Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
This past week I embarked upon two long car drives — from Philadelphia to Cape Cod and back again — with an almost-two year-old. He’s a remarkably good traveler who takes everything in his stride (as long as he has his puffy stickers and you agree to put Elmo on the
Fediverse
[Erin Kissane] "Back in the fall, I wrote about a research project I was diving into with Darius Kazemi. Now, after a few months of prepping and conducting interviews with people who run Mastodon and Hometown servers about how they govern their parts of the network and then many
AI
[Open Society Foundations] "In February 2024, the Open Society Foundations issued a call for applications for a convening in which selected participants would share their visions of an AI-mediated future." I thought this, from the concluding observations, was telling: "Participants were generallyreluctant or unable to articulate exactly
Technology
[Alexander Saeedy and Dana Mattioli at The Wall Street Journal] "The $13 billion that Elon Musk borrowed to buy Twitter has turned into the worst merger-finance deal for banks since the 2008-09 financial crisis." "[...] The banks haven’t been able to offload the debt without incurring major
AI
[Jess Weatherbed at The Verge] "“Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future,” Procreate said on the new AI section of its website. “We think machine learning is a compelling technology with a
Privacy
[Surveillance Watch: They Know Who You Are] "Surveillance Watch is an interactive map revealing the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources and affiliations." This is a volunteer-driven, well-cited database of global surveillance companies and how they interrelate. It's very well-executed: a pleasure to use,
Fediverse
[Anuj Ahooja and Sean Tilley at We Distribute] "Starting today, Flipboard will let users search for and follow accounts from across the Fediverse from the comfort of their own dashboards. [...] This new feature isn’t just limited to Mastodon or PixelFed, but includes Threads profiles that opted in to
Webmentions have been broken on this blog for a little while. I’m on vacation this week, so I’m hoping to get them fixed up — as well as a few other fixes here and there. Mostly, though, I have to admit that I’ll be taking the little one
Notable links
[Andy Kroll at ProPublica and Nick Surgey at Documented] "Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of
Notable links
[Dan Kennedy at Media Nation] "Four years ago, Boston lawyer and journalist James Barron wrote that the Watergate break-in may well have been an attempt to steal documents from Democratic Party headquarters showing that Nixon had taken $549,000 from the Greek government in order to help finance his
Every so often, a post goes around in tech circles about how news is bad and we shouldn’t pay attention to it. I think that’s ludicrous. Today’s was a post from 2022 called The News is Information Junk Food. I think it’s a bad argument that
Media
[Bill Grueskin in Columbia Journalism Review] "What’s most important is that a disruptive start-up not be placed at the mercy of the old organization—which might see the upstart as a competitive threat and attempt to have it shut down or cause it to fail." "[...] Newsroom