Hey there,

Another week has gone by - if, like us, you’re also inching forward to the close of work next week for the holidays, hang in there! There’s a lot to like about the festive season, so hopefully you’re finding cheer along the way.

This week we had the last of our team Away Days for the year. In 4-5 hours, in teams of 3, we developed and produced story prototypes based on a short field trip around the city of Brighton that we did in groups. From an audio-visual story about a very interesting sculpture on the beach, to podcast pilots about the psychology of sound and the history & mystery of a landmark institution like the Brighton Dome, it was a lot of fun and reminded us that storytelling skills, like most skills, need to be constantly practised. We’re pretty proud of what we produced - stay tuned to know where you can have a look or listen!

This season of giving, why not visit the Best Little Museum Shop and help fund the Flickr Foundation if you’re looking for gifts for the art enthusiast amongst your friends or family? Or perhaps you’d like some screenprints from Magpie Printworks, by friend of Storythings Matt Jones?

Anjali

The New Rules of Media (7-minute read)

No Such Thing: The Podcast for Dumb Arguments (10-minute read)

On Specificity (2-minute read)

Why The iPod Remains Popular in The Age of Smartphones (5-minute read)

The History of Slipping on Banana Peels (33-minute watch)

‘Big Advertising’ Needs To Think Small (9-minute read)

AI Godmother Fei-Fei Li Has a Vision for Computer Vision (7-minute read)

PocketFM: The Indian Audio Storytelling App With Global Ambitions (8-minute read)

Perfectly Imperfect: The Rizzler’s Favourites (1-minute read)

Play The ‘Open The Microwave’ Game (online game)

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The New Rules of Media (7-minute read)
We are big fans of Kyle Chayka’s book Filterworld at Storythings, and in this newsletter he gives us the truth about modern day media. If you, like us, are a subscriber of multiple newsletters and publications, you’ll find something of interest amongst the 20 points he chronicles: “Be vigilant. Break up with them before they can break up with you, whether it’s platforms, employers, or audiences.”

No Such Thing: The Podcast for Dumb Arguments (10-minute read)
I was not a listener of No Such Thing before, but having read this interview in Kate Lindsay’s Embedded newsletter, I might well become one. It sounds fun. In this newsletter episode, Kate interviews the creators of the podcast, Manny Fidel, Noah Friedman, and Devan Joseph. This one is, like the link above, a lovely meander through some key observations about media today. Kyle in the link above this one mentions a leftist alternative to Joe Rogan, which funnily enough is something Manny mentions here too: “I don't know if we necessarily agree that the left NEEDS a Joe Rogan, but I think penetrating that kind of content is a worthy cause.”

On Specificity (2-minute read)
Rishi Dastidar reminds us of the importance of using words with intention: “If you can paint a picture in someone’s mind, the image – and the words, and hopefully the intention behind them – are much more likely to stick.”

Why The iPod Remains Popular in The Age of Smartphones (5-minute read)
Storythings’ Chris Mitchell kicked off a fun chat on our Slack when he shared this link. Turns out more of us have iPods than you’d imagine! The reasons, as this Back Market blog post says, are many, but this one strikes me as accurate: “There’s a chunk of people who are tired of paying $10 a month to listen to music they don’t even own and are angry at paying a license fee to, well, essentially borrow songs. They want to take back control and have a musical library that’s truly their own.” 

The History of Slipping on Banana Peels (33-minute watch)
Jon Bois, creator of this neat documentary about banana peels, says it best 😃 : “Beware of banana peels. They are capable of inflicting great physical harm. Even worse, they might own you so badly that you'll need to make a 33-minute documentary about them several years later simply to purge yourself of the abject shame and humiliation.” More interesting for me, the video was funded by subscribers of Secret Base.

‘Big Advertising’ Needs To Think Small (9-minute read)
A good read from Jellyfish’s Tom Roach on the new era of effectiveness, and how it is important for anyone working in advertising - from brands to agencies to industry bodies and researchers - to champion the creation and measurement of new forms of advertising - which are now led by the creator economy - at least as much as the older, more traditional TV formats.

AI Godmother Fei-Fei Li Has a Vision for Computer Vision (7-minute read)
Stanford University professor Fei-Fei Li is a pioneer of AI, having worked for years to “create the ImageNet dataset and competition, which challenged AI systems to recognize objects and animals across 1,000 categories” as this IEEE Spectrum article says. Now she’s founded a startup called World Labs which generates 3D scenes that users can explore. In this interview, she explains why this is her focus: “I think spatial intelligence is where visual intelligence is going. If we are serious about cracking the problem of vision and also connecting it to doing, there’s an extremely simple, laid-out-in-the-daylight fact: The world is 3D. We don’t live in a flat world.”

PocketFM: The Indian Audio Storytelling App With Global Ambitions (8-minute read)
We came across PocketFM earlier this year, so this was an interesting read about the app which aims to be a big player in the creator economy - indeed it already is. It is “essentially a content mill for audio fiction and an example of what happens when a tech company dives into story production at scale and across cultural lines”, as this piece in The Verge says.

Perfectly Imperfect: The Rizzler’s Favourites (1-minute read)
If you didn’t know about New Jersey third grader The Rizzler, here you go - you’re welcome. But don’t stop there. As you go into the weekend, check out his newly released rap music video collaboration with toy store MGM - that is something else (take it with a pinch of salt, yeah)!!!

Play The ‘Open The Microwave’ Game (online game) 
Apropos of the fact that it’s the weekend and it’s been a long year, spend a few minutes trying to best my 9400 score on this browser-based game where you have to open the microwave door at exactly the right time!

And that’s it for this week. Sharing with your friends and colleagues is always appreciated. And if you have ideas of how we can improve it, we’d always love to hear from you!

Have a great weekend!

Hugh, Matt, Anjali and the rest of Team Storythings