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The beginning is almost never the most compelling or important part. It's just the bit you thought of first, based on your subjective chronology.

Signposting what you're going to write about is good, but starting with an exhaustive list of definitions is extremely boring.

Invoking paleolithic people is an overplayed way to convince us your topic is cosmically important.

Openings need tension – paradoxes, unanswered questions, and unresolved action

Good openings propose problems, pose questions, drop you into an unfinished story, or point at fundamental tensions within a topic. Ideally within the first paragraph or two.

"Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché ("Since the dawn of time"), not with a banality ("Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the questions of..."), but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity."A Sense of StyleStephen Pinker

Creating tension in non-fiction work is trickier because your story is (hopefully) constrained by reality. You are not at liberty to invent suspicious murders, salacious extramarital affairs, or newly-discovered-magical-powers to create tension and mystery. You have to deal with the plain, unexotic facts of the world.

Your job becomes much harder if you pick topics with no tension, problems, or puzzles within them. To paraphrase Williams, it is more of a failure to pose an uninteresting problem, than to poorly articulate an interesting one

Your interest in the topic is your best directional clue for finding the tension or interesting paradox. Your urge to write about the thing hopefully comes from a place of curiosity. You have unanswered questions about it. It feels important or consequential for unexplained reasons. You think you've seen things in it other people haven't. Pay attention to that interest.

Problems are a destabilising condition that has a cost for a community of readers that needs a solution. Destabilising condition is just a fancy word for “change” here – a change in the status quo. Put another way, a problem is an expected turn of events, that has undesireable consequences, for an audience who will care about it, that we want to explore solutions to.

Williams is speaking to a community of academic writers in his book. They're trying to present scientific and research problems in plain, objective language, which isn't necessarily what we want to do with narrative writing like blogging or personal essays. We have a little more liberty to put interesting padding around the change, consequences, and solution, such as telling an opening anecdote, or drawing readers in with characters, rich details, and sensory descriptions.

Williams suggests we try to state our problem and then ask a series of so what?'s to get at the underlying problem

For your writing to be worth reading, you need to be exploring something of consequence for someone

When McPhee writes, after first immersing himself in his raw material (field notes, interview transcripts, official documents) for weeks, he then draws a structure for the work. The structure lays out the major themes and scenes he'll work through, in the order that will make them most compelling and coherent.

Developing a structure requires navigating the tension between chronology and theme. Chronology is what we default to, but themes that repeatedly appear want to pull themselves together into a single place. The themes that really matter should be in your opening. Even if the moment that best defines them happens right before the end of the timeline.

Many case studies read to me like school homework: they knew what the answer and the process were “supposed to be” according to the textbook, so made up the story to fit. In reality, as you point out, it’s never smooth and linear. It’s messy and loopish. If you’re doing a good job, you rarely end up with anything remotely like you anticipated when you started out.

abandon your dogmatic and idealistic view of the design process, and keep learning about how flexible, messy, and beautiful it is.

I don’t speak about the “ideal” design process for a simple reason: it doesn’t exist. Design is never linear, and all projects are unique. The point is to show and explain your path from the kick-off to the final result in the portfolio.

If you tell a story, include the details and the things that didn’t work and how you adapted to overcome the problem, the design manager will empathise with you. For the five minutes it takes to read your case study, they’ll be in your shoes. It’ll remind them of all the times when they had similar problems and it’ll make them appreciate you and your struggles as a designer.

To quote Alexis Ohanian, “Pearpop is the marketplace for brand deals for anyone with an audience. I love my agency, UTA, but the traditional agency model cannot support the breadth and diversity of internet creators. There’s no way you can have agents in an office doing all those deals, nor should you. You want a marketplace for that, and that’s what Pearpop has built."

Many of the first users were successful artists/creators who wanted smaller influencers with highly engaged followings to share their content to extend their reach and awareness.

As Pearpop has grown, brands have been drawn to its ability to execute influencer activations directly in a quick, targeted, frictionless, hyper-localized, economically attractive manner. Pearpop’s self-serve marketplace is a win/win for creators and brands because it’s as simple for brands to find creators as placing a Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn ad.

The briefs go out as a type of casting call and brands are instantly/automatically paired directly with relevant creators. Brands can accept all that apply or specify to approve each influencer before they post.

“Brands play an absolutely critical role in the Creator Economy, and technology has the power to streamline access to the most relevant creators for a brand in the same way Uber and Airbnb streamlined access to cars or home rentals. As just one example, Pearpop shrinks the average time it takes to launch an influencer program from 6 weeks to 6 hours,” said Morrison.

Another aspect creators like is how easy it is to “get found” because of both the way they’re listed in the database, and how challenges are shared.

While the “Creator Economy” is experiencing hockey stick growth, the sad reality, is only about 1% of creators earn a living from their content. Social media platforms have been the primary beneficiaries.

The Wall St. Journal reported the top 1% of streamers on Twitch earn more than half of all streamer revenue, and the majority made less than $120 each in the first 3 quarters of 2021. In spite of that, the number of creators increased 48% in 2021

There are only so many degrees of freedom for users inside of these apps, which makes them simple to use. But this simplicity also strips away so much of the freedom we have during in-person interactions. You can type any message, but typing a message is all you can do. You can call any person, but talking directly into your camera is all you can do once you're connected. Without spatial interfaces, our current software doesn't give us much expressive control.

In social applications, spatial software has at least three advantages. These three advantages often overlap and bleed into each other.Afforded Intuition: Our natural understanding of space makes spatial software easier to use.Expressiveness: In a spatial interface, more degrees of freedom mean users can interact more creatively with software and with each other.Presence: In many spatial interfaces, we can sense other users through the presence of an avatar or figure.

The first hyperlinks pointed within their own domain, like the doors separating the rooms in your home. However, with the world wide web, the doors became portals, and pioneers mapped out site directories to guide internet travelers to the frontier of development. Reject modern interstates and embody Tarzan, Jane, or the chimpanzee to swing from link to link, blue to purple.

if you like handmade websites, you should visit Gossips Web or Brutalist Websites. These are the digital equivalent to the jazz bar, punk record store, or other physical places where subcultures gather. There’s likely one made by a devotee whatever your interest, like cyberfeminism, tiny internet sites, cozy websites, niche museums, list of lists, LA sandwiches, and much more.

my friend showed editorial work they’d done for various publications: beautiful illustrations that would accompany a feature article, a longform essay, or the like. They mentioned they didn’t really do that work any more, in part because of how tiring it was to constantly, quickly, ceaselessly produce concepts for each new piece.

our industry’s relentless investment in “artificial intelligence” means that every time a new Devin or Firefly or Sora announces itself, the rest of us have to ask how we’ll adapt this time. Dunno. Maybe it’s time we step out of that negotiation cycle, and start deciding what we want our work to look like.

I remember them talking about that work, and a phrase they used: “It requires you to be endlessly clever.”

Maybe one frame is through taking control of your own personal development and learning: after all “learning is the one thing your employer can’t take away from you”

Over the years we’ve seen the rise of bro-etry and cringe “thought leadership” and crying CEOs. When I scroll my feed I have to sidestep the clearly threadboi and #personalbrand engagement-farming posts and try and focus on the real content.

Networking is useful, but distasteful to many. Instead, participating in self-directed learning communities is networking

“Don’t become a marketing manager, become someone who knows how to run user research”