Cultural Digital #011Â with special guest Sam Scott Wood
Cultural Digital
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Hello
This week I'm handing over link-related duties to a special guest - Sam Scott Wood, Head of Digital at Cog Design. I'll be back next week. Enjoy!
That thing is a Raspberry Pi that's using sentiment analysis of Twitter's feelings about Christmas to make the lights twinkle on a Christmas tree. A project by Barney (and mentioned in one of the links below).
Guest links from Sam Scott Wood
So this is Christmas… and what have you done?
The internet seems to be mostly made up of end of year lists and reviews right now. From YouTube’s most watched videos of 2015 (mostly nonsense but the Love Has No Labels campaign video is great, to Twitter’s 2015 in review, and Pantone’s colour of the year (yes, that’s a thing). And if you fancy your own Year in review you can create your Spotify Year in Music.
Big Picture
Elsewhere, Martha Lane Fox has made her key digital recommendations for the NHS - it’s not rocket science but could easily be equally applied to the arts.
I think Tom Campbell of the Knowledge Transfer Network is spot on in his suggested Eight Great Creative Practices for the UK.
And I had one of those lightbulb moments listening to the NPR podcast on When Women Stopped Coding, thinking back to my own childhood.
And Big Data
I’m looking forward to Somerset House’s Big Bang Data exhibition which opened last week. Reviewed here by Creative Review.
Website design
How many of us are thinking about a purchase journey across multiple visits / devices? According to this research it takes an average 2.6 devices to achieve a conversion, which has big implications for how we think about and track user journeys on different devices.
I’ve been having a few Twitter conversations about enforced login for checkout lately. Of course it’s a massively useful data gathering tool with big potential for audience development, but I wonder whether we’re just creating another barrier to experiencing the arts by not giving users another option. This article makes a pretty good case for including checkout as guest.
Toys and gadgets
The fairly creepy Hello Barbie, which collects and stores kids’ audio online (and can report back their questions to their parents), has newly discovered security issues. It’s all fixable, but I think we’ll see similar stories about IoT devices before privacy and security standards and regulation catch up.
On the more positive side, if you’re looking for Christmas gifts and stocking fillers (or adding to your own wishlist) I enjoyed Guardian readers’ best (and worst) Raspberry Pi projects, and the Star Wars Google cardboard experience is kinda fun. It’s designed as an intro to VR - it’ll be interesting to see how widely it gets taken up.
And I haven’t tried it, but Google’s Cardboard Camera app for creating 360 degree VR immersive images looks pretty cool… (Android only).
Thanks, Sam!
Once again, you can find Sam on Twitter @samscottwood, with work-related updates here @cog_design.
I'll be back next week. In the meantime, thanks for reading.
Chris Unitt
@chrisunitt / LinkedIn
I work with cultural organisations on projects that involve digital strategy, content and analytics. Visit One Further or hit reply if you'd ever like to have a chat about that.