Ben Thompson's recent Stratechery article on Apple and the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), and the sub-optimal web experience these regulations have caused for EU citizens, got me thinking about the broader implications of privacy laws in Europe. Especially considering how major businesses are threatening (and sometimes implementing) slower or restricted rollouts of products in the EU (see @threads and looming Apple Intelligence delays).

Ok, I am using the iPad Ad as a jumping off point, but I am not going to opine on the ad itself. I think Ben Thompson in Today’s Stratechary (The Great Flattening) covers it very well and is slightly contradictory, or perhaps, more expansive in his thinking than the outraged masses about what, at the end of the day, is a subjective piece of creative.

I've had cause to think about tokenisation a little lately. Like all emergent technologies, it seems inevitable but is, well, just starting to emerge.

There is something of a divide when it comes to web3 technology, it remains somewhat fringe, incomprehensible to some, discounted by many, misunderstood by most, and as Chris Dixon points out in his excellent book “Read, Write, Own”; “Crypto” has come to be more closely associated with the “casino culture” of digital currency speculation or trading, which despite its wider reputation is, in and of itself, a healthy and viable marketplace, especially with the advent of crypto-based ETFs.

Like many, I spent a few days last week attending the Dublin Tech Summit . While AI was front and centre as expected, there were some more tempered conversations amongst the hype. But there was plenty of hype...like the inimitable Kate Minogue suggested in her post “Dublin AI Summit?”. In fact at one point, a panel host joked, "Remember blockchain and crypto? Well, this year it's AI."

I did in fact manage to join a Web3/blockchain session, though I largely self-selected into the AI-oriented sessions. Here's a brief overview and takeaways:

When I first started to transition my career from film production to marketing, and at the time, social media marketing specifically, I started doing some writing and blogging. To stop it all being lost to time and for the sheer embarrassment of it, I have linked to my old Wordpress blog here. It’s kind off a nice time capsule - to a time before thinking about ad loads, and echo-chambers, a time of relative innocence before the balkanisation of social media. So here is a link to “enduser view” my blog from way back in 2011.