I’ve always been anti-smacking, but having a baby of my own makes it so clear. How could you even think of hitting someone so vulnerable, so innocent, who is beginning to explore the world? It’s such an abuse; a way to cut someone’s spirit before it’s even begun to grow. | Continue reading
Web 2.0 as a business model only works if the crowds making and categorize information agree to be a part of the machine. Lately, they won't. | Continue reading
I fell into startups by accident.There were two paths I could have gone down at university. Next to an over-posed photo taken at a digital photo booth at a branch of Boots the Pharmacist in downtown Oxford, my high school yearbook declares that I’m likely to become a journalist. … | Continue reading
If your company gives its employees a space to blog or journal internally, what platform do you use? What do you think of it? eg: Confluence has blogs; at Medium they have a whole internal version of the site called Hatch; etc. | Continue reading
And that's the thing -- the best thing doesn't win -- the one that is easiest for others to build off of is what wins!~ Christina Warren on Mastodon, discussing ActivityPub and AT ProtocolThis is exactly right. It’s not about ideological purity or architectural perfection.Can a d … | Continue reading
I’m learning that I cannot write at night. Many writers do their best work once everyone else has gone to bed when the house is quiet; I, on the other hand, am a ragged, sorry mess.This is a bit of a turnaround for me: I wrote the first version of Elgg in the evenings, usually lo … | Continue reading
Fiction writers are popularly split into two camps: plotters and pantsters. Whereas plotters work closely on a detailed outline before they ever begin a word, iterating on the plot again and again so that it’s tight and hits the right themes, pantsters have a concept in mind, fil … | Continue reading
Ryan discusses the differences between the fediverse and the AT Protocol:One core difference between the fediverse and the AT Protocol seems to be that AT decouples many key building blocks – identity, moderation, ranking algorithms, even your own data to some degree – from your … | Continue reading
The internet is mostly all the same. What does it take to empower new kinds of communities? What does radical collaboration look like? How might we help people change the world? What does it take to build an operating system for inclusive democratic revolution? | Continue reading
I’m grateful to have received feedback, from multiple people in multiple places, that some of my writing is hard to understand. My working life is so saturated with jargon that I often forget to stop and define terms - so, for example, while I know what I mean by “human-centered … | Continue reading
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, which is definitely an organization we should be listening to about the future:Jamie Dimon said working from home “doesn’t work” for younger staff or bosses, the Wall Street titan’s latest salvo against remote work. […] Dimon also said remote work c … | Continue reading
The next The 19th Live event is happening on Thursday, Jan. 26. We'll hear from a group of experts about the state of reproductive rights on what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe v Wade.Speakers include:Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta: Chair, DOJ’s Reproductive … | Continue reading
I love traveling, and I love seeing new places, but I have less than zero desire to go to space. I want to be where the people are. | Continue reading
I’m not exactly sure why we celebrate Christmas rather than Hanukkah: we’re a secular family with roots in both traditions. It’s possible that being in | Continue reading
I love the indieweb and what it stands for:When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many | Continue reading
Eventually, it becomes second nature: jot down some thoughts and hit publish. Until then, think of it like starting a running habit. The first few days you run, it’s awful and you think it’ll never feel any better. But after a few weeks, you start getting antsy if you don’t run. … | Continue reading
This is how I feel when I open up my feed reader—it feels like the opposite of opening Twitter: The web remains a sea of interconnected ideas, across a kaleidoscope of forms and sources. Spending most of my time on just a handful of billion dollar sites squanders the possibilit … | Continue reading
Elon Musk needs to complete his acquisition of Twitter by October 28 if he wants to avoid the company’s lawsuit against him. That’s really soon | Continue reading
Last week, I asked you about your fiction-reading habits as part of my research for a personal project I’m working on.I also ran a separate | Continue reading
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