Updated on December 26, 2017 For many people in the UK and elsewhere, today is the last working day before Christmas Day which falls on a Monday this year. I’ve spent most of today wrapping up work-related matters in order to have a clean slate, as it were, for the fast-approaching Christmas break. Like many of you, I’ll be largely in rest and relaxation mode until the first week of January in the New Year. Christmas is a time to…
Shel Holtz and I recorded the December edition of the monthly Hobson & Holtz Report podcast. It is the final FIR episode of 2017: FIR will return on January 8, 2018, in an all-new format. Listen to this episode for details! This month’s topics: A group of UK newspapers using robots to help write stories Research that found higher engagement for tweets that took advantage of the new 280 character count Storify, a great curation tool aimed at journalists, is…
2017 was the year that artificial intelligence (AI) generally gained a greater consciousness in the public mind as well as in the minds of many professionals, not the least being those in the broad communication business – especially public relations, advertising, marketing and employee communication. Every time we see a robot mentioned in the mainstream media, there’s either a photo of the Terminator or some human-looking machine which feeds our fear – adding to the uncertainty and doubt already in…
As the Small Data Forum progresses through its early teenage years – our latest podcast is episode 14 already – regular co-hosts Thomas Stoeckle, Neville Hobson, and Sam Knowles are taking the opportunity to look forward by looking back. Patients of our own medicine, you might say, we’re using the year end and what we’ve observed and learned in 2017 to enter the predictive analytics business. We take our inspiration from Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, transitions, and time,…
You can summarise what marketers think about fake news with this – they are ambivalent about what ought to change, and are reluctant to alter their own business practices. That’s a key finding from the results of an online survey-based research study carried out between August-November 2017 by The Society for New Communications Research of The Conference Board (SNCR). Led by SNCR Fellow Jeff Pundyk, a former Senior Vice President at The Economist, the prime purpose of the research project…
