Google’s shift from narrow casting to broadcasting.

Byrichard

Earlier this week Google decided that it would shift from subsidising narrowcasting content makers to favouring “broadcasters”. This was demonstrated with their shift towards rewarding content creators with higher requirements. In order to be a youtube partner, you need people to have viewed 4000hrs worth of content and have over 1000 subscribers.


A few years ago when you browsed Youtube you would easily browse through hundreds of videos before finding content worth watching. You would then browse and find more content. It was organic. 


In recent months I have noticed a shift towards the sensationalist and tabloid. Most headlines are now clickbait. As an experiment log out of Google and look at the top youtube content. 



Instead of seeing 16-30 videos you see ten videos. The content that they want you to see has been whittled down. This means that unless you have a big audience, clickbait titles and are already authoritative you will be invisible. The amateur aspect of Youtube is gone. It is being replaced by the authoritarianism of mass appeal. 


The Upside


There are hundreds of thousands of content creators that had accepted to have adverts as pre-roll, as banners or at the end of the videos. Google and Youtube no longer take advantage of the long tail.  Most of us create content that is seen a few hundred times and the revenue is minimal. Marketers still paid youtube for the visibility and youtube still made money off our backs. We were never going to see that money. It would have taken years for us to earn enough for an electronic transfer to be made. Youtube was the clear winner until they decided to stop making free money from us


The second upside is that we’re going to be able to browse videos and find acceptable content more easily until recently we were forced to watch from 5 seconds to two minutes of advert before watching five seconds and clicking away. Without adverts, we will see the video is mediocre and move on sooner. 


The opportunity


When youtube was young it provided a unique opportunity because it gave us “unlimited” space and bandwidth for the sharing videos. Neither of these is scarce anymore. The barriers to sharing videos on our websites have decreased. HTML5 and above, h.265 and H.264 make it lighter for us to upload and share video content from our own websites.


Conclusion


Youtube was a great place for browsing and finding interesting content to watch but as algorithms and populism took over the website so the ease with which we could find random interesting content has decreased. From 30 videos to choose
from we have gone to five per theme. Everything is so curated that we watch what the crowd watches. 

Gutenburg WordPress plugin
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Gutenburg WordPress plugin

Byrichard

The
Gutenburg Press Plugin provides a new way to write blog posts. Rather than write as if a blog post was a single block of text it breaks it up into segments or “presses” 



A few weeks ago a
Gutenburg Press was brought to the Palais
wilson and we had the opportunity to experiment with printing our own Universal Declaration of Human rights as part of the UDHR 70 event. In Gutenberg’s day you would have to typeset every letter character by character but for the sake of
speed we just had two slates as you see above. One version was in French and the second one was in English. It made duplicating a single page instant. 



Working with blocks speeds up the process of formatting posts because it allows for you to write each paragraph as a block of text and to insert images with ease.



As
twitter becomes more like a blog and as attention swings away from Facebook it is the perfect time for a project like Wordpress to diversify
it’s audience. As we have seen on the Wordpress.org front page they power 29 percent of websites. 



I would love to see us move back towards having websites, blogs and user-owned websites. I want to go back to when people enjoyed writing and sharing content without competing with hundreds of others. The beauty of a blog, as opposed to a Facebook, Linkedin or other posts, is that it can be multimedia rich. We can add images anywhere in the post and we can write information about them. We can share multiple videos at once and more



Using this plugin is a pleasure because everything you do is context sensitive. When you create a block you see what options you have. The tools you need appear when you need them as a result of which the experience is much cleaner. You can see the content you’re working on, rather than the tools. Writing software push that as a feature and now it will become a feature of Wordpress as standard.


I look forward to Writing many more posts with this plugin. 

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A theoretical Seven Minute Workout a day

Byrichard

Seven Minute Workout for 36 days

For about six weeks I have been trying to do at least one seven-minute workout every single day. I eventually fell out of the habit for a few days because I had to fight a little virus. I’m feeling better again. Time to see if I can beat my old maximum of 36 days.

At least one circuit a day

The Seven-minute app I was playing with is by Perigee. The app provides you with the opportunity to train for fitness, for strength or to lose weight. I tried to last for seven days on the Fitness program and suffered. I managed to stick with the routine for a week once as a challenge. Now I choose the routine that I feel I am most in the mood for. On some days I choose a stretching routine and on others I choose to push myself. I tried a chest workout and I found it hard. Yesterday I went for an animal routine and it was easy.

Workout to your day’s energy level

The beauty of these apps is that as you get familiar with them you can give yourself different intensity workouts depending on the time of day and how you’re feeling. You can start with one of the morning routines if you like or an office chair workout. When you’ve finished with a run you can stretch or you can do the post workout routine.

Chose the trainer

I tried the drill sergeant for a while but he frustrated me so I tried the hippie and the kung fu master (or whatever name they used for the app). I have settled for the cheerleader. If I met someone that cheerful in real life I’d probably avoid them but for the workouts it’s nice. I’m usually working out either an hour before bed or more recently before dinner. This is the best time when I can decompress from the commute.

Complimentary

These workouts are complimentary to the rest of my day. I have started training with the c25k app once again and I’m trying not to push too hard. Eventually I want to get to 10km runs and beyond but only when my body can keep up. During week days I walk at least 2 and a half kilometres to work and back as well as walk during my lunch break. Today was an average day and I walked up the equivalent of fifty floors. The 7 minute app is just a bonus.

Motivation

I’ve tried a few of these apps and after less than a week I usually stop using them because they’re either too expensive or they’re a good challenge but not much more. With this app I like that you get badges for the challenges you accomplish. I My goal with this app is to go for seven months without missing a single workout. I managed for 36 days and now I have to start all over. I’m on day 8 of the current challenge. When I finish typing this blog post I will have accomplished day 9.

If you threw in some running between workouts then it would be just like parkour vita. That’s what they should do next.

12 exercises with three or four minutes of running between routines. By the end, you’d be exhausted. With perseverance, you’d be fit. Or you could just do crossfit.

 

 

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A book on Sleep and Sleep Tracking Apps

Byrichard

Why We Sleep

Sleep is something that we do almost every day and yet explore it only superficially. We either say “I should go to sleep” or “I wish I had slept longer”. Recently I read “Why We Sleep”. It’s an interesting book because it explores the topic in such depth. I learned that birds sleep on power lines and the birds on the right and the left of the group are sleeping with one eye open. Half of their brain is sleeping whilst the other half is awake. Half way through the sleep cycle they hop around and the other eye is opened and that half of the brain takes over. Sleep is a fascinating topic.

Sleep As Android

I have been playing with two apps for over a year now. One of these is Sleep As Android. When I first started using this app it required being placed in the bed to detect when I moved. Over time they developed technology so that it uses “sonar” to detect when we move during the night. Thanks to the “sonar” feature I can keep the phone up to a metre away from me.

I might have tracked up to 576 nights of sleep with this app. With this app I can see the duration, the irregularity, how much of my sleep cycle is deep, how efficient it is and how I rate it. It shows my how bad or good my sleep deficit is and what my chronotype is. According to the app I am a morning lark.

This app gives advice. This app believes that to maximise sleep I should go to sleep at 23:15 and that to maximise deep sleep I should sleep 8hrs 10.

Sleep Cycle

Another app I have played with extensively is Sleep Cycle. I used this app to track my sleep for several hundred nights of which six months was whilst working as an aircraft deicer. This is relevant because I was trying to go to sleep for 1800 and waking for 2am. Of course, I usually went to sleep around 2000 or so. I mention this because if any sleep specialists read this blog I am ready to share the data. Since then I have gone back to sleeping more pleasant hours.

This app provides you with a sleep graph per night, the time you went to bed and got up, sleep quality, time with noise, sleep notes, wake up mood, heart rate, step count and total nights tracked. I have tracked 303 nights of sleep with the app.

When you look at the trends tab you can see sleep quality and you can compare it with entire countries. You can track how regular your “went to bed” graph is, how much time you spent in bed, the time at which you woke up, what factors result in better sleep, decreased sleep, weather effect, air pressure, moon and location. You can also track your heart rate when you wake up. My average is currently 47 bpm, average in Switzerland is 67, Denmark, 65 and Turkey 73. The heart rate measurement comes from shining light through your finger and the phone detecting the change in colour per heartbeat.

Apparently, my best night of sleep is on a Tuesday and it gets progressively worse as the week wears on.

 

Finding time for Long-Form Writing and Other Pursuits.
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Finding time for Long-Form Writing and Other Pursuits.

Byrichard

Finding time for Long Form Writing

This morning I read twenty percent of a book whilst sitting in the car waiting for shops to open. In the process I occasionally looked up to see private jets and airlines fly over me. A few years ago in the same situation I would have been staring at my phone. I would have been refreshing twitter and Facebook looking for conversations. These days social media marketers and others are using social media as if they were Really Simple Syndication feeds, RSS. The problem with RSS feeds is that there a low signal to noise ratio. You need to skip hundreds of pieces of content for one or two worthwhile posts.

Highest Return on Investment for Social Media

When I finished university in London I had an extremely high return on investment for the time spent with twitter, Facebook and social networks. I was invited to events, to alpha projects and establishing friendships that last to this day. When I left London Facebook and twitter were still sticky because I was able to keep in contact with friends in a diversity of geographic locations. We’re the easyjet generation after all.

Flooded with content rather than Conversation

For several months now I have been spending less and less time with social media, not because my desire to socialise has gone down but because the success rate has suffered. News organisations, celebrities, personalities and brands are flooding social media with content rather than conversation. Facebook and Twitter have algorithms to make sure that brand and paid for content is seen a dozen times. A consequence is that we don’t see conversations. Not seeing conversations negates the purpose of social media.

Back to Passive pass-times.

Without conversations on social media we can go back to reading books, playing computer games, watching television series, blogging and more. The reason we came to social media was to socialise. The reason we cut down on social media is that like the bars, pubs and playgrounds of our childhood people have moved on. Some are in their marriage bubble, others are focused on their career and yet more are enjoying sports.

This year I will try to finish at least one book every two weeks. I will try to go on multi-day hikes every single weekend and more. We can also go back to reading and writing blog posts.

A missed opportunity.

When I was in London and we were living the golden age of social media I almost started to believe that social media adoption rates were increasing so much that they would be a great way to meet people who lived within walking or driving distance. For a moment being an online introvert was fruitious. over time of course engagement decayed and social media stopped being a practical place for introverts to meet up. Commercialism turned social media into the same competition as the Physical world.