Hey, it’s nearly the weekend!

After travelling a lot in the last few weeks, this week I’ve just been in Brighton, which means I had time to write the penultimate episode of my Attention Matters series on how to build a prototyping culture. We’ve been working a lot with clients recently on how to build prototypes and pilots, so it’s been good to capture and share what we’ve learnt over the years. After next week’s final episode, I’ll take a couple of weeks off to plan the next Attention Matters series. If there’s a subject or issue you’d like us to explore in the world of attention, audience behaviours and B2B marketing, then let me know by hitting reply!

Right then - here’s ten carefully curated links of ideas and lovely things to take you into the weekend. If you find it useful, please share it with your friends!

Matt

Incredible Photographs of Arctic Icebergs (Photo Gallery)

How Conde Nast Grows Their Audience Funnel (5-min read)

Why You Should Choose Your Metaphors With Care (4-min read)

Magic Cards and Knowledge Bottles (8-min read)

TIME Magazine’s 100 Best Podcasts (Epic List)

Who Is Watching All These Podcasts? (5-min read)

POST: A New Artist Space In Brighton (Kickstarter Campaign)

Every Wes Anderson Film, Explained By Wes Anderson (56-min watch)

Do People Click Links On AI Summaries? (5-min read)

Bob Ross Baseball Cards (Topps Card Launch!)

Don’t become a B2B zombie. STAY HUMAN.

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Incredible Photographs of Arctic Icebergs (Photo Gallery)
I saw these photos via the ever excellent Kottke. The whole gallery is incredible, but towards the end of the Greenland section there’s a couple of images of two huge icebergs that floated towards a tiny village. Just awe-inspiring!

How Condé Nast Grows Their Audience Funnel (5-min read)
If you’ve not come across The Audiencers before, I’d strongly recommend a subscribe. In this write up from their Festival in June, Sarah Marshall, the VP of Audience Strategy at Condé Nast, explains how they use specific format and channel strategies to acquire, retain and build habits with their audiences. Lots of good strategic info here.

Why You Should Choose Your Metaphors With Care (4-min read)
I wrote a mini-rant on a slack channel yesterday about why I hate people using cities as metaphors for the web, triggered by Hamish from Substack’s latest bloviation. And then, just a few minutes later, Hugh posted this excellent LinkedIn post by Richard Shotton about why we need to choose our metaphors carefully. I agree 100% that too many business and tech leaders use war metaphors without thinking about how crass that is.

Magic Cards and Knowledge Bottles (8-min read)
Talking of metaphors, I like this story about how Steven Johnson used the metaphor of ‘Knowledge Bottles’ with the team at Google when they were developing Notebook LM’s curated notebooks. Johnson is really on to something interesting with how he’s using AI to augment thinking and writing, and I love this quote from Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson: "The books of the future won’t just be static. Some will talk to you, some will evolve with you, and some will exist in forms we can’t imagine now."

TIME Magazine’s 100 Best Podcasts (Epic List)
Best-of lists are just catnip, aren’t they? We know why publishers do them, we know they are supposed to create disagreement and debate, but we still love them. Anyway - this is the latest one causing fevered argument in the chat groups, Slacks and Discords I’m on. My take - obviously far too US centric. The word podcast was invented by a Brit, remember!

Who Is Watching All These Podcasts? (5-min read)
Talking of which, we know that video podcasts are popular, but are people actually watching them? Turns out the answer is ‘maybe not’. As we discovered in our Scroll Stoppers research a few years ago, people are doing many things at once. I love this quote from a video podcast fan in this piece “I don’t have the ability to watch the entire thing through, but I do my glance downs if I hear something funny. It’s passive a little bit.” That’s the current state of media and attention right there - ‘passive a little bit’.

POST: A New Artist Space In Brighton (Kickstarter Campaign)
Both Anjali and I were on the board of the excellent Photoworks in Brighton at various times, and fellow board member and Photographer Simon Roberts is one of the duo behind this campaign to a launch a new space for lens-based artists in Brighton. It’s a tough time for arts spaces in the UK right now, so give them your support if you can! There’s some fantastic rewards, and only six days left to pledge!

Every Wes Anderson Film, Explained By Wes Anderson (56-min watch)
I haven’t had a chance to watch this yet, but as exactly the kind of insufferable arty media nerd who loves Wes Anderson’s films, I’ll be watching this at the weekend. It’s nearly an hour long, so fits with the post above about video podcasts. As we’ve said for years at Storythings - attention patterns haven’t got shorter - they’ve got shorter and longer.

Do People Click Links On AI Summaries? (5-min read)
This Pew Center Research into how AI summaries are changing search behaviours has got a lot of commentary this week. The key stat most people are drawing from it is that only 8% of people click on a link with an AI summary, compared to 15% without AI summaries. But I urge you to look further into the research, and in particular the bit about what sites AI sends users to. Wikipedia, Government sites, Youtube and Reddit are the winners. The future of the web will be AI interfaces and a just a couple of huge archives.

Bob Ross Baseball Cards (Topps Card Launch!)
As well as being an insufferable arty media nerd, I’m also a massive baseball fan, player and coach. So this collaboration between Topps Cards and the Bob Ross estate is right up my street. I’ll repeat my “painting the corners” gag from the image caption above, for the benefit of our US readers and the few fellow UK baseball fans. If you need an explanation, hit reply.

And there we are! Lots of insight into user behaviours, the future of AI and the web, great podcasts, giant icebergs and niche sporting collectibles. Just what you’d expect from the team at Storythings.

If you’ve read this far, you’re clearly liking what we’re doing, so please share it with your friends, or hit reply to let us know what we could do better. As a thank you, here’s the track I shared in response to our Storythings team question this week - what is your favourite summer song?

See you next Friday!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh and the rest of Team Storythings