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Her goal was never merely to change corporate behavior. It was to change the entire economic system. As she sees it, the newfound emphasis on selling authenticity is just further evidence of capitalism’s ability to co-opt dissent and exploit seemingly subversive niches. Reform is always the enemy of revolution, and any change that maintains the overall status quo is to be viewed with suspicion. Writing about branding was only an excuse to talk about politics, and what led Klein to re-engage with the discourse of marketing after 10 years was the emergence of Barack Obama, the first U.S. president who is also a “superbrand.

Enter Demon’s Souls, a game that claims to be a role-playing game but that’s missing many key traits of that genre. There’s almost no story to speak of, and the mere act of character progression has become so common that it’s no longer identified as an “RPG element.” There’s very little strategy involved in combat (it’s more about timing and pattern recognition), making patience a tactic that works every time. As I play through Demon’s Souls, RPG is that last genre that comes to mind.

Currently, Microsoft's development guidelines tell developers and publishers that the optimum time to release DLC is "within the first 30 days" of a game's release. The problem with that though is that it's not enough time to gather enough data about the audience's behavior and then generate content that reflects it. Content delivered in the first month has to be pretty much finished and sitting in the first party approval queue before the actual game comes out. So right now, that first bunch of DLC we see for something is usually based on a hunch, rather than the way we actually play. For some games that appeal to specific tastes, that's easier (I guess) to anticipate. But as games are increasingly under pressure to achieve monstrously huge sales, the whole system will have to change.

The institutions will transform faster than we can keep pace. Between the cracks of our existing educational infrastructure will grow varied species of educational delivery the likes of which we have never seen and cannot possibly forecast. What our students will need is a love of learning but we should not mistake this for an easy love affair. A love of learning is a hard relationship. Learning hurts sometimes. Learning is scary most of the time. It’s impact is all-too-often proportional to its agony. As Benjamin Franklin described it, “Those things that hurt, instruct.

Social media is inherently social, public, and mostly free. And the smartest people in the industry are also inherently social, public, and give away a lot of amazing insight and information for free. Everything you need to know about social media is already available for you, filtered by millions of readers, and optimized from many years of other people’s trial and error. And everyone you need to know to help you learn and apply this knowledge is already willing to engage with you, and help you learn it.

most "social media" strategies have one or more of three goals: to "push product," "build buzz," or "engage consumers." None of these lives up to the Internet's promise of meaning. They're just slightly cleverer ways to sell more of the same old junk. But the great challenge of the 21st century is making stuff radically better in the first place — stuff that creates what I've been calling thicker value.

Organizations don't need "social media" strategies. They need social strategies: strategies that turn antisocial behavior on its head to maximize meaning. The right end of social tools is to help organizations stop being antisocial. In fact, it's the key to advantage in the 2010s and beyond.

Children used to actually talk to their friends. Those hours spent on the family princess phone or hanging out with pals in the neighborhood after school vanished long ago. But now, even chatting on cellphones or via e-mail (through which you can at least converse in paragraphs) is passé. For today’s teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friendship seems to be conducted increasingly in the abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant messages, or through the very public forum of Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins.

Twitter represents 100 million people who are freely sharing their thoughts with the rest of the world (you don’t need to be “following” someone or logged in to access >99% of tweets), but these thoughts are refined to 140 characters, and typically aren’t very intimate. Facebook, on the other hand, gives you no-holds-barred access to the personal information of your friends, but this group usually doesn’t exceed 1,000 people. And so we’ve ended up with two very different treasure troves of data: a little information from a lot of people in Twitter, and a lot of information from only a few people — from a given user’s perspective at least — in Facebook.

These days we have to contend with the creeping power of what can only notionally be defined as media "content"--produced purely to appear at the top of search results. But it appears that the (so far) still entirely human-filtered paradise of Twitter may come to the rescue. Owing to the short path length between any two users, news travels fast in the tweet-o-sphere.

Earlier work suggested that the best way to get noticed on Twitter was to tweet at certain times of day, and Kwak et al.'s paper sheds some light on why this is the case: "Half of retweeting occurs within an hour, and 75% under a day." And it's those initial re-tweets that make all the difference: "What is interesting is from the second hop and on is that the retweets two hops or more away from the source are much more responsive and basically occur back to back up to 5 hops away."

The Twitter archive, which was “born digital,” as archivists say, will be easily searchable by machine — unlike family letters and diaries gathering dust in attics.

As a written record, Tweets are very close to the originating thoughts. “Most of our sources are written after the fact, mediated by memory — sometimes false memory,” Ms. Taylor said. “And newspapers are mediated by editors. Tweets take you right into the moment in a way that no other sources do. That’s what is so exciting.”