Matt Karolian (Nieman Lab)"We need to learn from the mistakes *we made* and collectively build better guardrails for the industry, ensuring that we don't make these mistakes with large platform partners again."
Errin Haines Whack (Nieman Lab)"We are not in the hint business; we are here to report facts, including the difficult facts of racism."
Ken Doctor (Nieman Lab)From paywalls to politics, pipes companies to public radio, the Post to The Post, podcasting to partnerships, and the press to a president.
The lesson, again, and again: Unique voices supported by subscribers point a way forward. ❧
December 21, 2018 at 06:47PM
Check out the Times or the Post these days, though, and it is a different world. Stories of greatest import can sometimes stay atop phone screens for much of the day. ❧
December 21, 2018 at 06:52PM
César A. Hidalgo (Scientific American Blog Network)What is knowledge? How does it disseminate? And what’s its value?
Mark Zuckerberg began the year promising that he would fix Facebook. He didn’t, and 2018 has only presented more problems.
You can’t spend too long working in WordPress without finding out that you need a “hook.” Hooks are WordPress’ system for you to do something at a specific event. Hooks can be used to either change the value of something at some point — we call this a filter — or to do something, which i...
In this post, I’m going to talk about how to choose a web host. If I had to guess, I would say that about 30% of our Caldera Forms support tickets are about a conflict with a hosting provider. We know better than most that choosing the right web hosting provider is essential to any site builder’...
Following last week’s post about WordPress security, in this post, I’ll start with advice I see commonly in other places that I don’t see much point in doing. Most of this advice is nearly harmless to slightly beneficial if it’s done. But the reason I don’t recommend it is that its benefit...
There are a lot of reasons to love WordPress, but one of the reasons I keep WordPressing is the supportive community. While I have no formal training as a web developer, I don’t like describing myself as “self-taught.” I didn’t figure this out on my own, I was taught by a supportive communit...
A beloved Robert Frost poem is among the many creations that are (finally) losing their protections in 2019
David Heinemeier Hansson (dhh.dk)Fundraising for open source has become trivial through venues like Kickstarter, so it's natural more projects are asking for money. "Imagine all the good I could do if I was able to work on this full time for the benefit of the community". Yes, let's imagine indeed.
You’re solving the problems for you and your mates, likely in the simplest way you could, so you can get back to whatever you originally intended to do before starting to shave the yak.
But once there is money involved, work will expand to fill the amount raised (to paraphrase Parkinson’s law).
External, expected rewards diminish the intrinsic motivation of the fundraising open-source contributor. It risks transporting a community of peers into a transactional terminal. And that buyer-seller frame detracts from the magic that is peer-collaborators.
Take Ruby on Rails. More than 3,000 people have committed man-decades, maybe even man-centuries, of work for free. Buying all that effort at market rates would have been hundreds of millions of dollars. Who would have been able to afford funding that?
Jeffrey Keefer (Silence and Voice)I have been successful with writing poems for the first two days of National Poetry Writing Month, the annual celebration of poetry writing that coincides with National Poetry Month each April. Since I have been writing poetry as one of my 2018 goals (the goal is specifically to publish a poem this year), I thought this was a wonderful opportunity to generate some first drafts of poems in a communal setting as others who are engaging in the same process are sharing their progress via the #NaPoWriMo tag .
Hi everyone! We're excited for Season One! There's a lot happening in agriculture that connects to major issues in labor, manufacturing, and sustainability.
Haley Campbell-Gross from Human CurrentIn this episode, Haley interviews TK Coleman to discuss how humans allow their conflicting mental models to influence the way they handle controversial topics like racism. TK also shares how understanding context and patterns within human systems ultimately empowers us to actively contribute to human progress.
Also glad to have the recommendation of General Systems Theory: Beginning With Wholes by Barbara G. Hanson as a more accessible text in comparison to Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s text. The gang at Human Current should set up an Amazon Affiliate link so that when I buy books they recommend (which happens frequently), it helps to support and underwrite their work.
Reality is objective, but meaning is contextual.
—Barbara Hanson, General Systems Theory: Beginning with Wholes quoted within the episode
Lost faith in Facebook after data leakages, breaches and too much noise? Here’s a guide to breaking up with the social network and its photo-sharing app for good.
