As regular readers know, I care a lot about growing the open social web: the rapidly-growing decentralized network of interoperable social platforms that includes Mastodon, Threads, Ghost, Flipboard, and many other platforms, both emerging and established. This is for a few reasons, including but not limited to: Support for strong
Technology
[Hannah Devlin, Tom Burgis, David Pegg and Jason Wilson at The Guardian] Quite a disturbing new startup coming to light in The Guardian: “The footage appears to show experimental genetic selection techniques being advertised to prospective parents. A Heliospect employee, who has been helping the company recruit clients, outlined how
Media
[Kirsten Eddy at Pew Research Center] The lede is a little buried here behind some pretty shocking top-line stats: "Today, 37% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they have a lot of or some trust in the information that comes from social media sites. This is nearly on par
Technology
[Cory Doctorow] Cory Doctorow discusses how he reads writers like Molly White: "This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface. It is my secret super-power." I agree. I start every day
Climate
[Abrahm Lustgarten at ProPublica] "For a generation, conservatives — not just the far right, which Crusius appeared to identify with — had propelled the notion that climate change was a hoax fabricated so the government could impose new restrictions on the economy and society. Yet Crusius hadn’t denied climate change
Technology
[Dries Buytaert] "I'm excited to share an experiment I've been working on: a solar-powered, self-hosted website running on a Raspberry Pi." Lovely! The key seems to be a Voltaic 50-watt panel and 18 amp-hour battery, which run to around $300 in total. That'
Media
[James Salanga at The Objective] "Layoffs in journalism since 2022 have disproportionately impacted people of marginalized genders and people of color, according to a new report from the Institute of Independent Journalists (IIJ). It collects data from a survey with 176 journalist respondents who had undergone a layoff or
I was lucky enough to sit down with Mike McCue, CEO at Flipboard, and 404 Media co-founder (and former Motherboard Editor-in-Chief) Jason Koebler to talk about the future of media and its intersection with the future of the social web. Savvy journalists at forward-thinking newsrooms are not letting this happen
To be clear, I'm not in any way saying that they should - just that I can see it as a possibility!
Technology
[Mathew Ingram] Mathew Ingram's overview of the WordPress drama continues to be updated with new information. The hole just seems to be getting deeper and deeper. As he says: it's a mess. "It's pretty clear that Matt sees what he is doing as
Technology
[Anil Dash] Anil Dash makes a pertinent observation about the current state of the web: "At the start of this year, I wrote The Internet Is About To Get Weird Again, which began by calling back to the Internet of 2000. In thinking more about it, though, we more
I thought it would be fun to revisit Known, the open source publishing platform that powers my site. How it works Known allows a team or community to publish news on any topic to a single, searchable stream of content that’s easily accessible from any device. It is not
