This week is about how we read and understand the world.
I lost the reference, but this week I found an idea that said our brain is more than what’s inside us, it is also our tools, our notes, and our ways to solve problems.
This translates well into the websites and social media we use everyday. For better or worse they are a way to scan the horizon for opportunities and new ideas. If we don’t curate the content we consume in some way, we ourselves can be consumed by the algorithm and truly be turned into mere pawns. “Marketing as Control of Human Interfaces and Its Political Exploitation”
We also know that there is one thing in common with every social network in the last 10 years, information is slashed into bite size. Context is the first one to die. Journalists are encouraged to write for clicks and pageviews, some media even have a policy not to link to other websites.
There are of course exceptions to this rule and one of them is The Pudding. This is a digital publication that turns data into stories and presents them in beautiful visualisations.
This monday, they announced their winners for the Pudding Cup, the best visual and data-driven stories of the year. The winner was Jess Carr with an essay called “Does Vogue hate text?”
Jess shows us how the amount of information on the cover decreased in the last 22 years. Maybe this trend of bite-sizing everything isn’t just happenning on social media. Countering this trend, Jess published links for the data and sources at the end of the essay. That, plus all the context given to the data in the essay, makes this a remarkable form of journalism.
Others fighting the bite-sized content trend
This is where I will shoot myself in the foot.
While I have been sharing the tools and AI shortcuts, Stephen Waddington was publishing #FUTUREPROOF focusing on using AI tools for Public Relations. The book is available on Amazon.
A while back, Philippe Borremans also published his book, “Mastering Crisis Communication with ChatGPT - A Practical Guide”.
Your AI tools for this week
Since we are touching on the topic of data and visualisation, this week we have 3 tools to query data.
https://www.morphdb.io/ promises you will “Stop Sweating over Spreadsheets” by offering cross-source analysis in plain, natural language.
https://github.com/run-llama/rags, Build ChatGPT over your data, all with natural language. This is an open source project and a lot of assembly is required.
https://www.streak.com/ai, CRM, data entry, insights, and tailored suggestions to help your team make informed decisions.
I have been looking into these tools and how they can integrate with a company’s data. Soon it will surely be a part of services provided through the Lisbon Collective.
