read | Chris Aldrich

👓 Instagram’s Wannabe-Stars Are Driving Luxury Hotels Crazy | The Atlantic

Read Instagram’s Wannabe-Stars Are Driving Luxury Hotels Crazy (The Atlantic)

Hotels are being forced to figure out how to work with a new class of brand-peddling marketers.

Just because you’ve got the desire to be a social media influencer doesn’t mean you don’t need to treat it like a serious business.

Social platforms have such huge scale now, I’m surprised they don’t crack down on bots and fake accounts so that it’s more transparent what kind of true value accounts actually bring to the table. They could even leave them in the system so they can show to investors that they’re getting the traffic and “engagement”, but they’re throwing away a lot of actual value by not disclosing actual accounts and real engagement by real people (aka potential customers). Bots are second class citizens because other than the veneer of value, they’re really not adding much to the conversation other than a weak form of tummeling.

This makes me wonder if anyone in the social networking space is doing research on bots as tummelers?

👓 How Firefox is using Pocket to try to build a better news feed than Facebook | The Verge

Read How Firefox is using Pocket to try to build a better news feed than Facebook by Casey Newton (The Verge)

Pocket CEO Nate Weiner on how local data processing is the future of personalized recommendations.

Nice to see people and companies iterating on new feed reader functionality–particularly ethical ones.

👓 Dear Marketing by Email “Experts” I’m Serious About Messing With You | CogDogBlog

Read Dear Marketing by Email “Experts” I’m Serious About Messing With You by Alan Levine (CogDogBlog)

Hi, Hello. I was wondering whether you’d be interested in selling advertising space on Does the phrase “No, not even after hell freezes over” mean anything to you? The advertiseme…

This is pretty hilarious. I definitely need something like this for my site.

👓 Annotations are an easy way to Show Your Work | Jon Udell

Read Annotations are an easy way to Show Your Work by Jon Udell (Strategies for Internet citizens)

In A Hypothesis-powered Toolkit for Fact Checkers I described a toolkit that supported the original incarnation of the Digital Polarization Project. More recently I’ve unbundled the key ingredients of that toolkit and made them separately available for reuse. The ingredient I’ll discuss here, HypothesisFootnotes, is illustrated in this short clip from a 10-minute screencast about the original toolkit. Here’s the upshot: Given a web page that contains Hypothesis direct links, you can include a script that pulls the cited material into the page, and connects direct links in the page to citations gathered elsewhere in the page.

Jon is always building something interesting. Here he covers some useful tools for journalism as well as education.

👓 Vice Media Was Built on a Bluff. What Happens When It Gets Called? | Daily Intelligencer | New York Magazine

Read Vice Media Was Built on a Bluff. What Happens When It Gets Called? by Reeves Wiedeman (Daily Intelligencer)

For almost 25 years, Shane Smith’s plan was that, by the time the suckers caught on, he’d never be stuck owning the company he co-founded.

A fantastic article.

This reminds me a lot of the recent Theranos stories and book. It’s sad how companies don’t do enough due diligence on potential investments like this. When I think about how much basic work and discussion Marcus Lemonis does for $100,000 investments, I’m appalled to hear what people are doing for multi-millions. It’s stunning that a company can get to this size and be worth nearly nothing. Using the relative size (ie number of employees) of business units like human resources and legal within a particular industry could be a reasonable guide for the internal management of a company.

This is also a good example that while investments may give a company a particular valuation, it can rarely be the actual potential present value of the company. As a result, workers who are working for near free plus stock should be paying closer attention to company internals to know that their stock portion is going to be completely worthless.

Worse, I’m always pained to hear that young people (rich or otherwise) are essentially giving away their work and sweat equity away for free to big companies that could easily pay them. Eventually the pendulum is going to swing back the other way and companies are going to need to pay more.

One of my favorite quotes from the piece:

“Shane would always say that young people are the No. 1 bullshit detector, which was annoying once you realized that the thing he mastered is getting young people to buy shit,” says a recently departed senior employee.

👓 Announcing indiebookclub | gRegorLove.com

Read Announcing indiebookclub by

gRegor Morrill (gregorlove.com)

I’m pleased to announce a new project I have been working on. indiebookclub is an app for keeping track of the books you are reading or want to read. It is primarily intended to help you own your data by posting directly to your own site with Micropub. If your site does not support Micropub yet, y...

This portends some awesome things to come. Can’t wait to get this working and see what pieces come along with it later. This is going to make it much easier to leave silos like GoodReads.com.

👓 Possible cultural & technological futures of digital scholarship | W. Ian O’Byrne

Read Possible cultural & technological futures of digital scholarship by W. Ian O'Byrne (wiobyrne.com)

I think there is a need to develop a system to track the draft of a manuscript from the beginning to the end of the process. This will open up new possibilities to scaffold new scholars while we onboard them in the process. This will also provide new opportunities for open scholarship and open science. Finally, this will allow researchers to replicate, remix, or reproduce the (research, reflection, writing, revision, publishing) process. The answer may be in indieweb philosophies, but the main impediment may be in the people and systems that make all of this possible. I think we have an opportunity for new technological opportunities in academic publisher, but I’m not sure if culturally we’re ready. Let me explain.

I think there is a need to develop a system to track the draft of a manuscript from the beginning to the end of the process.

If you’re drafting in WordPress you can set the number of revisions of your posts to infinite so that you can keep (archive) all of your prior drafts. see: https://codex.wordpress.org/Revisions

“pre-print” versions of manuscripts

This is just another, albeit specific, form of academic samizdat.

👓 Rare hashtags | Matt Maldre

Read Rare hashtags by Matt Maldre (Matt Maldre)

It’s funny to find hashtags on Instagram that are rarely used. When commenting on a photo, I’ll often combine two words together into a hashtag. And then I click on the hashtag to see if there any other photos. Apparently is the first Instagram photo with the hashtag: #comiccompilations in the comments No photo has ever …

Matt makes an interesting point about the ability to use and search some social silos.

👓 Lost in Math | Peter Woit

Read Lost in Math by Peter Woit (math.columbia.edu)

Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book Lost in Math should be starting to appear in bookstores around now. It’s very good and you should get a copy. I hope that the book will receive a lot of attention, but suspect that much of this will focus on an oversimplified version of the book’s argument, ignoring some of the more interesting material that she has put together. Hossenfelder’s main concern is the difficult current state of theoretical fundamental physics, sometimes referred to as a “crisis” or “nightmare scenario”. She is writing at what is likely to be a decisive moment for the subject: the negative LHC results for popular speculative models are now in. What effect will these have on those who have devoted decades to studying such models?

I love that he calls out the review in Science.

👓 Yahoo Messenger is shutting down on July 17, redirects users to group messaging app Squirrel | TechCrunch

Read Yahoo Messenger is shutting down on July 17, redirects users to group messaging app Squirrel (TechCrunch)

It’s the end of an era for Yahoo Messenger, one of the first instant messaging apps on the market that introd. Today, Oath (which also owns TechCrunch) announced that it would be winding down the service on July 17 as it continues to experiment and consider how and if it can have a relevant p…

Interesting, a silo death ostensibly used to do PR for a new app on the same broad platform.