Today we’re reading about the difference between the news and the account of the news, the story and the narrative that brings the news to its readers (“Collin Siedor was the best, most imaginative storyteller I ever worked with. The guy is simply a great writer… I recall a drowning in downtown Milwaukee one day that Collin covered. “The” story was the drowning, but Collin’s piece was how the event disrupted the normally peaceful lives of those who live and work along the river. The beauty here was that Collin’s story could be told in full fashion, within the context of the bigger story, and it’s a great illustration of the difference between “the” story and an account associated with it.”). In an age when anyone with a cellphone can be a news-collector, will the only differentiator be the ability to weave a compelling, ongoing narrative around the facts?
Then, a post on the Microsoft Careers blog on the three most “hot” career options in the tech industry: data mining, business intelligence and analytics. Having had first-hand experience of this, I think this is spot-on. A related post is Tim O’Reilly’s excellent “Data is the next Intel Inside” about the importance of data collection for the coming internet/mobile businesses (“”data is the Intel Inside”, and that many of the future battles between industry giants will be around who owns data, rather than who controls software APIs. In that battle, we’ll see deployed all kinds of techniques to “harness collective intelligence” to build added value databases of various kinds.”)
Finally, about something I’ve always found interesting: data persistence and data decay. Since authors in the digital age – whether individuals or institutions – pay for their own hosting, what happens to their writings when they die? (“Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.”)
In non-tech, The Economist (which has recently published a slew of good article on a variety of topics, some of which I’ll link to over the next few days), comments on how the second Congress administration (2009 – 2014) has let down the country. (“The government has brought almost none of the economic reform India needs. And it has done no more in other pressing areas, like infrastructure and health care, than its predecessor. It may even have jeopardised one of that government’s biggest achievements, a civil nuclear co-operation deal with America that was expected to lead to big investments in nuclear energy (with some provisions in the nuclear liability bill).”) Soon, it’ll be 20 years since the New Industrial Policy brought about much-needed reform across industrial sectors. That means 20 years of lamenting that the country hasn’t done any more after that brief spurt of activity.
Also, Shombit Sengupta (he of the sole Sunday op-ed column in the Indian Express that makes you smile) writes about three cases where his strategy consulting firm had to ‘unlearn’ several tenets it had taken for granted, to be able to succeed in Argentina, Bangladesh and Japan. ( for the “Reckitt and Colman product Robin Blue in Bangladesh, we conceptually prepared consumer interaction stimuli that had something called rebirth or rejuvenation of clothes that the product enabled… nothing interesting was emerging. Then one of the women respondents took me aside and advised me to stop talking about rebirth. Muslims consider it an insult to their religion… some people, hearing about rebirth discussions, were considering action against us for anti-religion marketing.”)
Finally, Hugh MacLeod (from back in 2007) on the Blue Monster poster that he designed for friends at Microsoft for fun, and which ended up getting a large amount of public endorsement from folks at Microsoft. (“Basically, Microsoft is in the world-changing business. If they ever lose that, they might as well all go home.”)