Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
MinionsOops.Google has abruptly killed off one of its April Fools’ Day “jokes” after it caused outrage online, with multiple people claiming that it lost them their jobs. The premise of the joke was simple. In Gmail, next to the standard “Reply” button, Google added a “Mic drop” button. Using it would reply to the email,…
Starting Wednesday, about 95 percent of content the British newspaper The Telegraph publishes online will flow through a new content management system — one that it developed in-house through a collaboration between its product team and the newsroom, aimed at simplifying its digital publishing process. “Our old content management system is about 10 years old…
Up to 30 percent of the current employees in the banking industry may lose their jobs to new technologies in the next 10 years, according to new projections from Citigroup. A 112-page report, “Digital Disruption,” released on Wednesday, said that the number of employees at American banks would drop to 1.8 million people in the…
March 30, 2016 8:00 a.m. ET Genius, the music-lyric storehouse and budding Web annotation platform, has accumulated millions of visitors and a stockpile of venture capital cash. Now the company is preparing for its next step in startup maturation: building an advertising business. To that end, the company has hired Ronen Shapiro as its first…
In 2013, the lyric-explanation website Rap Genius rebranded simply as “Genius,” and announced that it would try to annotate not only songs, but poems, essays, and news articles. Three years later, the startup has become a flash point in the panicked and disingenuous hustle to scrub the internet of unkindness, which has since gotten confused…
Sharing items on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Weibo can affect how well a user understands what they read, according to a new study. The finding comes after researchers from Peking University and Cornell University carried out a study on users of Weibo, a Chinese micro-blogging site which is similar to Twitter. Two…
paging_filter Annotation start-up Genius made it easier on Monday to report abusive comments on the platform on Monday, following criticism from Massachusetts congresswoman Katherine Clark. Clark, a Democrat who has campaigned against online harassment, sent a letter to Genius on Monday asking the company to respond to concerns about online harassment. “Now that your platform…
By now you’ve probably heard the story of Tay, Microsoft’s social AI experiment that went from “friendly millennial girl” to genocidal misogynist in less than a day. While Tay promised to learn from her interactions with people online, Microsoft apparently hasn’t learned anything from the countless headlines about how Twitter users like to talk to…
Twitter Might Be The Most-Advertised Company In History — And They’re Still Fucking It Up The little blue bird logo appears everywhere. On TV, Twitter usernames are listed below the real names of news anchors, athletes and politicians. On billboards and in commercials, even the most mundane cream cheese and snow tire companies beg us to log…
Soundcloud just introduced a $1o per month streaming music service called Go ($13 if you sign up through the iOS app), which adds only two new features to the existing offering: the ability to listen ad-free and download music for listening offline. Is it dead in the water? Oy Soundcloud. Soundcloud has been struggling over…