John Battelle:

I know that when I do write here, I tend to go on, and on – and those of you who read me seem to be OK with that. But sometimes the best posts are short and clear.

That was my thought when I read Journalists Need Advertising 101 by Brian Morrissey, writing in Digiday last week. In fewer than 500 words, Morrissey issues a wake up call to those in journalism who believe in the old school notion of a Chinese wall between editorial and advertising:

What’s crazy is journalists seems almost proudly ignorant of the business of advertising. …it’s time journalists take a real interest in how advertising works. I’d go even further. It’s time they get involved in making it. Hope is not a strategy, as they say, and it’s better to deal with the world you live in rather than the world you wish you lived in.

Philipp Franziskus:

After a long day of work I sometimes had this feeling that I had done a lot of things but nothing really important. I had made all these little decisions that take a fair amount of time and I felt exhausted. But my business didn’t move forward during that day. What was the problem?

A truly fascinating thing I have found to help me focus more on important tasks is killing some variables in my life.

Variables are usually recurring tasks that are not important but take a lot of attention because you have to make decisions. The more decisions you make the more you feel exhausted even when you actually didn’t do something important.
To keep my mind focused on my important goals, here are three things have worked well for me over the last years:

Cristene Gonzalez-Wertz:

If “muchness” were actually a word, it would be that modern blend of the right things greater than the sum of their parts. Or at least that’s the way I’d define it. So how will consumers discover their own personal muchness in 2013?

1. “Expressive Devices”

It used to be that 3D printing was for prototyping or for people who wanted to connect their Lego blocks to their K’nex. However, this technology is finally moving out of its geeky roots into the potential for people to make their own “art,” from Nokia allowing consumers to 3D-print device cases for the Lumia 820 or in Paris, for Fashion Week. The flexibility of the materials, and now the ability to combine them in a single item generates unprecedented levels of customization. And in all it’s geeky chic-ness, Wired announced a 3D Print-Off. We think so much of this whole notion of 3D printing, it’s one of the 3 pillars our Institute for Business Value colleagues are putting in an upcoming study (more on the other two over the next few months).

John Keane:

Lying on his desk is a biography of Martin Luther, the man who harnessed the printing press to split the Church. To add to his collection, I hand my pale-skinned host a small book I’ve mockingly wrapped in black tissue paper with red ribbon, tied in a bow. The noir et rouge and dead arm pranks aren’t lost on him. Nor is the significance of the book: José Saramago’s The Tale of the Unknown Island. Inside its front cover, I’ve scribbled a few words: ‘For Julian Assange, who knows about journeys because there aren’t alternatives.’

I’d been told he might be heavy weather. Fame is a terrible burden, and understandably the famous must find ways of dealing with sycophants, detractors and intruders. People said he’d circle at first, avoid questions, proffer shyness, or perhaps even radiate bored arrogance. It isn’t at all like that. Calm, witty, clear-headed throughout, he’s in a talkative mood. But there’s no small talk.

I tackle the obvious by asking him about life inside his embassy prison. “The issue is not airlessness and lack of sunshine. If anything gets to me it’s the visual monotony of it all.” He explains how we human beings have need of motion, and that our sensory apparatus, when properly “calibrated”, imparts mental and bodily feelings of being in our own self-filmed movie. Physical confinement is sensory deprivation. Sameness drags prisoners down. I tell how the Czech champion of living the truth Václav Havel, when serving a 40-month prison spell, used to find respite from monotony by doing such things as smoking a cigarette in front of a mirror. “Bradley Manning did something similar,” says Assange. “The prison authorities claimed his repeated staring in the mirror was the mark of a disturbed and dangerous character. Despite his protestations that there was nothing else to do, he was put into solitary confinement, caged, naked and stripped of his glasses.”