BlogSat

These are my favorite examples of unintended consequences that I happened to walk someone through last week. Years ago, in a coffee shop, I was listening to someone at the next table (yea, I know eavesdropping on phone conversations is bad, but people should be less loud :-P) confidently telling their friend/client, "Trust me. You need to make the YouTube videos longer - over 15 mins. That's what they prioritize. Just drag out the content."  I couldn't help grinning. I'd recently stopped working at YouTube then, and so while I knew that person was not exactly right, they were not completely wrong either.  It's conventional logic now among the creator community that you do better on YouTube if your videos are longer. It's why when you search for [Peppa Pig] on YouTube for you kids, the first few videos you get are either long-running livestreams or videos that are an hour long, and if you're listening to music you can often end up in a compilation video...

The Internets reminded me that today was exactly 2 years since Avenger's Endgame was released. I remember that day vividly for a few reasons I woke up before sunrise (way before the alarm went off).   I wore this (now that I think about it) borderline appropriate T-shir t and then..  .. showed up before 7:00am to watch that movie at Century Shoreline before going to work.  This is still the only movie that has a scene that can make me tear up consistently every single time (I know, I know - it's ridiculous).  That day was interesting from a work perspective for another reason. Along with a few other people at work (and with some crazy last-minute negotiating), we'd pulled together the Thanos Easter Egg on Search. It was typical of a lot of Easter Eggs on Search at the time, in that it wasn't really anybody's job, but we pushed it through because we loved the idea enough to do it. My day job on Media experience on Search helped me justify it a little bit I gue...

I'm bad at remembering dates. Like, really bad. :-) Anniversaries, birthdays - you name it, it tend to forget it.  So it's always amused me that of one of the few dates that I do remember is the one that I landed in the United States -  Sep 14, 2000.  I wouldn't have remembered the date under most circumstances, but a few years after I got here my dad, who was actually pretty good with dates once remarked that Sep 14, 1975 was the date he and my mother landed in Tanzania from India for the very first time. He would then go on to build most of his later career in Africa, and he thought it was a remarkable coincidence that 25 years later his son would land in the United States on the exact same date. Somehow that conversation has always stuck with me, and since then this particular date.   Exactly 20 years ago, my cousin picked me up from the airport and a couple of days later dropped me off to grad school. The photograph is from a few months later that Fall quart...

I've been incredibly impressed and inspired by the NBA (and subsequently other leagues) strike over the last 2 days to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake. Partially, it's because I'm an NBA fan and because I was moved by these incredibly personal and heartfelt takes from Doc Rivers  and Chris Webber , but I realized it was a few other things as well.  The first was that this strike seemed to start with just a few people on a single team that cared enough and were brave enough: the Milwaukee Bucks . Their act seemed to give impetus and courage to everyone else who otherwise would have tried to carry on as usual. Protesting matters - it may not be sufficient to drive change, but it's the only way to drive forward...and it generally takes just a few, committed people.  This cascade, and how fast it spread - the other teams in a few hours and other leagues and atheletes within the day - was inspiring. All driven by (probably, I don't know for sure) a few folks on a s...

To do my job I often have to think about and dive into the sea of collective human consciousness and intent that is the Google query stream. I often think about it in the context of media - it's both professionally required and personally interesting. A few weeks ago I noticed a few things, that I tried to confirm last week through Google Trends .  When the latest incidents of violence against the African-American community sparked both emotions and a movement across the United States and beyond, one of the things that struck me was how many conversations I was having with friends and colleagues around understanding system racial injustice better and how often movie and book recommendations came up as a way for people to understand issues better as well as build empathy.   There were also a flurry of articles recommending books, movies and shows on the topic. So I was curious. Did people change their media consumption habits at all?  They did.   Here are a ...

I'm spending a lot more time on TikTok recently, and so found myself reflecting a little longer than usual after reading this great article by Ben Thompson on TikTok and Quibi . I won't repeat all his insights, but the thing that stuck with me is his comment that Katzenberg's thesis that led to the founding of Quibi was right. It definitely was. I remember thinking at the time that he was definitely right on the trends. The thesis was roughly There was a lot of entertainment consumption shifting to phones. There was an opportunity to innovate there.  Shorter content was probably part of the answer as people's attentions and habits  However, the set of decisions and the execution the team decided on was informed by their backgrounds and assumptions. They innovated on format ( vertical/horizontal ) and on length (all content is under 10 mins) and then bet big on premium content (celebrities, high production value and great scripts) to attract users and a regula...