I realized I misspoke in today’s piece about Bluesky product strategy. In it, I said this: I’m generally not bullish about creator economy services. What I meant to say is that I’m generally not bullish about venture-funded creative economy services. It’s the need for venture scale
A lifetime or two ago, Biz Stone was showing me and my co-founder around South Park in San Francisco. The Twitter office was sat there, a weird building with glass bricks across the road from what would later be the Instagram office. We grabbed a coffee at Caffe Centro and
A quick aside: I now believe it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better (if it gets better). I’m not going to enumerate what’s been going on; you’re either paying attention or you’re not, but we’re less than one hundred days
Technology
[Tony Stubblebine on The Medium Blog] In the midst of some challenging cultural times, Tony Stubblebine and Medium are doing the right thing: "Over the past several months, I’ve gotten questions from the Medium community asking if we’re planning to change our policies in reaction to recent
Fediverse
[Sean Tilley] Sean has been integrating We Distribute with the fediverse for years. It's been hard - particularly at the beginning, which is the plight of the very early adopter. This rundown is incredibly useful for anyone who wants to integrate their own publication with the network, and
AI
[Simon Willison] Prompt injection attacks have been one of the bugbears for modern AI models: it's an unsolved problem that has meant that it can be quite dangerous to expose LLMs to direct user input, among other things. A lot of people have worked on the problem, but
Notable Links
[Andy Bounds in the Financial Times] The last few months have radically changed the risk assessment for people traveling to the US from abroad - as well as Americans who plan to cross the US border. In this case, it's European Commission staff: "The European Commission is
As I write this, I’m flying home from the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. Now in its 19th year, it’s an annual meeting of newsrooms, journalists, and news professionals from all over the world. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was blown away by
Notable Links
[Zoë Schiffer at WIRED] The Social Security Administration is changing its communications strategy in a surprising way: ““We are no longer planning to issue press releases or those dear colleague letters to inform the media and public about programmatic and service changes,” said SSA regional commissioner Linda Kerr-Davis in a
Media
[Alexander Lee at Digiday] Substack isn't the best deal in town for independent journalists: "A year after leaving Substack in early 2024, newsletter writers are making more money peddling their words on other platforms. [...] Since leaving Substack, some writers’ subscriber counts have plateaued over the past year,
AI
[Jeremy Keith] Jeremy Keith highlights the hammering that the public service internet is getting from LLM vendors: "When we talk about the unfair practices and harm done by training large language models, we usually talk about it in the past tense: how they were trained on other people’s
Media
[Zach Seward] I first met Zach Seward when he was running Quartz, the news startup with the quippy haiku notifications that had, at the time, captured a lot of the media world's attention. It was really good. This piece, by Zach, is written on the heels of the