Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Yesterday, I installed the Drumpfinator. This is the famous Chrome extension, launched by John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, that replaces the word “Trump” with “Drumpf”—his ancestral name—everywhere it appears in your browser. I wanted to understand the appeal of these extensions, and why they have emerged as a cultural force over the course of the…
Uber—despite ignoring and dismissing literally thousands of complaints from customers and drivers regarding sexual assault within Uber vehicles over the past three years—would like us women to know that they’ve got our backs. Hey, thanks, Uber. In a blog posted on International Women’s Day, Uber Senior Program Manager Blair Mattson wrote a special thank-you to…
The New Media is Made of Memes After months watching Snapchat’s irresistible Discover stories, I am everything but informed Gif by Ellen Porteus A year ago, Snapchat, the world’s fastest growing social network, told advertisers, media companies, and writers like me everything we wanted to hear. With the debut of its new media hub Discover,…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Webpage bloat is a growing problem. So no surprise techniques to speed page load times have often focused on data compression to try to shrink the number of milliseconds it takes for a website to heave into view. But researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have taken a different tack…
A while back, we ran an analysis on our posts to Facebook and concluded that the platform was largely time independent in terms of whether a post succeeded. A post at 4 AM on Saturday should be just as likely to find an audience as one at 10 AM on Tuesday. Despite a solid statistical…
The Long Slow Death of Twitter March 9th, 2016 prev Archives First World Problem Archive The Brads Archive Blog Posts Start of StatCounter Code End of StatCounter Code Source: The Long Slow Death of Twitter
Well, at least they’re trying Today is the day of the Twitter tantrum known as #TheTriggering, a contrived hashtag in which the Internet’s biggest jerks have decided to post crap that is slightly more jerky than the crap they usually post. I’ve been poking around in the hashtag for a couple of hours and I have to say it’s…
digitalundivided is a groundbreaking organization focused on Black and Latina women founders. Their latest effort, #ProjectDiane, is a major study of venture funding, Black women founders, and startups, and the findings are out now. In our last issue, Kara Melton highlighted how Black women lead entrepreneurship — indeed, creating the very business models the startup…
Last week, the New York Times reported on a modern day, technological art heist. According to the Times, two artists snuck a camera and a Microsoft Kinect 3D scanner into the Neues Museum in Berlin and did a surreptitious scan of the 3,300 year old bust of Nefertiti. The artists put the purported results of…
It ain’t easy being an American taxpayer. The US Internal Revenue Service said last week that the number of records it lost in a 2015 data breach is higher than it previously thought. When the agency first announced in May 2015 that hackers had broken into its website and stolen tax transcripts, it said that…