Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo: Marcie Casas/Flickr News Genius lets anyone add annotations to anything on the web. It’s an interesting tool with some potentially powerful applications—but it’s also adding a comments section on top of the entire internet, in a time when many sites (including Motherboard) are turning off the comments due to the potential for harassment….
Female bloggers have a long, sordid history of harassment on the Web.IPGGutenbergUKLtd/Thinkstock In 2014, while still recovering from a very public spat with Google over SEO marketing techniques that resulted in a brief suspension from Google’s search results and an 80 percent drop in traffic to the site, the lyrics and annotation site Rap…
Kenneth Harmon—affectionately known on the Internet as Sad Papaw—invited everyone to a giant burger cookout, and unlike his first attempt to cook burgers, everyone showed up this time. As the photo of Harmon staring into his burger spread online earlier this month and grandkids Kelsey and Brock Harmon updated a captive audience, many expressed a…
Citation, Appropriation, and Fair Use: News Genius Picks Up Again Where Failures Left Off As an old man of the Internet, I’ve seen several waves of “scribble on top of other people’s pages” plug-ins and web site. Anyone remember Third Voice? It was a browser plug-in that first appeared in 1999. that let you annotate…
I moderate Facebook comments all day. While the rest of the Internet shuts off comments on publications, Facebook comments aren’t going anywhere—they count as engagement to help rank posts in the newsfeed, and there is no way for an admin to turn them off. As the host of a large media non-profit’s page, it is…
As San Francisco’s housing shortage gets worse, there’s increasing pressure on tenants living in rent-controlled apartments to vacate so their landlords can start charging a market rate in the rapidly gentrifying city. This pressure often comes in the form of a buyout. Three years ago, for instance, a single mother with kids paid $1,600 per month for…
Before we get to why many on-demand apps have struggled to achieve mass-market prices, it is important to remember why anyone ever thought they could: because Uber did it. The ride-hailing company that is valued by investors at more than $60 billion began as a luxury service. The magic of Uber was that it used…
What happens when you introduce an innocent Artificial Intelligence chat robot to Twitter? Well, it’s kind of predictable – you get an evil Hitler-loving, incestual sex-promoting, ‘Bush did 9/11’-proclaiming robot. Developers at Microsoft created ‘Tay’, an AI modelled to speak ‘like a teen girl’, in order to improve the customer service on their voice recognition…
On March 21, 2006, a small team at a podcasting startup in San Francisco tested a simple product. It was a texting megaphone: Send an SMS message to the number 40404, and the service would forward it to all your friends. After that, the historical record gets cloudier. The four men with some responsibility for…
Wow: 10 years old, can you believe it. Hell of a decade, hell of a ride. Hey, though: the first ever tweet fucked sucked. It sucked. It was rubbish. It sucked. I mean what is that. Look at the way the word ‘Twitter’ is composed, here: no capital T, no i, no e, in fact…