Hunter Walk writes:The checks being cut to ‘owners’ of training data are creating a huge barrier to entry for challengers. If Google, OpenAI, and other large tech companies can establish a high enough cost, they implicitly prevent future competition. Not very Open.It’s fair to sa … | Continue reading
Breaking the News, the documentary about The 19th, aired on PBS last night and is available to watch for free on YouTube for the next 90 days.It’s both a film about the news industry and about startups: a team’s journey to show that journalism can and should be published with a m … | Continue reading
This weekend I realized that I’m kind of burned out: agitated, stressed about nothing in particular, and peculiarly sleepless. It took a little introspection to figure out what was really going on.Here’s what I finally decided: I really need to pull back from using social media i … | Continue reading
It's kind of impressive to see Ghost become a real open source alternative to WordPress. Many people have said it couldn't be done - but by focusing on a certain kind of independent creator (adjacent to both Medium and Substack), they've done it. It's a pretty amazing feat. | Continue reading
Over on Threads, Amanda Zamora asks:I'm plotting away on Agencia Media and some personal writing/reporting this weekend (over a glass of and many open tabs). One of the things I love most about building something new is the chance to design for intended outcomes — how to structu … | Continue reading
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursula K. LeGuin:They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but t … | Continue reading
This post is part of February’s IndieWeb Carnival, in which Manuel Moreale prompts us to think about the various facets of digital relationships.Our relationship to digital technology has been through a few different phases.One: the censusIn the first, computers were the realm of … | Continue reading
I’m genuinely thinking about starting a new blog about my experiences of fatherhood. It would be good on a new domain rather than be a part of my usual tech journaling. Too much? | Continue reading
I tried Arc Search, the new mobile app from the Browser Company. Its central insight is that almost every mobile browsing session starts with a web search; rather than giving you the usual list of results, it prioritizes building a web page for you that contains all the informati … | Continue reading
Tantek Çelik has posted a lovely encapsulation of the indieweb:The #IndieWeb is for everyone, everyone who wants to be part of the world-wide-web of interconnected people. The social internet of people, a network of networks of people, connected peer-to-peer in human-scale groups … | Continue reading
CNN reports that the NSA has been buying internet data as a way to track Americans without a warrant:[Oregon Democratic Senator Ron] Wyden, one of Congress’ most vocal privacy advocates, said he spent nearly three years pushing to be able to disclose the NSA practice and only suc … | Continue reading
Given all the talk lately of Threads, Mastodon, and ways that people can publish on their own sites, I thought it might be worth revisiting what the fediverse actually is — and why an organization might want to integrate with it.My focus is on media organizations, but remember th … | Continue reading
I’ve spent much of my career telling organizations that they should publish in a space that they control, on their own domain name.My usual argument is that it shields you from major changes in company policy, or even from the platform you’re depending on from going out of busine … | Continue reading
Previous birthday posts: 44 thoughts about the future, 43 things, 42 / 42 admissions, 41 things.This post is in partial answer to Matt Mullenweg’s birthday request for everyone to blog, which is a lovely idea in its own right - happy birthday to you, too, Matt.2024 feels like a g … | Continue reading
I don’t want to call these the best books I read last year: I read plenty of other well-written, worthy contenders. But these six titles are the ones that stuck with me and left me thinking about them long after I was done; they were, in that sense, my favorites. Maybe you’ll enj … | Continue reading
Let’s get this out of the way first: 2024 is going to be a hard year across the board. Mass layoffs, another hottest year on record, escalating conflicts with enormous human tolls and flagrant human rights violations in Gaza and Ukraine, not just a declining media but a declining … | Continue reading
2058 was many things: the hottest year in recorded history, a year when civil rights protests made national news in the face of deepening inequality, and where conflicts and the climate crisis turned millions of people into refugees around the globe.But it was also a year marked … | Continue reading
Newsletter subscribers might be surprised to see a slightly new design. I’ve moved away from Substack and back to Buttondown, an indie mailing list service. Every email will be free from now on; paid subscribers will be refunded in full.Why? Here’s the New York Times with the sto … | Continue reading
I participated in this year’s NiemanLab Predictions for Journalism. My prediction is about AI flooding the web with spammy, bland content — and the techniques newsrooms will need to use to connect with their communities:Newsrooms that commit to AI-driven storytelling as a way to … | Continue reading
Matter - coaching, consulting & training for executives and entrepreneurs. Plus managing 74 accelerator investments from 2012-2018.Matter - an iOS app designed to help you capture the best moments in your life, collect and reflect on your memories of good experiences, understand … | Continue reading
In the Washington Post, Taylor Lorenz writes about how influencers creating news content directly on modern social networks are outstripping traditional news sites in popularity:News consumption hit a tipping point around the globe during the early days of the coronavirus pandemi … | Continue reading
I kind of miss having something like a LiveJournal.If you missed its heyday about twenty years ago, LiveJournal was a private blogging community that led to much of what we know as social media. You could follow your friends, and they could follow you back if they wanted; your po … | Continue reading
Unlike many people, I’m not particularly worried about AI replacing peoples’ jobs, although employers will certainly try and use it to reduce their headcount. I’m more worried about it transforming jobs into roles without agency or space to be human. Imagine a world where perform … | Continue reading
I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with how links show up on this site, and their intersection with longer-form blog posts. Last night I made a few adjustments:Blog posts and links on the site now have the same font size, resetting the information architecture to display them a … | Continue reading
I thought it would be interesting to detail some of my day-to-day setup, Uses This style. This week I'm completely independent, so I'm only using my own hardware and software, which feels like a good time to take stock. This is my stack - I'd love to read yours!Previously; also s … | Continue reading
I’ve made a few updates to my technical assessment rubric, which is designed to help guide teams as they assess whether or not to adopt new internet services and software libraries.The response has been pretty great: some folks have described using it in practice, while others ha … | Continue reading
What’s going to happen is this: in a few years, AI will come crashing down as everyone realizes it’s not going to be an evolution of human consciousness, and some other new technology will take its place. Valuations of AI companies will fall and some will go out of business. Then … | Continue reading
I’ve been neck-deep in a long-form first draft for months; at this point I’m many tens of thousands of words in. Every time I look back at my writing from tens of thousands of words ago, it’s a horrible mistake that opens up floodgates of self-questioning. How could I possibly ha … | Continue reading
The way my link blog works is like this:I save an article, website, or book I thought was interesting to a database in Notion using the web clipper, together with a description and a high-level category. (These are Technology, Society, Democracy, and so on.) I also have a checkbo … | Continue reading
As social networks begin to fill with AI-generated crap, it occurs to me that the small, independent web will be the last place where you know you'll find content and conversations from real people. | Continue reading
I’ve come away from the Online News Association conference with a really familiar feeling: somewhere between unsettled and frustrated. Not at journalists, I hasten to add, who are doing important, democratic work despite shrinking budgets and adverse conditions. But a little bit … | Continue reading
I think it’s important to prefix this post with the obvious: I am not a fan or apologist for Donald Trump. I think he’s nakedly undermined the workings of democracy, and has used the authoritarian playbook to build a movement that is, at its heart, anti-immigrant, anti-inclusion, … | Continue reading
I’m over halfway through writing my book. It’s not, technically speaking, my first — I published a technical guide to the browser geolocation API a long time ago, and self-published a short novel I wrote during NaNoWriMo — but it is my first really serious attempt at a novel. As … | Continue reading
I’m thinking about diverging my website and newsletter.Today, if you sign up to the newsletter, you get every blog post via email (although sometimes I wait until there have been several small blog posts and send them together as a digest). That means you can follow along on the … | Continue reading
Zoom’s terms of service now allow meeting content to be used to train AI, without opt-out:What raises alarm is the explicit mention of the company's right to use this data for machine learning and artificial intelligence, including training and tuning of algorithms and models. Th … | Continue reading
As a (relatively) new parent, one of the questions that preoccupies me is: how can we show our son that anything is possible, and that he can be anything he wants to be? More specifically, how can we ensure that he knows that the templates and stereotypes laid out for him by soci … | Continue reading
Ever so tentatively, I’m beginning to show my head at in-person events this year. I haven’t been to any kind of industry conference or regular event since at least 2019. The small matter of a global, deadly pandemic kept me away, but I’ve decided that I’ll return to events that h … | Continue reading
I mildly redesigned my homepage today, in order to do a better job of what this site is and what you might read on it.I’d hoped to use the Internet Archive to go back and look at all my blogs — I started my first personal website in 1994 and my first blog in 1998. Sadly, those se … | Continue reading
Dare Obasanjo, over on Mastodon:Robots.txt needs an update for the 2020s. Instead of just saying what content can be indexed, it should also grant rights.Like crawl my site only to provide search results not train your LLM.Call it license.txt.The robots.txt standard allows a webs … | Continue reading
I’ve worked alongside news and journalism for a long time - since helping the team at Latakoo to define and build their first products that helped journalists with networks like NBC News send video back to their newsrooms using commodity internet connections. But the last few yea … | Continue reading
The single most important principle I see newer web developers overlook: don't trust your inputs. My guess is that the blurring of front and back ends has led to a blurring of this idea, too. But it's super-important. Sanitize everything, always. (Dare I say that the same goes fo … | Continue reading
I’ve always been anti-smacking, but having a baby of my own makes it so clear. How could you even think of hitting someone so vulnerable, so innocent, who is beginning to explore the world? It’s such an abuse; a way to cut someone’s spirit before it’s even begun to grow. | Continue reading
Web 2.0 as a business model only works if the crowds making and categorize information agree to be a part of the machine. Lately, they won't. | Continue reading
I fell into startups by accident.There were two paths I could have gone down at university. Next to an over-posed photo taken at a digital photo booth at a branch of Boots the Pharmacist in downtown Oxford, my high school yearbook declares that I’m likely to become a journalist. … | Continue reading
If your company gives its employees a space to blog or journal internally, what platform do you use? What do you think of it? eg: Confluence has blogs; at Medium they have a whole internal version of the site called Hatch; etc. | Continue reading
And that's the thing -- the best thing doesn't win -- the one that is easiest for others to build off of is what wins!~ Christina Warren on Mastodon, discussing ActivityPub and AT ProtocolThis is exactly right. It’s not about ideological purity or architectural perfection.Can a d … | Continue reading
I’m learning that I cannot write at night. Many writers do their best work once everyone else has gone to bed when the house is quiet; I, on the other hand, am a ragged, sorry mess.This is a bit of a turnaround for me: I wrote the first version of Elgg in the evenings, usually lo … | Continue reading
Fiction writers are popularly split into two camps: plotters and pantsters. Whereas plotters work closely on a detailed outline before they ever begin a word, iterating on the plot again and again so that it’s tight and hits the right themes, pantsters have a concept in mind, fil … | Continue reading