To render a list of the content creation companies, first of all, we should distinguish between the content creators and the content creation platforms.

The social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, are of the greatest content publishers ever existed on the planet. However, they are not publishing their own content. They’ve just prepared a platform for the other people to help them – or tempt them! – to create and publish the content.

Putting the content creation platforms aside, still the rest of the content creating companies fall into two categories:

• The companies who are active in the field of content marketing
• The companies who are working in the other industries

The content marketing companies have to be great content creators if they are interested in leading their market. So it’s not so surprising if Content Marketing Institute, Contently, Hubspot, and Moz are providing us with a vast amount of content in their blogs.

By assuming that the ones who are looking for the leading content creation companies are not thinking about the great content marketers, seems that our list has to be created from the companies that are outside the content marketing field or at least, are not often considered as a player in this field.

Here’s a list of the leading content creation companies I believe would be instructive to be studied:

• Coca-Cola has been always great in creating and publishing content. We have always heard of the controversial ads and other stories about the Cola-Pepsi battle that has been helpful for both of them to get more distance from the all other carbonated soft drink brands available in the market. In 2012, Coca-Cola turned its corporate website into a digital magazine (Coca-Cola Journey). So it’s not a place for the company address and some banners and occasional news anymore. It’s a content rich magazine that can be read more frequently.

• Stanford and Harvard universities: For some of us, may it not be so sweet to consider universities as companies. However for anyone with some knowledge about the nature of the business, some of the universities such as Stanford and Harvard, are of the biggest educational companies ever existed. They create a massive amount of content and deliver it in various formats and models from paper to the digital version and from free to the high-price subscribed content. Part of the branding of these universities is done through their media which is under continuous care and development.

• Red Bull is famous for its content creation efforts. This brand tries to associate itself with breathtaking extreme sports. Just take a look at the Stratos Jump and how the Red Bull describes it: the most detailed documented jump ever!  As you see, Red Bull is not investing on promoting the taste of its drink (or let’s say, the investment in side stories is much larger than the root product) and this is the reason that Red Bull is on the top of the most of the content creation companies lists.

• Apple is not always in the list of content creation companies. However everyone knows that they are great storytellers. The most excellent storyteller is the one who helps you to forget that you are listening to a story and even helps you to become part of the story and a new storyteller. Seems that Apple has been undeniably successful in this art.

• Colgate is another company worth a deeper study. Their volume of content may not be comparable to the other brands on the list. They have about 500 articles on their website. But this amount of articles has been helpful in promoting their brand and Colgate brand can be a role model for small and medium enterprises who are seeking to lead their market through content.

• Adobe is the other successful content creator brand. Adobe’s digital magazine called CMO is one the amazing and engaging magazines filled and fueled with fresh, helpful contents. Part of the content is related to the trends and news and the other – more important – part is the ever-green content that is published and republished in many other blogs, helping Adobe to maintain its brand position.
• Cisco is another leading company in content creation. Cisco’s documentary series called my networked life features inspiring stories about the people all around the world who have used technology as an enabler to bring their dreams into reality.

Sure there are many other companies that can be added to the above list. But I believe that the above list can be a good starting point.

The post A list of the 7 Leading Content Creating Companies appeared first on webmindset.

MIT – Technology Review

One of the best places to read articles about recent developments in the field of technology. Most of the articles have some kind of analysis and concept description, so there you find something more tasteful than the pure scientific news blog.

Tech The Future

Techthefuture is a nice insightful website with various types of articles about future of the technology. For this website, the term technology is used with its broader meaning and it’s not limited to the digital technology. So you will find interesting up-to-date articles in the fields of mobility, energy, Climate, etc.

Jack Uldrich Blog

It’s not so easy to find a personal blog with such a diversified topic range. Jack writes articles about arts, algorithms, aging, advertising and many other topics and there’s one common theme between most of his articles: future trends.

Of course, you will not expect a deep analytical article in every field when a generalist talks about them. But sure there are many key insights visible to a generalist which are located in the specialist’s blind spot and this is what makes his blog worth reading and following.

Kurzweil accelerated intelligence

We have talked about Ray Kurzweil before. If your are interested in his ideas about the future, accelerated intelligence is a very helpful blog to follow.

Singularity Hub

This is another blog about the future which you will enjoy it especially if you prefer facts to the imagination. A large collection of articles on different futuristic subjects with reference to the related news and research. As the name shows, it’s a good hub and will lead you to next links and addresses for further reading.

Ubiquity

Ubiquity has not any claim about the future study or any futuristic view. But most of the articles have some concerns about information and information-related complexity. As information seems to be the most critical building block of the future world, I have also considered this blog in my recommendation list.

The post Weblist: Best Technology Blogs To Follow appeared first on webmindset.

Here’s a list of books I found helpful in learning more about the basics of complexity and complex systems. I hope it helps you too:

Complexity: The emerging science at the edge of order and chaos

The book written by Mitchell Wardrop provides an honest account of the founding of Santa Fe institute. One of the leading institutions with a major contribution in the development of the complexity theory.

Although the book is published on 1992, still it’s one of the best books to start with if you are going to study the field systematically.

Emergence: From chaos to order

This book is written by John Holland. One of the pioneers of the artificial intelligence and genetic algorithms. The book content is centered around life, mind and organizations. Three of the most important emerged entities in the history of evolution.

Considering the publishing date (1996), he has done a valuable effort to introduce the concept of emergence and to show us the mechanism by which complex behaviors are emerged from the repeated application of a few simple rules.

Here‘s a brief review of the book published by MIT.

Complexity: A guided tour

If you have time for reading just one book in the field of complexity, Melanie Mitchell’s guided tour would be the best choice. A fine blend of computer science, biology and information theory referring to a wide variety of cases from metabolism and genetic algorithm to the immune system and ant colonies.

You will love the book if you remember that you are invited to a guided tour and not to an official organised academic lecture on complex systems and complexity theory.

At home in the universe: The search for laws of self-organizing and complexity

Stuart Kauffman’s book on the complexity is not an easy read, but it’s one of the most vivid pictures drawn about the origins of life.

You may like to take a look at a very short summary of the book provided by the Stanford university.

Linked: How everything is connected to everything else

And as the last item on the first part of my list, if you are looking for a book to read in bed before sleeping with some flavors of complexity and emergence, Linked is one the best choices available.

The simplified non-mathematical yet precise and scientific descriptions of the networks and their emerging characteristic, makes it a good choice for an exciting tour to the world of complexity.

You will find many different examples from the AIDS proliferation to the internet traffic. You will not regret reading it.

The post Books on complexity theory and complex systems – Part I appeared first on webmindset.

After industrial revolution, technologists moved to the factories. Then, the future of technology found a new meaning: Thinking about future factories and fully-automated production lines operated by mechanical robots.

After development of the electronic technology and invention of semiconductors, discussions about the future of technology inclined toward smaller and smarter gadgets (e.g. computers, mobile devices, watches, home control systems). This approach is still the dominant trend in predicting the future of the technology.

But something missed in the middle of these amazing imaginative discussions about future. We are reaching the singularity as it is neatly described by Ray Kurzweil in his book titled the singularity is near. Future is not the fast-paced-past. It’s the time to expect radical changes. Not only in the devices we use but also in ourselves as one of the most powerful species ever emerged on the planet.

Many people may think it’s nonsense to think about the future in this sense. But there’s one thing for sure. If we want to have some contribution in building the future, we need to think about this singularity and its consequences.

The best point to start is following the people who are already on the edge. The ones who’ve helped us to reach here and the ones who are not content with the current stage of the human development.

Here’s a short list of the people I believe they belong to the future. Their concerns are not limited to the near future: the next year or the next decade. They think about and talk about the future of humanity and transhumanism.

This list is still under development and I will add more names to it:

Eric Schmidt

He has always been in my people-of-future list. Not as executive chairman of google, but as someone who is interested in future of humanity and the developing path of the digital age.

His book about the new digital age is one of the most popular books about this topic enriched with many contemporary practical and political examples (Here‘s my review of the book).

He also has an active twitter account.

Raymond Kurzweil

He works as director of engineering at google and has been involved in the development of some of the influential technologies we know today (e.g. optical character recognition, speech recognition, text to speech synthesis).

He has a very active and up-to-date website reporting or republishing his articles in other media. Also don’t miss his book titled Singularity is near on the subject of singularity.

Marvin Minsky

As co-founder of MIT’s AI laboratory, he has been engaged with the concept of intelligence for decades. He doesn’t have a very active presence in the online world and is not so interested in social networks or blogging (Marvin Minsky is his official MIT page). But would be nice if you could view his TED talk on health and the human mind.

He has some influential books and articles about future of the technology which I think The Emotion Machine would be a good starting point.

Jeff Hawkins

The gadget world knows him as inventor of the Palm Pilot. But he has many other things to tell us about ourselves. Jeff has dedicated his time on research about neuroscience and developing a general theory about the function of the brain.

He has a very simple yet deep book on intelligence and an amazing TED talk about the way brain science will change computing.

Peter Thiel

You will understate him if call him as co-founder of paypal or first outside-investor of facebook. He is a modern business philosopher with some hands on rich and famous technology-based businesses. His book titled Zero to One is a good starting point to know him more.

Nick Bostrom

Nick Bostrom envisioned a future enriched with machine intelligence long before it became the dominant point of view. His website is a good place to start if you want to know him and his book titled superintelligence is an effective tool if you want to understand him!

The post Leading thinkers of the technology (Futurist Minds) appeared first on webmindset.

Google Analytics: Sure you know google analytics. But there’s no other choice. Every list of analyzing tools has to be started with google.

Ahrefs: Checking backlinks, Pagerank and many other SEO parameters. You have to register your email for receiving more detailed reports (Don’t miss Ahref’s Position Explorer Tool).

Alexa: There’s nothing to say about Alexa. Virtually everyone on the web, uses Alexa for monitoring local and global rank of the websites.

Similarweb: Sure Alexa is a more popular service for measuring and monitoring your website rank. But similarweb provides you with valuable information about the interests of your visitors as well as historical trend of visits. Similarweb has a very powerful algorithm for estimating your unique monthly visitors.

Woorank: Would be a very professional tool for assessing your website. If someone else has developed your website and you are not so professional in website design, just try Woorank. It has a wonderful analysis capability.

On-Page SEO tool: A very simple yet useful minimalistic tool for suggesting you the best one-word, two-word, three-word combinations which have more opportunity to be promoted by search engines.

GTMertics: A very helpful tool for site designers. Analyzing every detail of the website including loading time of every script and CCS errors and many other indicators which website designers and administrators are interested in.

Pingdom: Calculating your website loading time with a detailed cascading report.

Nibbler: Assessing your website from various aspects such as accessibility, experience, marketing and technology.

Browserling: Helps you to see how your website is viewed in different browsers and devices.

Browseo: Helps you to see your website the same way as search engines see it.

The post SEO: A List of best free SEO and web analytics tools appeared first on webmindset.

Although there are many services for list making such as listly still I prefer to have my list here. So I can apply my own format and style and concentrate more on quality instead of quantity or comprehensiveness.

Here’s the list of content strategy blogs I visit regularly. As I am not a fan of RSS and other similar notification services, usually categorize on blog lists based on my visit frequency.

May it be useful for you to take a look at my list. All of them are not directly about content strategy but most of them can be somehow influential in developing content strategist mindset.

Best Content Strategy Blogs

To be visited daily

 The content strategist (do not miss resource inventory there)

Hubspot (Specially marketing posts)

Pastry Box (Thoughts of content strategists on everything but the content!)

Content Marketing Institute Blog

To be visited weekly

Exact Target

Newscred

To be visited monthly

Content Harmony Blog

Content Strategy Articles on UXBooth

ContentStrategyInc (Don’t miss posts on content governance)

Jonathon Colman (I’d call it reflections of a content strategist on everything!)

Newspaperdeathwatch (Domain name tells everything and this is my favorite article)

Curata blog (As the name show implicitly, it’s more about content curation)

Near updated frequently but worth taking a look

Content Strategy Articles published on A List Apart

Steven Wilson-Beales Blog (Find alternative look)

Brain Traffic

Content-ment

Eating Elephant

The post Weblist: Best Content Strategy Blogs appeared first on webmindset.