Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
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
Work
A lovely conversation with my friend Roxann Stafford, who has inspired and taught me so much. #Work [Link]
If you own your relationships with your community, you'll never be locked into any platform. Start a blog, start a mailing list - get out of the algorithmic content game. This is even more important if you make a living from your work. Parker is right on the money
Plenty of people argue that the climate crisis is overblown. I think they're wrong. If anything, we need to be screaming about this more - and, I agree, calling out the deniers and green-washers. Billions of people will starve. Entire nations will become uninhabitable. It's not
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
So much of gender essentialism is self-feeding: the idea that men are born to be aggressive hunters was conducted by men who made assumptions based on contemporary societal sexism. Of course women hunted. Of course grandmothers hunted. There's so much value in re-examining the prejudiced assumptions
This seems like what a part of the future looks like: the island of Eigg has its own power, generated by renewable energy. Members of the community are trained and paid to maintain it. A power grid is not a bad thing for resiliency (see Texas), but I can imagine
I love this kind of short story: small, personal, revelatory. I wish I could write like this. #Culture [Link]
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 years have marked the
““Language skill indicates intelligence,” and its logical inverse, “lack of language skill indicates non-intelligence,” is a common heuristic with a long history. It is also a terrible one, inaccurate in a way that ruinously injures disabled people. Now, with recent advances in computing technology, we’re watching this heuristic
“King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands apologized Saturday for his country’s role in slavery and asked for forgiveness during a historic speech greeted by cheers and whoops at an event to commemorate the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Dutch colonies.” Now do Zwarte Piet. #Society [Link]
“In general though, I think we should tread lightly.” This piece captures my opinion on the subject well. #Media [Link]