Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
Fediverse
[Ghost] "Last week we officially started the ActivityPub private beta and sent invitations to our first 3 publishers to start testing things out. This was the first big milestone we've been working toward for months, and it felt great to get there! 🚀" The Ghost team continues
Heads up: this one’s for American citizens. The rest of you can pass this one over, or peek at it for a shot of either schadenfreude or fear, depending on your predilictions and assumptions. It’s your call. The election, at the time of writing, is in ten days.
Media
[Manuel Roig-Franzia and Laura Wagner at The Washington Post] "An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two people who were briefed on the sequence of events and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they
Notable links
[Jan Diehm and Michelle Pera-McGhee at The Pudding] "To illustrate how difficult it is to get abortion care, we built a maze for each state where the difficulty is calculated by the state’s abortion policies." What an incredible use of the web as a platform. These stories
Media
[Anne Helen Petersen] "The best indication of the health of an industry like journalism isn’t who excels there, because the answer is obvious: work robots who come from some sort of family money. To understand just how broken media is, look at who leaves the field — or who
Technology
[Bluesky Announces Series A to Grow Network of 13M+ Users] An important announcement from Bluesky: "We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $15 million Series A financing led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Amir Shevat of Darkmode, co-creator of Kubernetes
Mathew Ingram has posted some smart reflections inspired by Netscape’s thirtieth birthday: I don’t think an ancient serf seeing an illustrated manuscript for the first time in the 11th century would have been any more gobsmacked than I was at Netscape. Yes, there were things like America Online
Culture
[Jon Hicks] I love this sort of thing: "Usborne's The Detective’s Handbook and The Guide to the Supernatural captivated my imagination in equal measure. This site is an imagined combination of those books – an engaging thematic prompt for me to overcome the quandary of 'what
Technology
[Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism] File this under "good, but I can't believe this wasn't already banned": "Sweeping changes to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines aimed at cleaning up the polluted, confusing world of online product reviews went into effect on Monday, meaning
Notable links
[Joseph Cox at 404 Media] Without needing a warrant, police can track ordinary peoples' smartphone locations - including people who travel out of state to get abortion procedures. The implications are troubling: "“Warrantless law enforcement access to digital information related to reproductive health care, including location data, threatens
Notable links
[Blake Ellis, Melanie Hicken, Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Audrey Ash, Kyung Lah, Anna-Maja Rappard, Casey Tolan, Lou Robinson and Byron Manley at CNN] "More than 1,000 reports filed with government agencies and consumer advocacy groups reviewed by CNN, along with an analysis of campaign finance data and interviews with dozens
Notable links
[Timothy Snyder] Timothy Snyder on the seriousness of the Trump-Vance deportation plans and their implications: "Such an enormous deportation will requires an army of informers. Â People who denounce their neighbors or coworkers will be presented as positive examples. Â Denunciation then becomes a culture. Â If you are Latino, expect to