Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
It’s December, somehow; the tail end of a stressful year, but also the precursor to another one that (and I’m sorry this isn’t the cheeriest prediction) somehow promises to be worse. Good times. How do we propose to survive it? Although I’m not a big resolutions
Technology
[Joel Gascoigne] I always appreciate Joel's updates. "Early on, my dream was just to create a tool that made it easy to Tweet consistently, build it for myself and others, and make enough money to cover my living expenses and go full-time on it. The number
Notable links
[Ricardo Mendes] Ricardo argues that Twitter's sale to Elon Musk was one major factor that led to the rise of extremism worldwide, and that it should never have been allowed: The sale of Twitter to Musk should never have been allowed to proceed without serious scrutiny, oversight, or
I think Thanksgiving is mostly about belonging. I was raised in a culture other than that of either of my parents or my nationality: what they call a Third Culture Kid. With that sort of profile, belonging is hard to come by. As a child, I sounded British but wasn’
Indieweb
[Gita Jackson at Aftermath] I love a good treatise in favor of the indie web: "Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more
Daniel van Strien, a machine learning librarian at Hugging Face, took a million Bluesky posts and turned them into a dataset expressly for training AI models: “This dataset could be used for “training and testing language models on social media content, analyzing social media posting patterns, studying conversation structures and
Technology
[Tyler Fisher] Tyler Fisher has built a Nuzzel-like service for Bluesky: "Sill connects to your Bluesky and Mastodon accounts and aggregates the most popular links in your network. (Yes, a little like Nuzzel.)" It's a personal project for now but there's more to
Notable links
[Melissa Sanchez and Mica Rosenberg at ProPublica] Important resentments coming to the surface here: "Her anger is largely directed at President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party for failing to produce meaningful reforms to the immigration system that could benefit people like her. In our reporting on the new
Media
[Brian Stelter at CNN] CNN's Chief Media Analyst Brian Stelter reports that multiple very wealthy individuals, including Elon Musk, have enquired about buying MSNBC: "I spent Sunday on the phone with sources to gauge what might be going on. I learned that more than one benevolent billionaire
Technology
[Wes Davis at The Verge] Interesting announcement from the European Commission: "The European Union says Twitter alternative Bluesky violates the EU Digital Services Act rules around information disclosure, reports Reuters. But since Bluesky isn’t yet big enough to be considered a “very large online platform” under the DSA,
Notable links
[Mike Masnick at MSNBC] As Mike Masnick points out here, the hypocrisy from Elon Musk about collusion between tech and government is staggering: "Before, we were told that White House officials’ merely reaching out to social media companies about election misinformation was a democracy-ending threat. Now, the world’
Fediverse
[Christine Lemmer-Webber] Christine Lemmer-Webber has written a superb post that sets out to ask how decentralized Bluesky is but goes far deeper into the different models at play in decentralized social networking. It's required reading for anyone who cares about the space. "What many users