She was six years old when she found YouTube. By nine, she was on Instagram. By ten, she was hurting herself. By thirteen, she had been diagnosed with body dysmorphic disorder and social phobia. At trial, she went only by her initials: KGM. This week, a jury found Meta and YouTube liable for creating addictive products engineered to hook young users. [...]

When you sit down to record a podcast, you usually think you know what the conversation is going to be about. AI.Social media.Destination marketing tactics.Campaign strategy. But after recording a series of interviews during the Oregon Governor’s Conference on Tourism for my podcast Field Notes: Insights and Observations for the Travel Marketer, a different theme started to emerge. Not technology.Not marketing [...]

For most of the internet’s history, a photograph arrived online with a strange kind of authority. If you saw it, you assumed someone had taken it. A camera pointed at the world. Light hit a sensor. A moment froze in time. Photography had a kind of built‑in credibility. Not perfect truth, photos can lie, of course, but at least there was [...]

Most marketers experimenting with AI have learned the basics of prompting:

Travel inspiration has always been visual, yet the nature of those visuals is evolving quickly. With Google’s introduction of Nano Banana 2, image generation is becoming more contextual, blending AI understanding with real-time information like weather, lighting, and environmental cues. The result is imagery that feels less imagined and more experiential, offering travelers a preview of how a place might feel [...]

In Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the emotional tension hinges on a simple idea: what if artificial beings had memories like ours? What if they carried experience, longing, and narrative continuity? We are tempted to project that same idea onto large language models. We shouldn’t. There’s a growing conversation about “AI memory [...]