Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Congratulations, you’ve set up a Jekyll site. You may even be, like me, taking advantage of the free hosting provided by GitHub. You’ve written your first post, you’ve set up all the options. But when you go to share it on Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn or Twitter, that share may not look so pretty. Here’s how…
Sometime in the past 20 years, people soured on email. Culturally, it went from delightful to burdensome, a shift that’s reflected in the very language of the inbox. In the 1990s, AOL would gleefully announce, “You’ve got mail!” Today, Gmail celebrates the opposite: “No new mail!” So what happened to email? What happened to us?…
Australian Essena O’Neill caused a stir when she quit her Instagram modeling career and lambasted the vainglorious “industry.” Even compared to the horror stories about abuse and exploitation in traditional modeling, this sounds exhausting and thankless. And yet it’s typical for New Media and for industries that have been “disrupted” by tech. I found Essena…
Turns out kids these days, like kids in those days and the days before that too, do sex things, to themselves and to each other. Even in small, wholesome towns where teenagers are still cursed with hormones and interests and curiosities, and wet panties and hard-ons. That teenagers have varying degrees of interest in S-E-X is…
he rope swing looked inviting. Photos of it on Airbnb brought my family to the cottage in Texas. Hanging from a tree as casually as baggy jeans, the swing was the essence of leisure, of Southern hospitality, of escape. When my father decided to give it a try on Thanksgiving morning, the trunk it was tied…
While Facebook makes headlines for cooking up new initiatives with publishers, the actual traffic it’s sending those publishers has fallen sharply. Referral traffic (desktop + mobile) to the top 30 Facebook publishers (as defined by their reliance on Facebook) plunged 32 percent from January to October, according to SimpleReach, a distribution analytics company. The more…
Photo Credit Andy Rash As someone with the keen observational skills of Mr. Magoo, it took me a long time to notice a problem social-media acquaintances had been talking about for months. “I woke up to four new people today asking me for money on four different donation platforms,” one friend said. “One was my…
Two weeks ago, we reported that one of the numerous “unicorns” prancing around Silicon Valley was about to have a very rude wake up call when Dropbox was warned by its investment bankers that it would be unable to go public at a valuation anywhere near close to what its last private round (which had…
I can’t even. I’ve been tracking misogynistic ridiculousness on this blog for five years, but I’m not sure I ‘ve ever run across anything quite as ridiculous as this. A prominent Open Source guru, Eric Raymond, is warning tech dudes to be extra super duper careful around their female colleagues, because any one of them…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Twitter Engineering Manager Leslie Miley, the only black engineer in a leadership position at Twitter, just publicly announced that he has left the company. In his post, he says his reasons for leaving have everything to do with the way Twitter is addressing diversity and inclusion. Though Miley was laid off as…