How did Mozart become a prodigy? What moved Steve Jobs to found Apple? How can college dropouts create multi-billion dollar companies today? I am intrigued, but all theories point to the same place: self-apprenticeship.

Clear-cut apprenticeships, along with patronage, gave birth to some of the most creative minds in history, like Leonardo da Vinci or William Shakespeare. They were given the resources and mentors matched to their specific skill, and ultimately, became Masters. …

Most inventions, stories and ideas have something in common: they are inspired by something. In today’s digital age, we continuously get inspired by following blogs, reading Medium articles, looking at photography, browsing trending tweets and connecting with friends on Facebook. Collecting inspiration from places is a very valuable tool, and for that purpose the appearance of bookmarklets and Pinterest — collect and organize things you love.

The collaborative beauty of research comes when you are able to take someone else’s data collection and continue to add value with your own hypothesis and analysis. Then, inspiration also has a personal, original…

Wouldn’t it be meaningful to plan and book a trip according to your favorite book? Wouldn’t you enjoy buying that classic jacket while watching your lifestyle-defining movie? What if brands became publishers and products were just the extension of a story? One of the reasons why journalism is endangered is because what they do is no longer related to how they make money from it. For its survival, brands must become publishers, and vice versa.

In fact, publishers are already behind. As consumer product brands turn into storytellers to break through the social media noise, the evolution of journalism might…

Almost all social platforms put a big emphasis on the number of followers you have, the number of “likes” your posts accumulate and the number of times your content is shared by others. There is no doubt the author is interested in knowing all of these statistics, but how do these stats influence the way consumers interact with content, and how do these impact recommendation engines?

It makes sense that recommendation algorithms take into account the number of views or likes. But, does the fact that users already know how many likes a post have, influence the decision of liking…

They say content is king, but are today’s blogging platforms designed to improve the quality of content? Even if quality was not a priority, are they designed so that we can find content we are interested in? Let´s take a quick look at Wordpress, Tumblr and Medium.

The 1-9-90 rule states that in a collaborative website, 90% of the participants of a community only view content, 9% of the participants edit content, and 1% of the participants actively create new content.

On Wordpress

Following the 1-9-90 rule, Wordpress seems to be the most popular blogging tool for the 1% given its flexible…

Leonardo da Vinci epitomizes the innovation explosion from the Italian Renaissance. Considered to be a genius by many, he was a painter, sculptor, humanist, scientist, architect, philosopher, engineer, and more. In retrospect, this essay briefly examines the influence of technology all the way from Leonardo’s polyglot inventions to Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, to finally discuss the future of blogging.

Indeed, art and culture in the Renaissance would have never flourished without the help of technology. The invention of the printing press in the mid 1400s made the works of great authors widely available. This meant going from a few hand-copied manuscripts…

A Crisis in Long-form Journalism

Blogging as we know it has excelled at easily turning everybody into publishers. As a result, content quality has lowered and great stories get lost in continuous torrents of information. Breaking news, tweets and status updates are evidently insufficient to make us a more informed society. Authentic stories are life-changing, but the fascination about knowledge inside of books has been taken away by today’s information systems. Step back and realize how people read tweets instead of reading books, it is heart breaking.

The appearance of “personal brands” is a prime example of how authentic journalism is at stake. Lost in…