Facebook news referrals: no sign of the slow-down stopping
"Aggregate Facebook traffic to a group of 792 news and media sites that have been tracked by Chartbeat since 2018 shows that referrals to the sites have plunged by 58%." I'll bang this drum forever:...
View ArticleFormer Far-Right Hard-Liner Says Billionaires Are Targeting Texas Public...
"When Courtney Gore ran for a seat on her local school board in 2021, she warned about a movement to indoctrinate children with “leftist” ideology. After 2 1/2 years on the board, Gore said she...
View ArticleMozilla Foundation Welcomes Nabiha Syed as Executive Director
This is great news for Mozilla, for everyone who uses the internet, and for everyone who cares about ethics, privacy, and human rights. We need a well-functioning Mozilla more than ever - and that...
View ArticleGoogle’s broken link to the web
"A quarter-century into its existence, a company that once proudly served as an entry point to a web that it nourished with traffic and advertising revenue has begun to abstract that all away into an...
View ArticleApple, SpaceX, Microsoft return-to-office mandates drove senior talent away
"Taken together, our findings imply that return to office mandates can imply significant human capital costs in terms of output, productivity, innovation, and competitiveness for the companies that...
View ArticleA new Ani DiFranco album is something to celebrate
I’ve been following Ani DiFranco for decades. I’ve seen her play live around twenty times: she always brings a kind of joyful, progressive energy that leaves me motivated and buzzing.She has a new...
View ArticleShare Openly: A simple icon for a new social sharing service
A lovely blog post by Jon Hicks on his process for creating the ShareOpenly icon. Characteristically, lots of care and attention went into this. I'm really glad you get to see the open hand icons,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
ShareOpenly is now on Tedium
I adore the way ShareOpenly has been added to Tedium:You can see it for yourself on all its posts, including this great one about the decline of the ball mouse. Its founder, Ernie Smith, told me:...
View ArticleThe IndieWeb’s next stage?
"I want the IndieWeb to be a viable alternative to social media, gradually widening the audience beyond tech-savvy folks by making the tools easier to use and more reliable." This is what we were...
View ArticleAs clicks dry up for news sites, could Apple News be a lifeline?
"The free version of Apple News is one of the biggest news platforms in the world. It’s the most widely used news application in the United States, the U.K., Canada, and Australia, and boasted over...
View ArticleDecentralized Systems Will Be Necessary To Stop Google From Putting The Web...
"The various decentralized social media systems that have been growing over the past few years offer a very different potential approach: one in which you get to build the experience you want, rather...
View ArticleProPublica’s new “50 states” commitment builds on a decade-plus of local news...
"It’s a good time to be ProPublica. And it’s a good thing that we have ProPublica." Hey, that's where I work! The article continues: "Spreading its journalistic wealth has long been core to its...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dispatches from the media apocalypse
Without serious intervention, newsrooms are going to disappear. Changes to social media and the advent of generative AI threaten their businesses and the impact of their work. They need to own their...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Unoffice Hours
I’m enamored with Matt Webb’s unoffice hours: a way to chat with him about anything, without needing to email him first, for 30 minutes.As Matt says:I loved those open conversations over coffee in the...
View ArticleThe AI data goldmine
If I was a nefarious software company, here’s how I might be thinking:AI functionality tends to require that data is sent to a centralized service for processing.This is often data that is not being...
View ArticleThe Fatal Flaw in Publishers' OpenAI Deals
"It’s simply too early to get into bed with the companies that trained their models on professional content without permission and have no compelling case for how they will help build the news...
View ArticleWhy publishers are preparing to federate their sites
"At least two digital media companies are exploring the fediverse as a way to take more control over their referral traffic and onsite audience engagement." The Verge and 404 Media will both support...
View ArticleNostr Journalism Accelerator
Nos is running a "journalism accelerator", which onboards independent journalists and publications onto Nostr with guaranteed promotion and 1:1 help. Nostr is a different kind of open network, in the...
View ArticleStudy Finds That 52 Percent of ChatGPT Answers to Programming Questions Are...
On answering programming questions: "We found that 52 percent of ChatGPT answers contain misinformation, 77 percent of the answers are more verbose than human answers, and 78 percent of the answers...
View ArticleWho actually uses Instagram’s Threads app? Taiwanese protestors
"While young Taiwanese users discuss everything from relationships to celebrity gossip on Threads, the app has gradually become a gathering space for progressives, who favor independence from China to...
View Article