I sat down recently and thought: the world needs another newsletter. There aren’t enough newsletters. Everybody loves feeling overwhelmed with newsletters.

But this newsletter will be different. It’ll have um, case studies. Interesting links. The odd sweary rant. A picture of my dog. Zero editorial sense.

If you like it tell your friends.

Content of this week

Archives have so much stuff. Stuff in cabinets. Stuff in rolling racks. Stuff in card catalogues. Stuff in boxes.

Stuff, basically, that's pretty hidden away and difficult to show off. There's only so many photos of manilla envelopes and roller-racking you can post on Instagram.

Which is why I love it when I see an archive show off deliciously: in this case, Buckinghamshire Archives.

I’ve said more stuff about it - including what it says about persistence, the difference between the social and interest graph algorithms, and some other guff - on my website. Click the big link to read the rest.

The bullet-point bit

• Instagram may have told you that your content will soon appear in search engine results. As far as I know this was already the case for Facebook, X et al. but not for Instagram photos and video. It’ll be interesting to see how it’s weighted - if tons of people tag themselves at a venue, will they get higher ranking than your carefully curated photos? P.S. it also means it’s a good time to get into the habit of always adding alt text, for accessibility obvs but also that sweet SEO.

• Whenever I had to work with Google Arts & Culture I found the people lovely, the tools very cool and the entire thing absolutely fucking pointless. Leo Cao at the University of Texas has done a more scientific study that basically found the same thing.

• Disney and Universal are dogs, but they’re dogs that are suing AI tool Midjourney for blatantly plagiarising their works without permission. The consensus is they’ve gone for a mid-level AI company to make the bigger ones pay attention. Will this mean AI companies won’t be allowed to break copyright? Depends who has more political power and deeper pockets I guess.

• Speaking of AI, this is an illuminating thread by Dr Zara Bain on how governments are trying to rewrite copyright law to benefit AI companies. Again, I don’t know who’s going to win. Starmer seems to think AI will save the public sector at the cost of the entire creative industries atm.

• I don’t have a link for this, but a lot of my Instagram Reels feed is now just screenshots of text posts from Tumblr, X/Bluesky and Reddit. It juices the algorithm because you can put a short audio track on it and by the time you’ve finished reading it the videos looped several times. So probably worth screenshotting some of your best text posts.

Personal stuff I do for me and you can just skip this if you like

📖 what I’m reading

I feel like a bad person for reading so much fiction, so I picked up Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend. I’d always wrongly assumed that most of Aztec history was lost to time, so it was a revelation that actually lots of indigenous people had written down their history but it wasn’t taken seriously for centuries by western scholars. A classic of the genre.

🎮 what I’m playing

Been on a bit of a medieval/early modern Europe binge recently, smashing through peasant-simulator Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and currently playing Bellwright - a survival game where you need to set up your own village, beat brigands and create a primarily berry and wattle-based economy. Highly recommend.

🐕 Keith

Here he is