Links – 21st November 2008

My top 10 reads of the past week:

1. The Times published an absolutely fantastic article looking at neuroscience and how we can improve our brain performance. The writer pays short shrift to the DS Brain Training activities, for the sensible reason that this rewards recognition and repetition over learning. While we do not yet know a lot about our brain, the author exhorts us to work on improving oneself through a simple mantra: Pay Attention

2. On a neuroscience theme, Martin Lindstrom – author of Buyology – has an article on Advertising Age explaining why sponsorship of American Idol works for Coke but not Ford. Essentially, Ford has had trouble justifying its existence.

3. How intelligence can overcomplicate: Students trying to predict the stockmarket perform worse than a rat finding a piece of cheese. It is the conflict between striving for perfection (through modelling) or accepting a reasonable chance of success (Science Blogs)

4. Chris Anderson has conceded that the Long Tail argument is flawed, in that the number of aggregators providing the long tail of product options conform to powerlaws (think Google, Amazon or Netflix)

5. ETH Zurich have studied Youtube videos to try and work out what constitutes a successful upload. Their typology consists of viral, quality and junk videos – a more nuanced approach to my 4-video typology where viral constituted a single element (against reference, scheduled and topical) (Newteevee)

6. Engage Research and Global Market Insite have published a report saying that online surveys bore respondents. Quite. Unlike telephone or face to face interviews, online is restricted to the narrower range of those that opt-in. Therefore things need to be mixed up regularly in order to avoid a) burn-out and b) recognition of formats and patterns. (Brand Republic)

7. Fast Company has a profile of Sam Ewan – whom some people may refer to as a guerrilla marketing. I don’t particularly like the label, but I think the concept is fantastic – the levels of creativity in constructing a unique experience are limitless

8. A NY Times article looks at how industries change to survive e.g. one might predict the extinction of the bicycle with the advent of the automobile but that evidently wasn’t the case

9. Lifehacker tells us how to burn any type of video file to a playable video DVD

10. And finally, a triumvirate of brilliant little websites (OK I’m cheating in order to get a nice round figure of 10). Tag galaxy transposes Flickr searches to a galaxy of interrelated search items, the Charlian is a Charlie Brooker themed Guardian that came out of their hack day, and Let me Google that for you gives a visual display of searching to colleagues lazily shouting out a question when the answer is in front of them

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