Werd I/O
  • About
  • Notable Links
  • Asides
Sign in Subscribe

Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

The indieweb is for everyone

Tantek Çelik has posted a lovely encapsulation of the indieweb: The #IndieWeb is for everyone, everyone who wants to be part of the world-wide-web of interconnected people. The social internet of people, a network of networks of people, connected peer-to-peer in human-scale groups, communities of locality and affinity. This complements

27 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

The War on Gaza, by Joe Sacco

Joe Sacco, the graphic journalist who wrote Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza, and Safe Area Gorazde, has started a new series, The War on Gaza. It's accompanied by this statement from Fantagraphics: "We want to state clearly and emphatically that we stand with the innocent people of Gaza.

27 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

We Need Your Email Address

"In order to combat the fracturing of social media platforms, a Google discoverability crisis fueled by AI generated spam and AI-fueled SEO, and a media business environment that is in utter freefall, we need to be able to reach our readers directly using a platform that we own and

27 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

Four years of The 19th News: The year in review and what’s next

Honestly, what a lovely thing: a nonprofit newsroom doing important things for news, media, and democracy, for the right reasons - with a women-led, diverse team. And thriving. 60% of the team is BIPOC; nearly 40% is LGBTQ+. And that diversity allows them to tell the sorts of stories that

26 Jan 2024

The right to see who is spying on us

CNN reports that the NSA has been buying internet data as a way to track Americans without a warrant: [Oregon Democratic Senator Ron] Wyden, one of Congress’ most vocal privacy advocates, said he spent nearly three years pushing to be able to disclose the NSA practice and only succeeded when

26 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

How Beloved Indie Blog 'The Hairpin' Turned Into an AI Clickbait Farm | WIRED

"In 2018, the indie women’s website The Hairpin stopped publishing, along with its sister site The Awl. This year, The Hairpin has been Frankensteined back into existence and stuffed with slapdash AI-generated articles designed to attract search engine traffic." This is one of the worst kinds of

26 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

More states propose bills to exclude trans, nonbinary people from public life

"Proposed legislation would prevent trans people from being able to update driver’s licenses, hold public office, use public restrooms, or take shelter from domestic violence unless they do so according to their sex assigned at birth." I'm grateful, as ever, for The 19th's

25 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

Introducing our Open Salary System: Reflecting on a Decade of Transparent Salaries at Buffer

"What we’re sharing today is the result of applying our lessons learned from running a company with transparent salaries for a decade." I've been following Buffer's open salaries initiative since the beginning; this is a great update. An open salary system is smart

25 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

The 19th News Network

The 19th News Network is "a collective of national, regional and local publishers seeking to advance racial and gender equity in politics and policy journalism." Partners include USA Today, the Texas Tribune, Teen Vogue, The Nation, and Ms. Magazine. Partners get early access to 19th stories, which they

23 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

Fake Joe Biden robocall tells New Hampshire Democrats not to vote on Tuesday

A robocall used a deepfake of Joe Biden's voice to encourage New Hampshire voters to stay home. "It's important that you save your vote for the November election." It's not a perfect deepfake, but it doesn't necessarily need to be

22 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

How The Guardian raised a record amount of reader revenue in the U.S. | Nieman Journalism Lab

Roughly a third of revenue for the Guardian - a firmly British paper - now comes from US readers. The Guardian is free for everyone to read online. There's the promise that paying readers see fewer calls to donate, but the real value proposition is the knowledge that

21 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

NYT Flash-based visualizations work again

"NYT is using the open source Ruffle as their Flash emulator. I hope other news outlets follow. It’s great to see my favorite visualizations working again." A lovely way to keep interactive archives alive. A little-known, but perhaps obvious, fact about newsrooms is that a lot of

21 Jan 2024
See all
Werd I/O
Mastodon
Bluesky
Threads

Subscribe to new posts

Werd I/O explores the intersection of technology, democracy, and society. It's independently published by Ben Werdmuller, reader-supported, and always free to read.