July 2015 - NevilleHobson.com

FIR #818: Do we really have to take emoji seriously?

Intro: New FIR Podcast Network show: the Fellows Circle debuts live on July 30; Quick News: Twitter deletes tweets on DMCA grounds; consolidation in the social media space; Residence Inns lures Millennials with booze, food trucks, and augmented reality; LinkedIn adds lead-generation tool to SlideShare; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: Do we really have to take emoji seriously?; Dan York’s Tech Report; Edward Snowden’s message to the IETF, Instagram brings search to the web, using Facebook author…

Tweeting a joke can be no joke

Reports emerged late last week that Twitter is deleting tweets that copy another tweeter’s jokes. The Verge reports on a writer’s request to Twitter to remove a tweet that used her content (a joke) without permission and thus infringed her intellectual property rights: I simply explained to Twitter that as a freelance writer I make my living writing jokes (and I use some of my tweets to test out jokes in my other writing). I then explained that as such,…

Windows 10 is just around the corner

In just a few days, on July 29, Microsoft will begin the public rollout of Windows 10 in 190 countries. If you want to upgrade your desktop or laptop computer, it’s a free upgrade in specific circumstances. Lifehacker has a simple flowchart that makes it quite easy to see if you qualify. The only difference to this chart is that Windows 8 won’t get you the free upgrade but Windows 8.1 will. According to Microsoft: The only requirements are that…

Is it time for a post-capitalism post-communism mashup?

Books on politics and political issues rarely capture my attention or my imagination. During the past decade, I have read just three books about politics, all biographies – Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Probably great fodder for Freudians who’d like to pop me in a pigeon-hole. Good luck with that! My own self-analysis of why these works did attract me tells me that each addresses times and experiences of significant change and, indeed, upheavals in society, in political…

FIR #817: Sarcasm poses a challenge in sentiment analysis

Sarcasm poses a challenge for computer algorithms in sentiment analysis: is relying on humans to make the final call the only way forward?; social by design: how Ogilvy leveraged the Chinese obsession for naming with an integrated advertising campaign for Visit Britain.