Where Upendra Shardanand posts occasionally.
As of last November, Daylife’s API now serves 1 billion queries a month. To put that in perspective, Bing’s API does 3 billion calls a month. Google does 120 billion calls a month across 60 different APIs, but they do have a decade and an IPO on us…
Congratulations to the phenomenal team at Daylife!
Another guest column up on paidcontent.
TechCrunch says it’s The End of Handcrafted Content.
It may seem that way, because the art of storytelling is being disrupted. Disrupted by social and community. The melding of text, photography, video, and flash. The real-time web, algorithms, and data analysis. Readers in control of the navigation and interaction.
Storytellers online can’t tell stories the same way they did on print and expect it to be compelling. The analytics showing the one-pageview-per-visit for articles prove that.
The real problem is that storytellers are using the same authoring tool to write stories for the web that they use for print. A text editor. For those in print businesses, they are particularly handcuffed since they need the same tool to publish to two places – print and the web. So the tools force the authors to create “print” experiences online.
For the savvy and telling stories only online, they are armed with a text editor, and a hodge podge of other tools cobbled around it, but that hodge podge hasn’t really helped to make a beautiful, integrated web experience that takes full advantage of the capabilities of the medium.
But it’ll get there. What’s needed are tools for storytelling that let the authors have directly control over the output, and interact with it as it evolves. Tools that let editors create and curate immersive, integrated, beautiful experiences that seamlessly blend content, community, algorithms, and analytics.
Hand-crafted content will be more live than ever – once the tools are there for the hands to do their work.
A fine piece about Daylife by Gillian Reagan in the New York Observer:
Perhaps RoboCop “writers” building information aggregators will be all that’s left in media’s post-apocalyptic future. Or maybe they just need to be armed with the latest technology artillery to fight for a better future.
A panorama shot of an amazing work in Dumbo.
In the spirit of my last PaidContent column, this piece in the NYT:
At Harvard and other top business schools, there has been an explosion of interest in ethics courses and in student activities — clubs, lectures, conferences — about personal and corporate responsibility and on how to view business as more than a money-making enterprise, but part of a large social community.
However, it seems only 20% of the graduating class has taken an oath to act responsibly, ethically and refrain from advancing their “own narrow ambitions” at the expense of others.
And the other 80%? Seems a worthwhile interview question next time I interview a Harvard MBA.
From the New York Times Magazine, The Case for Working With Your Hands:
A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.Reconceiving value creation depends on new ideals. Ideals shape what we wish to achieve in the first place: freedom, peace, fairness, justice – all are ideals vastly more powerful than mere business models. That’s because they are what ensure the value we are creating is authentic, deep, meaningful value – not just the shabby, threadbare illusion of value.
