The Wind in What's Left of the Willows…
Time for a #wilderfuture.
Yes, I am an old tree-hugger and proud.
The price of hedgehog influencers? Salmonella…
Facebook uploaded 1.5 million users' email contacts without permission. Just as well Facebook has behaved impeccably up until now, so we can give them the benefit of the doubt, isn’t it?
Oh, wait. Never mind.
This is a telling piece of reporting from the Irish Times. It’s clear that members of the ERG are starting to concoct conspiracy theories to deal with the cognitive dissonance between their emotional beliefs and the reality of the world.
Interesting that Facebook saw Apple News as a competitive issue:
”The company discussed setting up a new section on the app entirely for news and directed a team to quietly work on developing it; one of the team’s ambitions was to try to build a competitor to Apple News.”
”But he brightened when he turned to one of the topics that, according to people close to him, truly engaged his imagination: using AI to keep humans from polluting Facebook.”
”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.
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
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.