I'm in an AirBnb on the edge of Lake Mendocino and I want to get out and see the redwoods, so I'll keep this short:
2018 was a hell of a year for me personally. I lost family, I lost a job I cared about, for a while I thought I ...
December 31, 2018
I miss my bike.
Growing up in Oxford, bicycles were the default mode of transportation for just about everyone. I cycled to school and back every day; I'd cycle into town to go shopping; later on, I'd cycle to the pub to meet my friends. I remember cycling through the University ...
December 24, 2018
We have a half gallon of eggnog in the fridge.
I'm surprised by how old it is. I don't remember it really featuring in British supermarkets, and based on its modern incarnation - Christmas drinking custard - I would have guessed that it had been invented in maybe the fifties or sixties, ...
December 23, 2018
Corey has made an announcement about Matter over on its Medium publication:
I’m proud of the impact we’ve made, the team we’ve built, and the people and organizations that we have transformed. But now it’s time for me to flare.For the last two years I have tried to secure Matter’s future. ...
December 22, 2018
VICE has a long-running series where British writers bring photographers back to their hometowns, which I stumbled into this morning via Metafilter. It's stunning, and while I didn't recognize the Edinburgh entry almost at all, there was another piece that unexpectedly took my breath away.
I'm from Oxford as much as I'm ...
December 21, 2018
The New York Times report on Facebook's ongoing data sharing relationships is quite something. The gist is that even while it claimed that its data sharing relationships had been terminated in 2015 - to users and to governments around the world - many were still active into this year. Moreover, ...
December 19, 2018
I'm getting really strong deja vu from Gro.ups 2.0 - an open source social networking platform that is now entirely implemented in JavaScript widgets.
From the Product Hunt thread:
I should also note that Grou.ps v2 is actually a set of GraphJS widgets Put on top of a gorgeous Bootstrap theme. That makes ...
December 18, 2018
Since August, I've been helping my friend Julien Genestoux at his startup Unlock.
Unlock is a protocol which enables creators to monetize their content with a few lines of code in a fully decentralized way. In the initial version, anyone can sell their work on the internet by adding two lines of ...
December 18, 2018
There's a lot in the news this morning about online influence campaigns conducted by the Internet Research Agency, a propaganda firm with close ties to the Russian government. Two reports were prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee: one by an Austin-based security firm called New Knowlege, and the other by the ...
December 17, 2018
Three weeks ago, I decided to go dark on social media. No convoluted account deletion process; no backups. I just logged out everywhere, and deleted all my apps. It's one of the best things I've ever done.
I thought I'd check in with a quick breakdown: what worked, and what didn't. ...
December 14, 2018
NPR announced Remote Audio Data today: a technology standard for sending podcast audience analytics back to their publishers. Podcasting is one of the few truly decentralized publishing ecosystems left on the web, and it's a relief to see that this is as decentralized as it should be.
Moreover, it's exactly the ...
December 11, 2018
One of my recurring regrets is that I stopped at a bachelor's degree. There are many times when I wonder if having an MBA - or just the deeper study that a master's or even a PhD would provide - would be useful.
There's also a recurring meme in the tech ...
December 11, 2018
I've been in the business of getting people to use ideologically-driven technology for most of my career (with one or two exceptions). Leaving out the less ideologically driven positions, it goes something like this:
Elgg: We needed to convince people that, if they're going to run an online community, they should ...
December 7, 2018
I still need to read the documents unsealed by British Parliament for myself, but they seem pretty revealing.
From the Parliamentary summary itself:
Facebook have clearly entered into whitelisting agreements with certain companies, which meant that after the platform changes in 2014/15 they maintained full access to friends data. It is not clear ...
December 5, 2018
I've long said that there are two sectors I will never work in: banking and the military.
The reason I wouldn't want to work on technology for the military is hopefully obvious: I don't want my work to contribute towards killing people, in any capacity. I haven't stood behind any modern ...
December 4, 2018
I was asked last week about the ethics of social networks: what would need to change to create a more ethical ecosystem.
Targeted display advertising, of course, has a huge part to play. Facebook created a system designed to capture the attention of its users so that they could interact with ...
December 3, 2018
Okay, but seriously, how can I get to work on Doctor Who?
It's a dumb question, but my love for this show runs deep - I've been watching it since I was five years old at least. As a non-aggressive, third culture kid who couldn't fit in no matter how he ...
December 1, 2018
I remember reading about Tavi Gevinson when she was just starting out; a wunderkind blogger. Now her media company is winding down - but at least it's winding down on her terms.
Her goodbye letter is beautiful:
In one way, this is not my decision, because digital media has become an increasingly difficult ...
December 1, 2018