A wise person recently told me that, statistically, a person is more likely to die in an aeroplane crash than click on a banner ad. As I’m writing this month’s column on a long-haul flight to San Francisco, this is something I’m hoping not to be true.

It is the case that display ads are woefully ineffective - just witness the average CTR of a banner ad: 0.2% in 2012 (down from 9% in 2000). Indeed, the death of display advertising has been declared so many times, it’s astonishing it still has a pulse.

Mel Exon, jemi.ma/1aVMZtY (via thisjem)
Indiscriminate sharing is a bad idea. A large social network isn’t the best way to find information. We need to go back to smaller communities. Where people aren’t lost in the mediocre averages of large networks. That’s where ideas flourish.
The Facebook experiment has failed. Let’s go back. — A Programmer’s Tale (via apoplecticskeptic)

(via apoplecticskeptic)

New deck workflow: iA Writer > TextEdit > Keynote

Here’s a dry (but useful) post detailing the method I use to create slide decks - a simple flow that means you can focus entirely on structure up front before worrying about formatting (always a killer when you’re on a tight deadline).

Here it is:

  1. Open iA Writer and create an outline using markdown, like this (single line spacing, double dashes for each bullet):

    # Section Header

    - Slide 1 Header

    — Slide 1 Bullet 1

    — Slide 1 Bullet 2

    - Slide 2 Header

    — Slide 2 Bullet 1

    — Slide 2 Bullet 2

  2. When you’re done Export (⇧⌘E) to RDF
  3. Open the RDF in TextEdit, copy all
  4. Open Keynote, click View > Outline
  5. Create a new slide (⇧⌘N) using the Title & Bullets master
  6. Paste directly into the outline - make sure you use Paste and match style (⌥⇧⌘V)
  7. Now, and only now, worry about formatting

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