Good piece from Om Malik comparing Anthropic and OpenAI’s business models and claimed revenue figures. It’s going to get very interesting if they decide to go public, and start having to show us the real numbers. As Om puts it:
Welcome to 2026, when AI’s big boys have to start wearing their big boy pants and show their true worth.
Sitting on a train to London, and one chap lurches by carrying a bottle of Bells whisky and nothing else.
It’s 8.55 in the morning.
It’s encouraging to see journalism returning to the idea of community being central to audience development after the decade-long detour of handing that all over to the social platforms.
But doing this well requires skill and expertise many of the organisations lack right now.
Newspapers have always come and gone. The slow crumbling of the Washington Post is a tragedy for the legacy of that once-great title.
But we need a cycle of death and rebirth more than ever in journalism. Sometimes small fires let new diversity bloom in forests – and in media.
As journalism re-embraces community as a core component of audience work, we’re going to see publishers make the cardinal sin of community management:
Believing they own the community.
You can never own the community. You can host it, sure. You can - and should - serve it.
But you never own it.
Apple dinged over low-quality, scammy-looking ads on Apple News:
Apple’s controversial partnership with Taboola to serve ads on Apple News seems to be going exactly as expected.
Shocker. Who could have predicted etc etc etc
For the last three years, I’ve been looking out over a courtyard from my desk at the university.
I’d never been in it in all that time.
Today, I finally rectified that.
I should work out there on a summer’s afternoon.
The good folks at Ghost have just ticked off a couple of items on my wishlist, with upgraded comment moderation and management.
Step by step, they’re turning this platform into the perfect audience-centric publishing platform.
Admid all the noise around AI, it’s worth remembering that there are some areas where it is unquestionably creating benefits, like early detection of breast cancer.
I lost both my parents to cancer before I was out of my 30s. I’ll cheer this use of AI every step of the way.
Just discovered that Apple Creator Studio has an education discount: £29 per year, rather than £129. That’s a no brainer.
Life is not a football game. And sometimes we journalists have been guilty of making it one…
Well, this is uncomfortable.
Musk’s Grokipedia has quite an extensive page about me. It’s… not bad. But I’m not ecstatic that it exists at all.
That moment when you realise you’re trying to unlock your under-desk pedestal drawers with the key to your car’s roof box, and then you’re seized with an overwhelming desire to fill the box with camping gear and head to the woods.
Cook is not stupid. He is not evil. He is trapped. The iron clasp of market expectations has turned him into what he never meant to be: a man who goes to parties at the White House while nurses die.