PinnedWhy Media Metrics MatterA Primer on Media Measurement and Why it Defines Your World — We sometimes treat the information industries as if they were like any other enterprise, but they are not, for their structure determines who gets heard. — Tim Wu, The Master Switch Advertising funds much of the information and entertainment in our lives. The amount of funding from ads each source…Media14 min readMedia14 min read
Published in The Startup·Sep 21, 2020Member-onlyThe Gauntlet Faced by Upstart Social Networks Just Got HarderA common set of trials faced all ambitious social networks… Until this month. — As Facebook faces a crisis in confidence — having lost the trust of a wide swath of users, advertisers, investors, employees, and (most worryingly) regulators — pundits have attempted to make sense of the matter by holding the company up to historical precedents. Comparisons to AOL have always been popular…Social Media5 min readSocial Media5 min read
Feb 28, 2020How to Build a BuzzwordAnd why they’re so powerful — Recently a friend asked why people have an abundance of concern for “porch pirates.” “Is package theft truly a frequent problem?” he asked. “Or is the inconvenience so tremendous people loath to deal with it even once?” While I tend to support the latter theory, I also believe the term…Language4 min readLanguage4 min read
Published in The Startup·Feb 3, 2020Member-onlyWhat are We Waiting For?Playing chicken with the limits of technology — Spend enough time thinking about the technology business and you’ll inevitably acquire a mental metaphor for the rhythms and cycles you observe. A specific book or presentation might snap into your head, providing scaffolding to order successes and failures you’ve observed over the years. …Technology6 min readTechnology6 min read
Published in HackerNoon.com·Oct 21, 2016How the iPhone Led to Today’s Internet OutageExplaining the DDoS Problem & its Origins, As Simply As I Can — You may have noticed the Internet is kind of broken today. I think this event will become a Big Deal, potentially remembered as the denial of service attack which led to regulation and more. Discussing it via iMessage, a friend who doesn’t follow Internet security (like, you know, normal people)…Cybersecurity5 min readCybersecurity5 min read
Oct 8, 2016Keeping Up with the Joneses, TodayParticipatory Mass Media Changes the Equation — You should really read Obama’s essay in The Economist. In it, he discusses the rise of populism and anti-globalization, the importance of economic mobility, the growing divide between rich and poor, and how we might address these challenges. Midway in, Obama makes a quick point on how digital media affects…Inequality4 min readInequality4 min read
Published in Startup Grind·Oct 7, 2016I Dream of the Post Office Buying TwitterContemporary ‘Free Speech’ includes distribution. Will we rely on corporations or — Yes, it’s a goofy dream. Yes, Congress won’t let them stop Saturday delivery, let alone spend $30 billion on a wobbly and weird social network. Yes, this will never happen. Yes, $30 billion could buy 90 F-35s instead. But: I can’t get this idea out of my head. My mind…Politics5 min readPolitics5 min read
Published in HackerNoon.com·Sep 26, 2016Spectacles are the Anti-Glass…and they’ll succeed where Google stumbled — Snapchat announced Spectacles, their first hardware product, last Friday evening. Despite being the first hardware effort from our current social darlings, Evan Spiegel and company seem to be playing down the product. In a Wall Street Journal feature on Snap, only a handful of paragraphs touch on Spectacles. …Snapchat7 min readSnapchat7 min read
Published in HackerNoon.com·Aug 24, 2016Do Algorithms Find Depression or Cause Depression?About that Harvard Instagram study… — You may have heard about the Harvard study wherein researchers “trained a machine to spot depression on Instagram.” The paper’s subject is perfectly weaponized to make the media rounds, combining data, AI, health, a popular social network, and an enticing question to encourage clicks (what filter means you’re depressed?). MIT…Machine Learning5 min readMachine Learning5 min read
Aug 9, 2016Apple Shouldn’t Kill the Headphone JackThe 3.5mm audio connector is not the new floppy disk — The next iPhone will not have a headphone jack, Bloomberg reported today. I am very sad to hear this news. In all of tech, we have only one cheap, open, ubiquitous, small, sufficient, and reliable interface. There’s no reason to replace it right now. On the Verge, Nilay Patel wrote…Apple6 min readApple6 min read
