40 years of wisdom for $4, and a call for your inescapable truths
I wrote about the 40 most important things I’ve learned in 40 years. What has life taught you?
Fighting for identity as change accelerates
All of those thoughts in our head that create the experience of life from moment to moment — mundane and profound alike — have finally broken past the speed limits of time, distance, and hierarchical power. Blame and credit the internet.
The era of the performer: As need-based communication becomes increasingly mediated and impersonal, civility plummets and partisanship rises
Life used to be so inconvenient prior to the internet. There were no one-button presses to satisfy every want, no Google to find every answer, no screen through which to mediate every bit of communication. You had to talk to people in all their glory, ugliness, prejudice and promise. And if you wanted to get …
News companies, start building your virtual reality templates and tools for user-generated VR journalism
Fully immersive virtual reality environments are the next media space that will produce another generation of winners and losers in the race to provide the best, quickest and most engaging information. Which news organizations will win? Their past performance is worrisome; the internet and its democratic system of links gutted well-funded newspapers. In the internet’s …
Believe me, here are 11 of the bigliest tremendous signs from women’s marches against Trump
So many awwwwwws and guffaws were to be had when scrolling the internets for images of yesterday’s remarkable protests. I found 11, arranged below in no particular order, that were memorable and demanded to be shared: (Also, will our new government vote to leave the United Nations?) I have the best signs Excellent sign work …
Politics revealed by the technical legality of murder in a slice of Yellowstone
It’s interesting enough that a section of Yellowstone National Park provides an area in which to murder someone without breaking the law due to a lack of proper jurisdiction, but I ended up being equally fascinated by a professor’s pithy analysis of U.S. government and the motivations of politicians. See how he explains their inaction: …
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Trends in the journalism business and content creation: movies and the art of clickbait headlines
Movies and the art of clickbait headlines “We found something out here” is the first line you hear (at the 0:21 point) in the trailer for the next Independence Day film. Sound familiar? Here are some recent headlines from the news(ish) world: This Is What Happens When Two BuzzFeed Employees Explode A Watermelon | What …
Trends in the journalism business and content creation: Centralized digital power and our virtual world (news roundup for March 26, 2016)
1. The Internet isn\’t distributing media power, it is concentrating it From Joshua Benton on NiemanLab: The game of concentration: The Internet is pushing the American news business to New York and the coasts “The Internet doesn’t spread things apart — it pushes them together,” Richard Florida, an urban studies theorist. “You’re seeing more of …
Trends in the journalism business and content creation: Targeting texting and choice cuts (news roundup for March 6, 2016)
1. Your messaging apps are about to be invaded by the news ==> http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/03/with-purple-you-can-get-election-updates-and-political-info-via-text/ Purple ==> https://getpurple.io/ Quartz jumped on this train ==> http://www.wired.com/2016/02/with-quartzs-app-you-dont-read-the-news-you-chat-with-it/ And eventually bots analyzing data streams will provide your conversation partner ==> http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-shows-xiaoice-chatbot-made-chinese-social-networks 2. Editorial strategy of reducing choice as a way to stand out ==> http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/03/this-cm-wants-to-deliver-the-only-links-youll-really-read-each-evening/ This.cm ==> https://this.cm/ Why does …
We spend 40 hours a year in traffic. Self-driving cars might fix that. Read all about it on my new blog, Robot Car Report.
The 40 hours of collective traffic congestion Americans experience annually also costs the country about $121 billion. That and other stories can be found on Robot Car Report, a blog covering self-driving vehicles that I launched in June 2015. I created it because I needed to do something about missing writing and reporting. Composing quirky …