Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
All told, I lived in Edinburgh for nearly a decade between my late teens and early thirties. I went there to study Computer Science at the University, stuck around to work in the Learning Technology department, co-founded Elgg, left for a while, and eventually came back to live with
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"Journalists write stories about incomplete events but there is always a mandate to write more. To write the next post that shows the breaking news. Authors write books that, when published, cannot be changed. An author can write another book, but the story is in print. No such mandate
I feel more than a twinge of regret that I’m not more involved in the current decentralized social web movement. This is where I came from, after all: I built one of the first open source social networking platforms (and one of the first social networks overall). Decentralized social
Dave Winer has been talking a bit about blogrolls lately: lists of blogs you like to read that typically sit on a sidebar or separate page of your site. I definitely used to have one, back when I had my Movable Type blog a million years ago, and I always
I’ve set up a new post type, “asides”, on my site. I’ve been kind of worried about writing shorter thoughts here for a while, because all of my long-form blog posts make it into the newsletter in real time, and who wants to receive a 150-word
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A wonderful playlist from Ethan Marcotte about the state and context of AI and its implications for labor and society. Every quote is a gem; in aggregate it's a strong argument about where we are headed. #AI [Link]
I write a lot about the intersection of technology and society here, and lately a lot about AI, but over the last year I’ve written a little less about what I’ve been up to. So, this post is an update about some of that. This isn’t everything,
404 Media reports that Automattic is planning to sell its data to Midjourney and OpenAI for training generative models: The exact types of data from each platform going to each company are not spelled out in documentation we’ve reviewed, but internal communications reviewed by 404 Media make clear that
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"The antitrusters are right. The publishers actually do need more power to maintain a workable bargaining position with the platforms, which now dominate how knowledge is transmitted over the internet." This is a coherent argument for how the news industry needs to evolve in the face of unprecedented
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This is lovely: the story of a news organization deliberately fostering a culture of care and equity. "Mutante worked with three organizational psychologists to better understand the experiences of team members. The psychologists used multiple tools to assess the organization and align on the team’s needs. They interviewed
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"The decline in capital to Black-founded companies greatly outpaces the overall decline in startup funding. While total venture dollars in the U.S. fell 37% last year, funding to Black-founded startups dropped a staggering 71%, according to Crunchbase data." As the piece points out, this may
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Buffer continues to lead by example: extraordinarily transparent and willing to share information about its ups and downs. I wish more startups (and founders) would think this way. Not only is writing well thinking well, but there's nothing to be lost by sharing in this way. It'