I've used a lot of payment services, and Stripe's API remains far and away the best. Flexible and intelligently designed. Hooray!
The engineering mechanics of that Flipboard web launch (they heavily use the canvas element): http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile-web
How Flipboard built their product for the web (the DOM was too slow): http://inside.flipboard.com/2015/02/10/hello-world-flipboard-launches-on-the-web/
@sama We've found that a mild fever + running a startup has pretty much the same effect.
There's a peaceful #blacklivesmatter march in Berkeley, so obviously the sky is buzzing with helicopters. What could be scarier?!
The pope just launched a startup accelerator: http://scholaslabs.org/app/
I think we can all agree that TJ Miller should be the new Daily Show host
@paulawirth Well, there was Craig Kilborn .. but Jon Stewart really made it his own. Genuinely can't think of who would be adequate.
Say it isn't so: Jon Stewart's leaving the Daily Show. Who could replace him? http://www.avclub.com/article/jon-stewart-says-hes-leaving-daily-show-215070
@markmorvant Instructional Ecosystem? OS implies lower-level, ecosystem implies lots of co-operating tools. #eli2015
The best tech events I've ever been to were co-organized by @andymcmillan. Cool that he's now offering his services: http://andymcmillan.is/
Australia's joining the increasingly poorly named Eurovision Song Contest. I can't wait. http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-31380742
@nickswarb Hmm. I suppose there might be a market for that too. #protein
ICYMI: Why you should start a website as a college student: http://stream.withknown.com/2015/why-you-should-start-a-website-as-a-college-student
Password reminder: the serpentine memory that you have repressed to a deep, concealed corner of your mind, of which you dare not speak.
Really great post from @thinkup about their new Insight Creator. (What's our version of this? Watch this space ..) http://blog.thinkup.com/post/110644937587/create-the-next-great-thinkup-insight
Introducing @erinjo to I'm an Alabatroaz. I don't think she's as impressed as I am.
@mdvfunes @johnjohnston Just wrote up some thoughts on this: http://werd.io/2015/for-artists-if-the-internet-is-not-the-answer-what
Instead, it has handed extraordinary power and wealth to a tiny handful of people, while simultaneously, for the rest of us, compounding and often aggravating existing inequalities – cultural, social and economic – whenever and wherever it has found them. Individually, it may work wonders for us. Collectively, it’s doing us no good at all. “It was supposed to be win-win,” Keen declares. “The network’s users were supposed to be its beneficiaries. But in a lot of ways, we are its victims.”
Andrew has forged a career from standing to the side of the Internet gold rush and saying, "wait a minute". This isn't a criticism; we need that voice, I think, to counterbalance the cheerleading role that the tech press typically fills. In particular, as the Guardian points out:
The US government’s decision, in 1991, to throw the nascent network open to private enterprise amounted, as one leading (and now eye-wateringly wealthy) Californian venture capitalist has put it, to “the largest creation of legal wealth in the history of the planet”.
Wealth in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. But what Keen seems to be suggesting is that this has actually in part been obtained by devaluing other peoples' jobs - it's not wealth creation, in the same sense that software is something created from nothing, but rather wealth redistribution. The jobs that were rendered obsolete have not been recreated; there is no employment equilibrium. In particular, the article and the book cite figures that show a significant downturn in jobs for creatives.
There's a tricky conversation to be had here. Some of those jobs were bolstered by models that should not continue to exist, while few of us would argue that we don't value art or creative work. New models must therefore be found to support artists. (Companies like my friends at the Creative Action Network are doing great work here.)
It's been pointed out to me more than once that the 20th century models for selling creative work were very temporary. After I posted recently that relying on donations wasn't a sustainable practice, my friend J. Nathan Matias also pointed out that nonprofit arts and cultural organizations have a higher survival rate than businesses in America (PDF link). Elsewhere, arts are often funded (I think rightly) from public money. I'm not sure how much of this funding goes into creative work online, but anecdotally, I'd love to see more.
Artists themselves need more freedom to experiment online. The first years of the web were highly experimental, and many of the first startups could be thought of as art projects. However, over the last few years we've seen this slip away, to be replaced with projects that are either obvious land grabs (Uber, Spotify, food delivery apps and laundry startups, for example) or have settled into homogenizing advertising display funnels (Facebook). It's worth saying that some of the best startups, like Slack, have avoided this pattern, and retained a sense of whimsical experimentation. Meanwhile, projects like CASH Music and the aforementioned C.A.N. are transparently fighting for the artists. I'd hope that creative workers feel that they can take our project, Known, and use it as the basis of their own creative sites. But it's now the exception rather than the rule.
Yet, I know I've discovered all kinds of new artists across mediums. Meanwhile, reductive lists like the Billboard Charts have massively declined in importance for many listeners (which I think is a very good thing). The Internet is not the same thing as its prevailing business models, and I simply don't buy the implied argument that the Internet has been a net negative. But I do think it's worth having a conversation about who is hurting - and if nothing else, using it to figure out who has a problem just waiting for a startup, or a non-profit, to solve.
·
Posts
·
Share this post
Just discovered Wired's series Teen Technorati. Not quite what I imagined from the title. http://video.wired.com/series/teen-technorati
Heard a new, better phrase last night to replace "ramen profitable": mortgage profitable. A+.
@davidmead Whoa! my bad about the syndication field. Great catch and fix. Definitely send us a pull request!
Werd I/O © Ben Werdmuller. The text (without images) of this site is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
