”To this emotional story, Facebook had a programmer’s rational response”
Engineers versus investigative journalists
From the WIRED piece everyone is talking about:
”Investigative journalists are like pit bulls. Kick them once and they’ll never trust you again.”
I suspect a team full of engineers was ill-equipped for dealing with this sort of journalist. They’re very different from the mainstream tech jouranlists.
I’m a journalist, and one deeply interested in the future of journalism, and its business models. And I balk at paying £250 a year for Tortoise.
So, who is their market likely to be?
The platforms are not the internet
In reality, the problem we have is not the internet so much as those corporations that ride on it and allow some unacceptable activities to flourish on their platforms, activities that are damaging to users and, in some cases, to democracy, but from which the companies profit enormously.
Couldn’t agree more.
Good piece by James here, pointing out that Assange is a pretty horrible person - but that journalists should probably be defending him against the US charges. The same does not apply to the Swedish rape charges if they’re reopened.
Whatever you think about Assange and Wikileaks, his arrest this morning will do nothing to stop the repercussions his actions have had on journalism, politics and internet culture.
We’ve only scratched the surface of the impact so far.
I really need to stop letting my blogging slip as soon as my life gets busy. It’s such an intellectually rewarding exercise for me that my life is poorer when I don’t do it.
And no, social media does not scratch the same itch at all.
Making a (small) splash on Unsplash.
I’m really passionate about this: the journalism business should be unlocking the incredible value to be found in its archives.
There are so many benefits to this, for the costs involved.
Time to test micro.blog’s video hosting…
Don’t expect free stuff just because you have 2,000 Instagram followers.
The “marketing via influencer bashing” trend has a while to run…
Ooh, live ospreys nesting webcam from Scotland: LIVE: Loch Arkaig osprey cam
Ah, my weekend reading is here.
Yet another Facebook developer leaks private data
An insanely large Facebook data breach:
The Mexican media company Cultura Colectiva and an app called “At the Pool” used their access to their users Facebook data to make local copies of it, then left that data exposed, in the clear, without a password, on the public internet – 540 million records in all, stored in publicly accessible Amazon S3 buckets.
It looks like the data has been there for five years. And, yet again, it’s via a third party who had access.
Fascinating talk about personal responsibility and social media on the State of the net podcast.
Woe betide any pony that fails to perform to the expectations of Iris.
Weird flex for a CMS company, but OK:
”Today Automattic is announcing Happy Tools, a suite of products for the future of work. Each product in Happy Tools has been used internally at Automattic to grow our company.”
Revenue play, at the expense of focus? Hmm.
This is how hyper-partisan sites die: Inside the spectacular fall of WorldNetDaily, the granddaddy of right-wing conspiracy sites
May not have thought relative mug and scanner positioning through properly…
”My lifelong career love affair has only ever been with bioscience but what a huge, fascinating, awesome world that is. I am so grateful to be able to potter about in my corner of it and marvel at the rest.”
Glad the word “career” is in there!
One of the interesting things about the current MacBook Pro keyboard problems is that it’s proving to me that a five year old machine is pretty adequate for my needs still, as I avoid buying a new one until it is solved.
I can hang on to Apple kit for longer than I have been.
AirDrop is such a handy feature of Apple devices. It doesn’t get enough kudos.
It looks like I last wrote about Google+ nearly five years ago — and only to declare it not dead.
Never a good sign.
So, here’s a video from a defunct satire site, about a defunct social network, found via a defunct VC-backed news site, which concludes with the fact that social networks lead inevitably to nazis.
This must be the most 2019 thing ever.
Wow. Early 2010s-era One Man & His Blog. In many ways, the “classic” era of the site…
