Hello and welcome to the Digital Snapshot, bringing you all the latest digital news, inspiration, tips and guidance for the arts, culture, museums and heritage world.
Howdy. One of my slightly sad interests is trying to guess the etymology of words, based on their composition and use. I know that you can just Google it, but where's the fun in that. Anyways, 'howdy' is a combination of the words in the 16th century phrase 'how do ye?'. I'll leave you with 'struth'. Answers on a postcard.
Latest news 📰
- Some pretty significant news in the world of social media - Meta is getting rid of their teams of fact checkers. Instead opting to go with X's 'community notes' approach.
- The PM plans to 'unleash AI' across the UK to boost growth and also tackle potholes. It's about improving efficiency in public services, which I get, but using AI for fixing potholes feels a little bit too "AI will solve all of society's problems". That being said, leading tech firms have committed £14bn towards the various projects. So, you know, keep an eye out for those potholes being filled in the very near future.
- It's looking increasingly likely that the US supreme court will uphold the TikTok ban-or-sale law.
- The 'Absolute Unit' meme is going to be the first born digital object to go on display at the National Science and Media Museum. Something quite satisfyingly circular about museum material being turned into a meme, going viral, becoming 'digital' and then going back on display in a museum.
Useful / shareable 🤓
- Joe Vaughan, Marketing Manager at the Museum of English Rural Life, has put together a guide to using Bluesky. It's aimed at museums but I'd say it's fairly applicable across arts/culture.
- Pinterest has published their look ahead at the trends of 2025 (https://business.pinterest.com/en-gb/pinterest-predicts/) . They've done this for a few years now and I always think that they're useful at the time. But then I can never find their predictions from the previous years, so who knows how accurate it all is. Still, who doesn't love a bit of future gazing?
- Seeing as this is the first 'proper' Snapshot of 2025, let's carry on with the future gazing. Here's the BBC's list of tech to watch out for in 2025. I'll give you one guess and it rhymes with pie. The other one rhymes with shmyptoplurrency.
- This is a very useful post by Chris Unitt, looking at defining data for cultural organisations. In the post, Chris outlines a fairly simple categorisation which can be applied to different types of data, over different periods of time, for different uses.
Distracting / entertaining / inspiring 💥
- Two actors put on a virtual production of Hamlet inside the online version of Grand Theft Auto.
- And sticking with the theme of arts and culture in video games, who wouldn't want to visit a gallery built in the 1993 DOOM game?
- This is an interesting post from Europeana looking at the importance of digital media authenticity in cultural heritage.
Something good 👍
- Want something really good? Come along to our Let's Get Real conference AND, because you're an avid Snapshot reader who makes it all the way to the end, you can have a special discount code: FRIENDS25
And that’s all for this edition.
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You can find all past editions of the Digital Snapshot here.
Alec Ward
Consultant - Lead for Digital Content and Skills, The Audience Agency
