A study suggests that nearly half of Facebook users will never click on ads, making things less than favorable for those looking buy a piece of the site today.
With Facebook as one of the biggest tools for brands to connect with its fans, the number is quite jarring for companies that have invested the big bucks on Facebook advertising. Perhaps that’s why General Motors pulled $10 million worth of advertising from Facebook on Tuesday, citing that the service had not delivered effective results.
Digital Trends: Nearly half of Facebook users never click ads
Mapping Wikipedia is a groundbreaking visualisation of the world mapped according to articles in 7 different languages. The map displays both the global patterns and the vast number of geo-located items. The dataset was produced by the Oxford Internet Institute as part of a project that examines Wikipedia in the Middle East and North Africa.
Tracemedia: Mapping Wikipedia
Desktop publishing has given way to laptop or smartphone publishing. And Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing. Its document-formatting mission means that every piece of text it creates is thickly wrapped in metadata, layer on layer of invisible, unnecessary instructions about how the words should look on paper.
Slate Magazine: Microsoft Word is cumbersome, inefficient, and obsolete. It’s time for it to die.
Jeremy Deller does art outside galleries. It thrives in ‘low culture’ and it is usually ambitious, socially-engaged and unexpected. Indeed, most of his career is built on looking for art in the most unpredictable places, working with the public or with people who have particular knowledge or skill but who wouldn’t otherwise be associated with the contemporary art world. They include unemployed miners, brass bands, a campaign banner maker, fans of Depeche Mode, a glam rock wrestler, experts in battle re-enactments, etc. He even collaborated on an art project with nightclub owner and trendsetter Peter Stringfellow.
In late February, a retrospective of Jeremy Deller’s work opened at the Hayward gallery. It is called Joy in People and joy is precisely what it brings.
We make money not art: Jeremy Deller: Joy in People
Prolific coffee chain Starbucks has announced it intends to revamp its network of cafes to coincide with the Olympics and Queen’s Jubilee this summer, commencing with the chain’s 70 London outlets.
This will attempt to move away from the standardised approach taken thus far to pursue individually designed stores that fit in with their local neighbourhoods.
The Drum: Starbucks embark on store refresh ahead of the Olympics
Skeuomorphism is often rejected on the grounds of taste (“it looks tacky”) or generates despondence from its shackling of digital interfaces to old metaphors. The latter offends for two reasons: the resulting interfaces are limited by their chains, and the approach is inherently backwards-looking. I can imagine similar views being expressed in architecture and art quite easily.
Tom Hume: If it’s walking like a duck, it should quack