š„AI vs Metaverseš§ - This Week's Digital Trends
In this week's Hot or Not, AI keeps winning against the Metaverse in the battle to be the next big thing. The UK government impose TikTok bans, and every news site has an interactive calculator.
Welcome back to the sixth edition of our digital trends newsletter Hot or Not - the weeks have gone by so quickly. Letās take a look at whatās hot and whatās not in the digital media world:
š§š½ TikTok
So the TikTok bans have come home to the UK, both from government and the BBC.
There isnāt actually a whole lot new here, but it again reinforces the need to, yes, use and develop short vertical video content, but donāt rely on TikTok as the core of your business. Oh, and whilst Chris Stokel-Walker argues that the war on TikTok isnāt entirely justified, the US have officially launched their investigation into Byte Dance spying on journalists.
š§š½ MetaverseĀ
This week, Axios have taken a look at funding into the metaverse and web3 versus AI, and it doesnāt paint a pretty picture for those who changed their companyās name based on the gamble. Metaverse funding has dropped significantly, and Meta itself has put it on the āback-burnerā. Intelligencier have put out a very long read into experiences from inside Metaās metaverse which seeks to answer the question āWho is still inside the Metaverse?ā
Whatās new with InterhacktivesĀ
On the Interhacktives site we have lots going on. With news from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. We also consider how to visualise Google Trends data, 6 tips for Instagram, and the 5 big problems in Musk-era Twitter. Lastly, as part of our Women in Journalism series, we look at female journalists reporting from frontlines around the world.
š„š¼ Interactive calculatorsĀ
The Spring Budget made it a good week for the interactive digital media content teams at newsrooms around the UK. Everywhere from The Guardian to The Telegraph seems to have their own version of the same mini-quiz. You put in details about how many packets of cigarettes you buy and your annual dividends, and it will tell you how many millions youāre now saving. Joking aside, these are useful tools that can hammer home how much things are and arenāt changing.
š„š¼ AIĀ
And this leads nicely into the second āhotā thing this week: generative AIās. Using āAI-enchanced creativity toolsā, BuzzFeed have put out a fun game where you pretend to be an influencer trying to avoid cancellation. LinkedIn seems all in on AI which TechCrunch saying it is āforming a prominent part of the strategyā. This week also saw the release of ChatGPT-4. Time will tell if weāre ready for the ways AI is seeping into our everyday lives.
The InterhacktivesĀ Podcast
Continuing on the AI theme, in this weekās episode of The Interhacktives Podcast, we speak to Anna Vissens and Ines Montani about modular journalism and natural-language processing. You can listen here or on YouTube.
Thanks for joining us again this week folks! Donāt forget to head over to Substack to like the post and share it with your friends and colleagues. As always Iād love to hear your feedback or suggestions. And I hope you have a good week! Ā
Katie JonesĀ Ā
@katiejeanjones_Ā