SEO is riddled with myths like overvaluing keywords, backlinks, and content length. Success lies in focusing on user intent, creating valuable content, and adapting to changes. Stop chasing shortcuts and diversify your strategy, as Google prioritizes its own interests over yours. Build genuine authority and deliver what users need for lasting results.
My advice to any writer looking to start a new site based on the newsletter model would be to consider Substack *last*, not first.
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
I’ve always been a maker at heart—someone who loves to bring ideas to life. When AI exploded, I saw a chance to create something new and meaningful for solo designers. But making Griffin AI was only half the battle…
About a year ago, a few months after GPT-4 was released and took the world by storm, I worked on several AI features at Convex. One was a straightforward email drafting feature but with a twist. We incorporated details we knew about the sender—such as their role and offering—and the email recipient, as well as their role plus info about their company’s industry. To accomplish this, I combined some prompt engineering and data from our data providers, shaping the responses we got from GPT-4.
Playing with this new technology was incredibly fun and eye-opening. And that gave me an idea. Foundational large language models (LLMs) aren’t great yet for factual data retrieval and analysis. But they’re pretty decent at creativity. No, GPT, Claude, or Gemini couldn’t write an Oscar-winning screenplay or win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, but it’s not bad for starter ideas that are good enough for specific use cases. Hold that thought.
“The Spotify model” got a bunch of companies talking like Taylor Swift about startup culture, but four former Spotify employees reveal the truth: its eponymous way of working failed before it scaled.
Yesterday Apple announced its third-generation iPad, simply named “iPad.” Buried in MG Siegler’s excellent take on the press event is this statement:
What's more likely — 5 years from now, your primary home computing device is a PC? Or 5 years from now, your primary home computing device is a tablet? Just two years ago, this question would have been an absolute joke. Now it's a joke to think it will take a full five years.
In the post-PC world, tablets are becoming the new normal more and more. In just the two years since the iPad was first introduced, we’ve seen it pervasive on airplanes to entertain children, many executives in Silicon Valley walking around with them instead of lugging laptops, and even the President of the United States receiving his Presidential Daily Briefing via iPad instead of a sheet of paper.
There’s been a lot of chatter in recent weeks about how so-called “digital” agencies are or are not ready to be the lead for a campaign. But I think the question is a little off.
Instead the question should be “Why are clients splitting up campaign work based on tactic?”
Despite the maturing of digital agencies such as Razorfish (for whom I work), R/GA and AKQA, today’s clients are still sending digital work to digital agencies and traditional work to traditional agencies. And equally bad is having a third company plan and buy their media (sometimes there’s a traditional media agency and a digital one). Why is this bad?
OK, the end-zone is down that way 50 yards! Make sure you talk to each other along the way. Now go! [Download PDF]
In the age of digital and social media, and in the age of realtime marketing, what matters more? The big idea or the smaller idea and execution?
Many digital agencies have been experimenting with new ways of working to try to get at those ideas and executions that a traditional agency couldn’t dream of. I was working at Organic when we rolled out the “Three Minds” initiative, meaning that for every brainstorm, we needed to have at least three people from three disciplines in the room. This is similar to what Big Spaceship has been trying to do by throwing together teams of creatives, strategists, technologists and production.
Digital agencies think that this is a point of differentiation. They think that online, social and viral are so complex that they need all this brainpower to figure it out. What ends up happening when you put a technologist and/or producer into a room with creatives? Executions. It’s a natural and inevitable thing. And I believe it’s a distraction from getting to a better and bigger idea.
I believe that when you add in people whose jobs are to make things (technologists build, producers produce, etc.) too early in the creative process, before the idea is baked, you shortchange the idea. The idea becomes smaller and less compelling.
A couple of weeks ago, I happened upon a site called crowdSPRING. I forget exactly how I got to the site, but what I found there made me feel a little icky and left a bad taste in my mouth. I wrote a tweet about it (which in turn updated my Facebook status) and many of my designer friends had strong negative reactions too.
Stepping back a bit, what is crowdSPRING? It’s a website that allows companies to post briefs for design projects (mostly logos and websites), with the expectation that dozens if not hundreds of designers from around the world will post their solutions to those projects. Finished solutions. Not portfolios, resumes or even sketches. But the finished logo, website comps, CD packaging design, etc.
Why the ick factor? It took me a few days to process it internally, but I eventually came to this conclusion: the site sucks time away from thousands of budding designers. They are all working for free. Only the lucky ones whose solutions get chosen are paid. Imagine if you ate dinner at five different restaurants and only paid for the one dinner you liked? That is what’s happening on crowdSPRING: free work.
This Forbes article talks about pushback from the design community. I’ve long been against spec work. It’s just plain wrong from the free work angle as I’ve already illustrated. The AIGA has also had a long-standing policy against spec work because in their mind it compromises the quality of the work. How? Company asks for free submissions; young, inexperienced and unqualified designers submit solutions; established professionals stay away. That is a recipe for sub-standard creative work. Or how about designer Mark Boulton’s argument that spec work is bad for business? “Architects are invited to submit bids, proposals and designs for prestigious competitions. The winner gets the contract and the glory. The losers get nothing; the work is conducted speculatively.”
