Month: March 2017
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danah boyd on fake news
I’ve hesitated to write anything about the fake news issue because I work at a company that is in the middle of it. SmartNews uses algorithms to curate the most important stories of the moment and we are constantly debating how to best use the tools we have to discover, process, filter, and rank, filter,…
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Sticks for Sale
Artisanal Firewood made the rounds poking fun at the artisinal trend but in a strange twist, it is now reality in London where a florist is selling a carefully curated selection of sticks just down the block from the park. What’s next? Bespoke Air?
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Everyone’s Neighbor on the Chopping Block
The late-Mr. Rogers melted hearts in 1969 before the Senate Commerce Committee stressing the need for publicly-funded educational television and defend funding for the nascent Corporation for Public Broadcasting (the main source of funding for PBS and NPR). This speech is all the more poignant in light of the proposed elimination of CPB to help fund the expansion of…
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Work for SmartNews!
We’re looking for a few engineers for our downtown San Francisco office. Primarily back-end with a strong background in backend development technologies. The bullet points on the job posting say: Coding experience in Java, Kotlin, or Scala Experience operating and maintaining a JVM-based application Experience developing on top of a web framework (e.g. Spring Boot, Ruby…
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Full Disclosure
Diving into the minutiae of documents sometimes uncovers wonderful details and flashes of humanity. Mutual Fund disclosure statements are the usual dry blah-de-dah boilerplates but The Wall Street Journal Moneybeat column digs out this chestnut from the go-go dotcom days before the crash. Plain Language Risk Disclosure First of all, stock prices are volatile. Well,…
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The best thing on the Internet today
I’ve already shared this multiple times today but am adding it here so I can refer back when needed. Media coverage was thick and fast as it was a slow news day in Trumpland and everyone was looking for a bit of comic relief on a Friday after a busy week. Taiwan-based expat Ben Thompson…
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Truth to Power
It’s no secret that the disinformation swirling around our new president and how he got elected have been a boon for the troubled media business. Americans have taken a new interest in good journalism and are looking more carefully at where they get their information. Subscriptions are up at places like the New York Times…
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Casey Neistat – Disrupter of Broadcast News?
Two of the three commercials run by Samsung during this year’s Academy Awards were basically showing us why their phones will not explode, the final spot of the evening featured mega-YouTube star Casey Neistat and dared anyone with imagination to become the next star. It’s an inspirational advertisement that only peripherally features Samsung but is…