Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
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
Technology
[Wes Davis at The Verge] The feud between Automattic (or more specifically, Matt Mullenweg himself) and WP Engine is getting bonkers: "WordPress.org has taken over a popular WP Engine plugin in order “to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem,” WordPress cofounder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg
AI
[Julian Fell at Australian ABC News] "Ecovacs robot vacuums, which have been found to suffer from critical cybersecurity flaws, are collecting photos, videos and voice recordings – taken inside customers' houses – to train the company's AI models." So in effect these robot vacuums are tiny spies
I’m worried I’ve become cynical about technology as I’ve gotten older. But maybe technology really is worse. Someone asked me the other day: “what [in media and technology] are you excited about right now?” We both agreed that it was a surprisingly difficult question. And then came
Media
[Charlotte Tobitt at Press Gazette] "Paul Rowland wrote in an email to staff on 27 September that article volumes were being talked about “a lot in newsrooms at the moment” and blamed, in part, the volatility from previously huge traffic referrers like Google and Facebook." "A separate
Society
[Ben Kesslen at Quartz] "Waffle House, the iconic American restaurant chain with over 1,600 locations known for cooking up Southern breakfast food, has developed an advanced storm center FEMA consults with." Stores in the path of Milton were closed in advance of the storm, which is rare
Culture
[Chris Person at Aftermath] "Over the years, forums did not really get smaller, so much as the rest of the internet just got bigger. Reddit, Discord and Facebook groups have filled a lot of that space, but there is just certain information that requires the dedication of adults who
Climate
[Damian Carrington at The Guardian] Meanwhile, while we're all paying attention elsewhere: "More and more scientists are now looking into the possibility of societal collapse, said the report, which assessed 35 vital signs in 2023 and found that 25 were worse than ever recorded, including carbon dioxide
Notable links
[Charles Duhigg at the New Yorker] "As the tech industry has become the planet’s dominant economic force, a coterie of specialists—led, in part, by the political operative who introduced the idea of “a vast right-wing conspiracy” decades ago—have taught Silicon Valley how to play the game
Media
[ John Naughton ] "If you log into Dave Winer’s blog, Scripting News, you’ll find a constantly updated note telling you how many years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds the blog has been running. Sometime tomorrow morning the year field will switch to 30." Running a blog
Technology
[Karl Bode at TechDirt] "The Harris campaign has remained largely silent on whether Khan will be allowed to stick around. And it remains entirely unclear whether Harris will continue Biden’s support of something that, for once, at least vaguely resembles antitrust reform and a crackdown of concentrated corporate
Business
[Ben Werdmuller on Medium] I find myself returning to this piece I wrote on Medium about building downtime into your work and lifestyle. It's important: Eight years into working in America, I’m still getting used to the macho culture around vacations. I had previously lived in a