JP Morgan cancelled Kanye West’s bank accounts following his anti-semitic remarks today.Over the last few years, a raft of “free speech” social networks have emerged | Continue reading
I believe strongly in the indieweb principles of distributed ownership, control, and independence. For me, the important thing is that this is how we get to a diverse web. A web where everyone can define not just what they write but how they present is by definition far more expr … | Continue reading
Building a comments system is really hard. I tried to build one for Known, which powers my website, but found that spammers circumvented it surprisingly | Continue reading
Many tech companies continue to perpetuate modern-day slavery. | Continue reading
Amidst all this talk about the future of Twitter pending a still-theoretical Elon Musk acquisition, some people have been asking whether there’s a viable alternative | Continue reading
I don’t think the web could happen again.A public-minded developer, operating in a public service research institution, built an open knowledge-base with no eye on | Continue reading
Your resume is a story about you. | Continue reading
If you’d asked me a few years ago who won the browser wars, I would have said open standards: web pages were finally opening and | Continue reading
Matt Mullenweg asks people to blog for his birthday. It’s a lovely idea! And I might as well use his post to discuss one of | Continue reading
There's no need to stress about turning 40. There's so much ahead. | Continue reading
Facebook is reportedly betting the future of the company on the metaverse, changing the name of its umbrella company in the process. Meanwhile, supposedly NFTs | Continue reading
Being laser-focused is a privilege reserved for people who have no real distractions in their life - or those that do, and have sociopathically chosen | Continue reading
I’ve been having a lot of really inspiring conversations about decentralization lately. Decentralization doesn’t require the blockchain - and pre-dates it - but the rise | Continue reading
I want to unlearn the definition of "disruption".Disruption in the Clayton Christensen sense is all about removing an incumbent business from its perch by reaching | Continue reading
We're in the mist of what may be the largest civil rights movement in US history. In Belarus, inspiring protests are bringing down the authoritarian | Continue reading
I've spent most of my career in or alongside relatively early-stage startups. I co-founded two; was the first employee at two more; I sourced and | Continue reading
I hear a lot of complaints along the lines of: "isn't a startup just a small business?"The simple answer is: no. Many small businesses will | Continue reading
Today, President Trump is hosting a social media summit at the White House. Rather than inviting actual social media platforms and experts to have a | Continue reading
I was recently forwarded Jeffrey Zeldman's piece on A List Apart, Nothing Fails Like Success, on the impact of venture capital on startup business models. | Continue reading
Most of Silicon Valley is financed with venture capital, and its success there has made it attractive in other industries. The model isn't always transferrable: | Continue reading
The New York Times report on Facebook's ongoing data sharing relationships is quite something. The gist is that even while it claimed that its data sharing | Continue reading
There's a lot in the news this morning about online influence campaigns conducted by the Internet Research Agency, a propaganda firm with close ties to | Continue reading
NPR announced Remote Audio Data today: a technology standard for sending podcast audience analytics back to their publishers. Podcasting is one of the few truly | Continue reading
One of my recurring regrets is that I stopped at a bachelor's degree. There are many times when I wonder if having an MBA - | Continue reading
I've been in the business of getting people to use ideologically-driven technology for most of my career (with one or two exceptions). Leaving out the | Continue reading
I was asked last week about the ethics of social networks: what would need to change to create a more ethical ecosystem.Targeted display advertising, of | Continue reading
I remember reading about Tavi Gevinson when she was just starting out; a wunderkind blogger. Now her media company is winding down - but at least | Continue reading
I think lifestyle businesses are massively underrated.In contrast to a venture-funded business, whose aim is to gain as much value as quickly as possible, a | Continue reading
Over Thanksgiving, the Washington Post ran a profile of the babysitting startup Predictim:So she turned to Predictim, an online service that uses “advanced artificial intelligence” | Continue reading
As a proponent of the decentralized web, I've been thinking a lot about the aftermath of the domestic terrorism that was committed in Pittsburgh at | Continue reading
Building a product as part of any kind of business is risky. Most new businesses fail, for a variety of reasons. Your job in the | Continue reading
Today the EU passed Articles 11 and 13 of its new Copyright Directive in a 438 to 226 vote. This has, rightly, been widely painted | Continue reading
Eric Meyer's post about the unexpected side effects of securing every website is an important read:The drive to force every site on the web to HTTPS | Continue reading