Interesting enough to people who haven’t been paying much attention for the last five years I guess.
social media
☆ Want You To Know: Ampersand
Ampersand Consulting Em Dash
Renaming to something especially clunky is the latest craze. It's not as if PricewaterhouseCooper works particularly well in print anyway. Monday monday.
It's all incremental change at Twitter as it adds exciting, innovative features such as more images to user profiles to make them look more like Facebook. Because people who use Twitter in preference to Facebook really want that.
Bad ad of the day. Somebody in HTC signed off on this.
Here come the drones, supervising employees and serving legal papers. By 2022 they'll probably be deployed as SpAds. Of course, the Freemasons will still be running everything anyway.
EU data retention directive is "invalid" because it
interferes in a particularly serious manner with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data.
This very long infographic illustrates how far down the flight recorders from MH 370 might be.
It's The Final Countdown.
Totally Confused
Oslo mystery man, classic album covers, a day of Russian state TV, homeopathy is (still) bunk and won't somebody think of the books?
☆ Want You To Know: Crowdfunding Rich White Guys
Crowdfunding Grows Up
It’s been an interesting few weeks for crowdfunding. Octopus Raft gave some enraged backers a salutary lesson in what exactly crowdfunding was. Perhaps more importantly it showed what crowdfunding wasn’t, or at least not yet. Funding using this model does not equal investment. Don’t expect a return proportional to the amount you put in when your darling pet project is acquired by some industry behemoth. Expect to get exactly what you were told you would receive when you funded the project.
Still, some investing maxims can be applied to crowdfunded projects. If it looks to good to be true, it probably is too good to be true. The ongoing fuss over GoBe from HealthBe proves this.
Over to David Ahn, writing on imedicalapps.com –
Therein lies the problem with crowd-funding platforms such as Indiegogo and Kickstarter. There is little or no accountability when it comes to these projects.
More troubling, Indiegogo allows for flexible funding campaigns, which delivers your money to the project owners at the time of initial pledge, even if the campaign does not meet its goal. While the GoBe project far surpassed its goal, all initial investors would have been out of their money even if the project did not reach resolution.
As such, all $630k that has been contributed to GoBe is non-refundable at this time, and users are not able to re-gather their money unless the project owner permits.
Always read the small print, although in this brave new world that may not be enough. Indiegogo’s response to Pando showing evidence of what might well be fraud seems to have been to delete their anti-fraud guarantee.
Rich White Guys Update
‘one used to be a dude, one’s super small, one’s hyper-smart’
This is how Rich White Guy Elon Musk described his information security team in some sort of weird attack on satire / defence of humourlessness.
At around the same time one of the Koch brothers took to the editorial pages in the Wall Street Journal to explain what a hard time Rich White Guys were having right now.
Steve Jobs, one of the greatest Rich White Guys ever displayed a rather poor choice of words in a 2010 email which featured a bullet point “2011: Holy War with Google”. Them’s fightin’ words alright.
Winning
Read Before You Write
NPR pulled a rather magnificent April Fools’ prank on the stream-twits. These are the people who don’t actually read anything that appears in their Facebook stream apart from the headline, but immediately crack their knuckles and get stuck into posting comments. On the article they haven’t read.
Games
‘The Guilt Of The Video-Game Millionaires‘
But for many of these young game-maker millionaires, who created their work out of a passion for play rather than prospecting, the wealth and attention can be jarring. In February, Dong Nguyen, the creator of Flappy Bird, a recent iOS game that had inexplicably risen to the top of the App Store charts, stopped selling his game even though it earned him an estimated fifty thousand dollars a day.
The Internet Of Slang
Gawker has banned it. “We want to sound like regular adult human beings, not Buzzfeed writers or Reddit commenters.” Zing! Take that, Buzzfeed writers.
Meanwhile, the-toast.net offers some suggestions for even more Internet slang. Carrie Jewett’s tongue may be slightly in her cheek.
Totally Confused, Weekend Longreads Edition
The Dead Zoo Gang, The People’s Republic of Zuckerstan, The Corporate PR Industry’s Sneaky War On Internet Activism, The Woman Behind Apple’s First Icons and an Excerpt from the Winds of Winter.
☆ Want You To Know: Techno-JOY
Techno-JOY
From the latest Snowden revelations relating to Huawei it would seem the NSA has expanded fully into corporate espionage. Bruce Schneier thinks IBM may be telling porkies about what they did and didn’t hand over to the NSA. Although the US government is at least making a belated attempt to do a smidgen of face-saving.
If all that gets you down a bit, have a look at Eddie Izzard explaining techno-JOY [YT]. Hacking and back doors covered.
Happiness
If true happiness it is you seek, you’ll find it in the clergy, apparently. Whatever you do, don’t have anything to do with Silicon Valley, unless you fancy being over the hill and miserable at 35.
Often the discrimination comes veiled in that vaguest of tech-world concepts: culture. One recent trend in Silicon Valley recruiting is for job candidates to interview with a programmer at their level or below after they’ve cleared every other bar in the hiring process. Ostensibly, the point is to make sure a candidate meshes with the whole team, a perfectly noble impulse. In practice, it’s frequently a tool for weeding out older applicants.
When the VC money dries up again, the bursting bubble certainly isn’t going to be pretty.
economies that embrace the Silicon Valley model writ large—throwing massive amounts of money at highly speculative investments—are suspiciously bubble-prone.
Stunningly Unsurprising Stats Of The Day
Twitter has a slight spam problem, and an overall difficulty in getting users to, em, use the damn service.
about half of the accounts registered in 2014 have been suspended by Twitter likely because the accounts were spam, compared to 28% in 2012.
…
In all, roughly 500 million registered accounts have been suspended since Twitter was born.
Twitter have also quietly killed off Twitter Music. Nobody will really notice because nobody was really using it. Pretty much.
Incidental History Lesson
On this day in 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in Greenwich Village, New York City caught fire. Over one hundred and forty workers lost their lives. The death toll was so high because at least one exit had been locked, as was common practice at the time.
The fire was instrumental in launching the modern labour movement in the US.
For the last ten years, on the anniversary of the fire, volunteers have installed ‘Chalk’ across the city. They inscribe the names and ages of the victims of the fire outside their former homes.
There’s lots more information on the fire in this PBS centenary piece and at Wikipedia.
It’s also 25 years since the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Definitely Worth Pondering
Totally Confused
Donetsk to become part of the UK, magic for dogs, Los Angeles Police Department is investigating ALL the cars, water buffalo run free and silence may be golden.