It is funny how you consume media in the internet age. 

Some of us call it “information snacking,”  some call it “managing feeds.”  What is amazing is how we do still end up reading what we want to read and are able to keep up with significant stories or trends — even if they aren’t defined in a few media players editorial calendar as they were before.

I believe this is because the ease of publishing means strong ideas get enough coverage to still have a significant share of voice, regardless of the media fragmentation.

It is also because as humans we tend to build off of each other’s ideas.  A more cynical view would be to say we herd around themes. 

This WARC article does a great summary of the key themes I see frequently.

The changing art of persuasion in a downturn

Laura James

There were a number of recurring themes throughout the day, but three were most prominent. First, the traditional “persuasion” model of advertising is broken. Second, the industry is becoming data rich but insight poor. Third, the structure and process of creating advertising has changed little since the days of Mad Men (while the customer, in the real world, has moved on dramatically).

Just watched an interesting presentation on augmented reality which must be the next big thing that we will all get to have lots of fun with in the next few years.  For those of you who don't know it, the poster child is the GE work recently launched.

GE Augmented Reality – Plug In To The Smart Grid Just as Microsoft Surface was the pre-launch of gesture computing the iphone made real, the first baby steps of Cop Space are becoming a reality. In the presentation, the guys from Inition showed an example of a car on a road where the reflection of the dotted lines were reflected on the car itself and speeded up and slowed down with the car, based on the users movement of the paper.  Nice stuff. Made me think of a scifi classic, of course.  In SnowCrash by Neal Stephenson the protagonist, Hiro, visits a very powerful man in the book's virtual reality called the Metaverse.  He is ushered into the office and to Mr. Ng's pleasure, Hiro recognises the statement he is making much like a wealthy collector would hope a visitor notices a Miro casually hanging in the corner.

"You working with Fisheye?" Ng says, lighting up a cigarette. The smoke swirls in the air ostentatiously. It takes as much computing power realistically to model the smoke coming out of Ng's mouth as it does to model the weather system of the entire planet.

Don't forget the impact of great production values.  People recognise and respect quality.  It makes an impression.