Spotify | Chris Aldrich

Read Spotify will use everything it knows about you to target podcast ads (The Verge)

New ad technology for Spotify-exclusive podcasts is coming

This is exactly the sort of silo-ization of our data and attention we’ve come to expect from big tech. My friend Kim Hansen, in particular, saw this coming several years ago and was very worried about it.

Dawn Ostroff, Spotify chief content officer ❧

Former President of the UPN and the CW and under Les Moonves at Viacom/CBS.
Annotated on January 08, 2020 at 12:35PM

Listened to Episode 400: With The Help Of Mark Zuckerberg by Manton Reece, Daniel Jalkut from Core Intuition

Manton and Daniel celebrate episode 400 by inviting Oisín Prendiville to join them for a conversation ranging from Oisín’s podcasting app Castro and the virtues of selling it to Tiny, to the state of the podcasting industry, to a story of bicycle theft and recovery.

Discovery feature: Podcast Shuffle – Manton’s 2005 blog post announcing a hack for listening to a random podcast episode. (Sadly this link seems to be gone from the web and isn’t on archive.org.)

–Originally bookmarked December 21, 2019 at 10:51AM

👓 Deplatforming Works | Motherboard

Read Social Media Bans Actually Work (Motherboard)

Alex Jones says getting banned by YouTube and Facebook will only make him stronger. The research says that's not true.

Reply to Storify Bites the Dust. If You Have WordPress, You Don’t Need Another Third Party Clown Service

Replied to Storify Bites the Dust. If You Have WordPress, You Don't Need Another Third Party Clown Service by

Alan Levine (CogDogBlog)

How many more times do people have to get stiffed by a free web service that just bites the dust and leaves you bubkas? A monster post, some ranting on companies like Storify who offer free services that leverage our effort to get worth enough to get sold – when they do they just yank our content, an approach for local archiving your storify dying content, a new home spun tool for extracting all embeddable content links and how to use it to create your own archives in WordPress. Storify Is Nuking, for no credible reason, All Your Content Okay there are two kinds of people or organizations that create things for the web. One is looking to make money or fame and cares not what happens once they get either (or none and go back to flipping burgers). The other has an understanding and care for the history and future of the web, and makes every effort to make archived content live on, to not leave trails of dead links.

I like Alan Levine’s take on type one and type two silo services. Adobe/Storify definitely seems to be doing things the wrong way for shutting down a service. He does a great job of laying out some thought on how to create collection posts, particularly on WordPress, though I suspect the user interface could easily be recreated on other platforms.

I would add some caution to some of his methods as he suggests using WordPress’s embed capabilities by using raw URLs to services like Twitter. While this can be a reasonable short term solution and the output looks nice, if the original tweet or content at that URL is deleted (or Twitter shuts down and 86s it the same way Storify has just done), then you’re out of luck again!

Better than relying on the auto-embed handled by WordPress, actually copy the entire embed from Twitter to capture the text and content from the original.

There’s a big difference in the following two pieces of data:

https://twitter.com/judell/status/940973536675471360

and

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"> <p dir="ltr" lang="en">I hope <a href="https://twitter.com/Storify?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@storify</a> will follow the example set by <a href="https://twitter.com/dougkaye?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@dougkaye</a> when he shut down ITConversations: <a href="https://t.co/oBTWmR5M3A">https://t.co/oBTWmR5M3A</a>.</p> My shows there are now preserved (<a href="https://t.co/IuIUMvMXi3">https://t.co/IuIUMvMXi3</a>) in a way that none of my magazine writing was. — Jon Udell (@judell) <a href="https://twitter.com/judell/status/940973536675471360?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 13, 2017</a> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8">

While WordPress ostensibly displays them the same, one will work as long as Twitter lives, and the other lives as long as your own site lives and actually maintains the original content.

Now there are certainly bigger issues for saving video content this way from places like YouTube given copyright issues as well as bandwidth and other technical concerns. In these cases, perhaps embedding the URLs only within WordPress is the way to go. But keep in mind what it is you’re actually copying/archiving when you use the method he discusses.

Incidentally, I use both Broken Link Checker and Post Archival in the Internet Archive plugins to save a copy of content as well as to help fix broken links on my site when services or sites go down unexpectedly.

Those who are interested in better saving/archiving their content might appreciate the following links/resources:

Side note: I prefer the closer Yiddish spelling of bupkis. It is however a great term for what you often end up receiving from social silos that provide you with services that you can usually pretty easily maintain yourself.

An Information Theory Playlist on Spotify

In honor of tomorrow’s release of Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman’s book A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, I’ve created an Information Theory playlist on Spotify.

Songs about communication, telephones, conversation, satellites, love, auto-tune and even one about a typewriter! They all relate at least tangentially to the topic at hand. To up the ante, everyone should realize that digital music would be impossible without Shannon’s seminal work.

Let me know in the comments or by replying to one of the syndicated copies listed below if there are any great tunes that the list is missing.

Enjoy the list and the book!