Hi. After a rather warm start to November, the weather's finally turning. Evenings are getting shorter, everything's a bit more damp and chilly. On the plus side (for me at least), it'll soon be frosty hopefully with a bit of winter sun - my favourite kind of British weather. There's even a word for it, 'apricity' or to 'apricate' - meaning to be warmed by the sun on a cold day. It's not used that much today, but I do appreciate an apricate.
Speaking of words, 'Vibe coding' was named word of the year by Collins Dictionary. It means to code an app or game using AI prompting. Not sure if two words is a word, but I'm not a dictionary and I feel like they'd be the authority on that.
📰 Latest news
- We’ve launched a new free service called 'Genie', an AI-powered critical friend that helps you turn audience insight into action. It's a prototype designed to help you explore and apply Audience Spectrum in practical, day-to-day ways.
- Australia's social media ban for children under 16 starts next month including Facebook, X, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Threads and now Reddit. One to watch, as I could see other governments following suit (like Denmark recently announced)... depending on how it goes.
- Creative Commons has launched a call for equitable access to public domain heritage in the digital environment 'in order to uphold the right to participate in cultural life and affirm culture as a global public good'.
- Elon Musk has created 'Grokipedia' as a challenger to Wikipedia. The platform gives equal weight to chatroom comments as it does proper research so I'm sure it'll be a really useful platform with no foreseeable issues.
🤓 Useful / shareable
- Recent research from ACE looking into children and young people in museums has some interesting findings on digital and interactivity. Pages 31 - 37 is where you'll find it.
- Daniel Pett gave a talk on Digital Innovation for Historic England's recent staff conference, where he shared a number of interesting projects, links and talks. Dan has turned that into a resource covering everything from citizen science to 3D to heritage at risk.
- Here's a review of how ChatGPT is being used. The review was conducted by OpenAI so, you know, take it with a pinch of salt.
- This is an interesting look at how 'The Rest Is History' became the world's biggest history podcast.
💥 Distracting / entertaining / inspiring
- The 2025 Coca-Cola Christmas ad was made entirely with AI and people do not like it (at least if the YouTube comments are anything to go by). Even their 'behind the scenes' video was AI generated. All very interesting, considering how much people disliked their 2024 AI generated Christmas ad. But who says that you should listen to your audiences, right?
- I really enjoyed this episode of the Digital Culture Network's podcast, focusing on socially impactful digital storytelling.
- This looks like a really cool exhibition, using web archive data to create artworks - "Step into the forgotten corners of the internet with an exhibition that transforms real web archive data into playful, thought-provoking artworks".
- An artist snuck an AI-generated print onto the wall at National Museum Cardiff.
👍 Something good
- Drone light shows may make for a more ethical alternative to firework displays. I have two dogs and one of them is terrified of fireworks. But I also have a 4 year old who's obsessed with fireworks - quite the predicament.
- Here's an interesting article about how Copilot is being used by non-profits to reimagine 'how they serve, how they scale, and how they sustain impact'.
And that’s all for this edition.
Don't forget we're here to support you with training, research and consultancy, so please do get in touch.
Image by Lone Thomasky & Bits&Bäume / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
You can find all past editions of the Digital Snapshot here.
