120 million packages the week before Christmas, doesn’t that make them Santa Claus?

Repeat after me: An infographic is NOT a source.

The anti-capitalist protesters seem to be deflecting negative energy away from bankers and onto themselves.

“Thinking of going to see the world’s oldest olive tree, looked at it on Flickr, and it looked a bit shit.” 

“We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value.” NY Times

As the beers went down, the possibilities went up.

Pencils lack conviction.

Memes today are all me me me. Perhaps it should be renamed mememe.  

 “Most novels act as if they are dealing with a world in which media plays a role, rather than one that has been shaped by media. In fact, there are entire passages in novels that have been lifted from the Internet. The relationship between literature and the media has changed drastically as a result. And something else is changing: many authors have attended seminars about writing, where they have presented and discussed passages from their manuscripts. They have participated in public readings, applied for fellowships and tried to win prizes for their manuscripts — and in each of these cases, they have received feedback on their manuscripts and taken these reactions on board. As the editor, I have to adjust to the fact that the work of the author is stored in a process of self-discovery that involves many people and has not, for a long time, involved the author going it alone. In this respect, I am no longer reacting exclusively to the work of an individual author, but rather to a team of authors that confronts me in the form of one author who considers him — or herself responsible for the manuscript.”

http://publishingperspectives.com/2011/04/editing-digital-age-germany/