May 2024

In this issue of Between The Lines:

• The Spotlight section features Common Crawl Foundation 's AI & The Right to Learn on an Open Internet event in NYC.
• Our own Director of Content & Channel Strategy, Kelli Zorn , shares her thoughts on what it takes to create compelling content in our Light Bulb Moment piece.
• We take A Closer Look at RSA Conference 2024, recapping takeaways and highlighting 2 of our cybersecurity clients' activities at the industry tent-pole event.

Spotlight: Common Crawl's "Right to Learn" #AI Event

Common Crawl Foundation hosted an event in New York in April for a select group of leaders in AI, #technology, #media and content to discuss AI & The Right to Learn on an Open Internet.

SutherlandGold Co-Founder Lesley Gold is an advisor to Common Crawl and helped craft the event. Common Crawl is the “Large” in the Large Language Models (#LLMs) that are critical to fueling AI advances and breakthroughs, according to CEO Rich Skrenta . The event was titled, “AI & The Right to Learn on an Open Internet”.?

Crawling the Internet to assemble all of mankind’s information to help future generations learn should be a common goal, not something that is litigated or fought over. The conference was intended to foster an open dialogue between stakeholders about how to achieve this common goal of supporting a right to learn on an open Internet.?

Sponsors of the conference included 科尔尼 : Global Management Consulting Firm, Tola Capital , and Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA).?

The one-day event held at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at The City University of New York (CUNY) featured opening remarks, 6 firestarter mini-sessions, 4 panel discussions, demo time, networking opportunities, and more.?

Key Metrics on Common Crawl:

• Vision that Web crawls should be open, not kept in walled gardens
• 250 billion pages spanning 17 years
• Cited in 10,000+ research papers
• A critical resource for AI research and development
• Common Crawl covers 200+ languages, 10 petabytes
• Primary training corpus for nearly every LLM
• The “Linux” of open source training data

Skrenta said Common Crawl is considering hosting a similar event in Europe later this year, possibly in Paris, which is emerging as a new AI hub.

“But there’s so much going on in the AI space - you could go do something pretty much every day somewhere around the world,” Skrenta said. “We want to take the temperature of the room wherever we go and make sure that we have something unique to say about really using all the web’s information to create real learning for the world.”

Skrenta said he felt like Professor Jeff Jarvis 's wrap-up at the very end of the day where he ran around the room Oprah-style asking the audience questions was the perfect finale to a day of open discussion.?

“I think letting everyone get a chance to raise issues and ask questions of anyone in the room and hear their commentary and thoughts really opened things up to the floor,” Skrenta said. “I think that was the perfect way to end a day that was really about driving discussion.”

Light Bulb Moment: How to Write Consistent, Compelling Content: There's No Easy Answer

The evergreen content topic - How do you craft compelling content? - is consistently ripe for additional material because nobody actually knows the answer. At least, that’s my working theory.?

Some would have you front-load with what’s most important, while others insist on the narrative-style reveal, effectively parking the most important at the end of your content piece. There are arguments for attention over substance and vice-versa. The science of storytelling vs. the art of curating resonance. Specificity vs. wide appeal. And the ongoing battle of how to create compelling content doesn’t stop at the end of the (proverbial) page. Best practices are constantly evolving, as are the channels through which we disseminate the content we create.?

The simple truth is that there is merit and results to be gained from every which way and method content is composed. Which then brings us to the overused phrase, “test and learn”.

There’s no secret recipe, no formula, for crafting compelling content reliably and repeatedly. There’s too much change happening at any given time, in the industry, in the world, you name it; thereby necessitating “test and learn”.

The problem with “test and learn” is lack of specificity. It’s become a catch phrase used throughout the MarComm industry, often as a placeholder of sorts. Thrown out in a status call to placate stakeholders, or said internally to keep the peace among teams with different goals, “test and learn” holds less and less learnings.

My suggestion? Introduce some precision to “test and learn”. The following 60-30-10 rule can help provide a framework for genuine action:

• 60% of content produced should be something you’re fairly certain will land with core audiences. This is the tried and true, homerun stuff.
• 30% of content produced should be something you’re reasonably sure will land with audiences. Maybe you’re testing creative variations or copy versions, a new format or medium, etc.
• 10% of content should really just be spaghetti thrown at the wall. Take out that magnifying glass and see what sticks.

This approach to content development ensures effort and resources aren’t going into a black hole. You can feel confident that messaging is reaching your core target, while cultivating a less stressful environment for keeping up with the wild west that is creating compelling content.

So how did I do? Did I answer the unanswerable question? Likely not in a way that’s abundantly useful. After all, my working thesis states there is no winning methodology for crafting compelling content. So let’s end on a question - did you find this content compelling?

A Closer Look: Recapping #RSA Conference 2024

Flipping the calendar from May to June also means closing the books on #RSAC.

The official 2024 theme - “The Art of Possible” - quickly gave way to a much more tangible, substantive thread - the power of community - and timely topics like, “AI and risk.” Just like attacks are inevitable, the conference clarified that it’s a matter of when, not if, AI (and autonomous hacking) progresses past controls. Industry leaders and innovators called for collaboration and cooperation among the #cybersecurity community, emphasizing the critical need to strike the right balance between regulation and innovation.

We’re fortunate to work with some of the best of the best.?

In addition to hosting presentations and panel discussions on everything from supply chain AI threats and “Evolving Threat Management to Secure the AI Lifecycle”, HiddenLayer hosted a workshop for #CISOs and won Market Leader for AI & #MachineLearning in the 12th annual Infosec awards. They also announced their early commitment to Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency 's Secure By Design pledge, marking a continued emphasis on, and importance of designing products with security in mind.

RSA 2024 also saw major news from 1Password . Specifically, the announcement of a new security solution, 1Password Extended Access Management. Designed to keep up with the way work has evolved, this product secures every sign-in to every application from every device (even employee’s personal apps and computers that they use for business).