This Week - Aug 16, 2013
All in all, I quite like this trend. Stories have the same goal as advertisements, albeit achieved in a more roundabout way, but I don’t get supersaturated with stories, the way I do with ads. Provided their origin is clearly displayed, I don’t see any issue. There is the question of: if product companies create good stories, what will become of the (already beleaguered) content companies?
— Authenticity™ (Claire Willett)
'As you grow in size, most companies assume you lose that start-up culture inevitably,' Libin said. 'But it's not that you lose it. It's that you explicitly have to pay for it. You have to explicitly put in the effort not to lose those benefits. It is not inevitable that you cease to be a start-up. But if you don't do anything, you will.'
— How I Made It: Evernote CEO Phil Libin (LA Times)
Conventionally, it’s been suggested that there are only two real solutions to the piracy problem: either we accept the Free Economy, or we use the legal system to crack down on piracy (remember how that turned out?). Elmo’s alternative is educating consumers, in the hope that it will lead to reform. I think that’s overly wishful. If we want to push people away from the Free Economy, the reality is that we have to play to their self-interest. We need a carrot as well as a stick.
— Moving away from ‘free culture’ (Connor Tomas O'Brien)
Think about it: in an ad impression-and pageview-driven business, a service that allows users to opt out of the noise and get content delivered directly to them is dangerous. When the common practice for bloggers is to publish first, verify second, the paper trail of Google Reader can be an embarrassment. And when sites do everything they can to hook you and increase the critical “time on site” metric or hit you with retargeting cookies, off-site RSS Readers once again stand in the way.
— Our Regressive Web (Ryan Holiday)
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