Ben Werdmuller
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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

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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

NotableLinks

US to get first dedicated high-speed railway – built by Network Rail

I hadn't caught that the US's first high-speed railway is going to be built by Network Rail, which runs Britain's railway infrastructure. The San Francisco to Los Angeles route will take under three hours; right now it takes nine hours and thirty minutes. I&

21 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

My grandpa was a Nazi

"His definition of strength was power, influence, money and his network of important people. [...] I wondered for many years, how all of this could have happened. How people like my grandpa turned into monsters and people around him watched or turned into monsters with him. The last years made

20 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams

"Despite their idealist manifesto and their Bill of Rights, I don’t believe they could ever truly be in partnership with their community once they were taking large amounts of venture funding." This is a key challenge with social networks that try and work with a different model:

18 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

Search engine results are getting worse, research confirms

"We can conclude that higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality." SEO as an industry has made search engines much worse to use. People are essentially spamming the web, which undermines the signals search engines

17 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

Each Facebook User is Monitored by Thousands of Companies

"Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to [Facebook]. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’ data listing over 7,000 companies providing their data.

17 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

On being listed in the court document of artists whose work was used to train Midjourney with 4,000 of my closest friends

"They just take it. Whatever they want." A poignant and infuriating reflection on generative AI, from the creator of Cat and Girl.  #AI [Link]

16 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

The incredible shrinking podcast industry

The entire podcast industry's numbers were juiced by a quirk of how Apple Podcasts and other podcasting apps work. The actual number of listeners were far lower - as revealed when Apple Podcasts made a big update last September. "For instance, The Daily and Dateline both publicly

15 Jan 2024

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The Taliban’s curious love of SIM cards

"Global trade now means that even a pariah government like the Taliban can invest in and operate sophisticated surveillance systems, while imposing regressive policies that keep its population poor, hungry, and isolated. It’s a profound signal of how all governments will approach digital control in our era."

15 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

A Time to Break Silence (Declaration Against the Vietnam War)

"We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. [...] A true revolution of values will

15 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

Why return-to-office mandates fail

"My advice to business leaders is this: If your “personal belief” tells you that in-office work is better, approach the question analytically. What actual, measurable problems related to your business objectives will be solved by a return to the office?" This is the crux for me: there are

14 Jan 2024
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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

Writing at the intersection of technology, journalism, and community.

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Ben Werdmuller explores the intersection of technology, democracy, and society. Always independently published, reader-supported, and free to read.