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Kevin Howes was at a thrift store in rural Alberta in 2014 when he came upon an old vinyl record in a plain white cover. The music historian, who was on a cross-country trip digging to find lost music from the analog era, paid the cashier 25 cents for the record, not knowing what to expect. “I took it home to my motel room later that night and I had a portable turntable and I listened to it and I was just flabbergasted at what I was hearing,” Howes said. “This was a really personal, progressive folk album from the early ’70s.” About five years after discovering the album, Howes emailed musician Duane O’Kane, asking if he had anything to do with a band named Catseye. O’Kane was stunned to have someone reach out to him about a band he helped form decades ago.

Source: Thrift store find leads to release of B.C. musician’s album 48 years after it was recorded | CBC News

A red knot (a species of shorebird) whose tag is B95 has been nicknamed “Moonbird,” because of his prodigious flying record. The oldest known member of his species, at about 30 years old, B95 has flown about 20,000 miles every year on his journey from the Canadian Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, which means his total flying distance has exceeded the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

I recently moved this blog to a new server, so I ‘ve been reconstructing it, and in the process looking through some *really* old posts. It starts in 2005, with some columns I reposted from the newspaper I worked for (the Globe and Mail in Toronto). At the time, I thought I would create a website where I could cross-post my newspaper work, the way Malcolm Gladwell and others were doing at the time, but then I started actually blogging about “Web 2.0” and cross-posting went by the wayside. One of the first non-newspaper posts was about “the revenge of the blog-o-sphere,” sparked by a column in Forbes written by Dan Lyons (who would later write The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, among other things) and the negative reaction from people like @om and @dangillmor.

From there on, it’s like a time capsule: posts about Yahoo integrating RSS into Yahoo Mail, about the rise of Craigslist — which had 9M unique visitors when I wrote about it in 2005, and has about 200 million now — and TiVo (remember that?), and the battle of Flickr vs Webshots. Other blasts from the past include a post about Jason Calacanis selling Weblogs to AOL, one about Google Reader and Bloglines and NewsGator, and one that pits Dave Winer against Nick Carr, Paul Kedrosky and others.

Then there’s a classic: me arguing with Dave Winer over whether a blog without comments actually qualifies as a blog or not 🙂 It seems like a lifetime ago that this is the kind of thing we spent our time worrying about! At some point, my personal blog posts were getting more traffic than the technology page of the Globe and Mail, and I tried to convince the paper to let me create a separate site, the way Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg did with All Things Digital, but the paper balked 🙁 Posting got light in 2009, after I became the social-media editor for the Globe — the “communities editor,” we called it — in charge of reader comments, and of getting reporters to sign up for Twitter, etc. (explaining the concept of “tweeting” to newspaper execs was so fun).

At the time, having a “social media” editor was such a new concept that no one really knew how it worked, or how it should work. I remember the new social-media editor hired by the New York Times called me to get some advice, because I was one of the first to hold that position at a major daily in North America, and I confessed that I had no idea what we were supposed to be doing, but that she should try to convince reporters and editors to get on Twitter 🙂

in 2010 — 12 years ago this month — I left the paper to join GigaOm. It seems like a hundred years ago now, not just because of COVID, but because the media landscape has changed so much in the past decade. Do I miss the old blog-o-sphere? (Yes, we actually used that term unironically). I do — mostly because even when there were the same dumb fights and interpersonal BS, they happened more slowly and with fewer participants. But it was also a very male and white and well-off world. Do I regret pushing the message that the social web could help journalism? No. Maybe that makes me a Pollyanna, but I honestly think it has led to good things — more voices, different voices, worthwhile criticism etc. — although that gets lost amid the larger dumpster fire.

Anyway, if anyone is still here, thanks for indulging me in this little trip down memory lane! It has been an interesting time — maybe a little too interesting 🙂

Since it’s Christmas-time, this is your annual reminder that in Catalonia, a traditional part of the nativity scene for the past couple of hundred years or so is the “caganer,” a small figurine of someone taking a crap. It’s become such a prominent tradition that dignitaries such as former US president Barack Obama have been given figurines of themselves as “caganer.”

Why? Interestingly enough, no one is really sure. The following is from Vox:

“Though excrement is gross, for peasants and farmers it’s actually important since it serves as fertilizer. Some think the caganer was originally a portent of good harvest and fortune to come, a type of fertility symbol. “There was the legend that if a countryside man did not put a caganer in the nativity scene, he would have a very bad year collecting vegetables,” Joan Liiteras, a caganer connoisseur, told the BBC. In the words of an old Spanish proverb, “Dung is no saint, but where it falls it works miracles.”

There might also be theological reasons for the nativity addition. According to Maureen Tilley, professor of Christianity at Fordham University, the caganer is significant because it’s a reminder of the early Christian belief in the Incarnation: that in order to redeem humanity, God had to be fully embodied (incarnated) in human flesh. And what’s a more unifying human trait than “Everybody Poops”?

“One object recovered from the site, a lump the size of a large dictionary, initially escaped notice amid more exciting finds. Months later, however, at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the lump broke apart, revealing bronze precision gearwheels the size of coins. According to historical knowledge at the time, gears like these should not have appeared in ancient Greece, or anywhere else in the world, until many centuries after the shipwreck. The find generated huge controversy.

The lump is known as the Antikythera mechanism, an extraordinary object that has befuddled historians and scientists for more than 120 years. Over the decades the original mass split into 82 fragments, leaving a fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzle for researchers to put back together. The device appears to be a geared astronomical calculation machine of immense complexity. Today we have a reasonable grasp of some of its workings, but there are still unsolved mysteries.”

Source: An Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculation Machine Reveals New Secrets – Scientific American

December 2021: The Omicron variant, first identified in South Africa, is in the process of sweeping the globe — on December 15, the UK reported the highest number of COVID cases since the pandemic began: more than 78,000 in the past 24 hours. Because the Omicron variant is much more infectious than the Delta variant, the number of cases in most countries is expected to expand rapidly. “If you have 100,000 cases today, it’s 200,000 cases [in] two days, 400,000 two days later, and then it’s 800,000 two days later,” a WHO official said. “So in a week, the actual number of cases can increase eight or tenfold.”

Medical authorities say even if the Omicron variant proves to be milder than Delta — which some early studies and anecdotal evidence from South Africa seem to suggest it might be — because of the higher reproductive or “R nought” rate, this could still overwhelm intensive-care units and hospitals, many of which are already stretched due to the previous waves of the virus, and patients who should have gone to the hospital but didn’t, and are therefore in worse shape. Some early studies appear to show that Omicron is much more prevalent in the nose and throat, and much less prevalent in the lungs, which could explain both the less serious symptoms and the higher rate of infection.

Continue reading “New updates: Life in a time of COVID-19”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

On Tuesday, Vox Media and Group Nine announced that they have agreed to merge their operations, in what Jim Bankhoff—Vox’s co-founder and CEO—told Axios will create “the fastest-growing company of scale in media.” Vox controls a suite of websites, including the eponymous Vox, as well as The Verge, Eater, and SB Nation, while Group Nine owns a number of niche interest sites such as NowThis, The Dodo, PopSugar, and Thrillist. The merger comes on the heels of a number of media-related deals, including BuzzFeed’s merger with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC), which gave the company a public listing and a theoretical value of $1.5 billion, and Axel Springer’s acquisition of Politico, in a deal valued at $1 billion. Donald Trump has also hitched a ride on the SPAC train by merging his media venture with an entity in a deal valued at $2 billion.

The idea of achieving something called “scale” is often referred to when deals like the Vox-Group Nine merger are announced, but the definition of that term is surprisingly hard to pin down. For example, Group Nine acquired PopSugar less than two years ago for $300 million, and yet, according to some sources who spoke with the New York Post, the Vox merger deal values all of Group Nine at less than $300 million—a little over half what the entire company was valued at in 2016, when it got a $100 million investment from Discovery. The current deal reportedly values Vox at $672 million, substantially less than the $1 billion it was theoretically valued at in 2015, during its last funding round, despite the growth the company has reported in the years since that investment.

In a similar vein, BuzzFeed’s SPAC deal originally valued the company at about one and a half billion—less than what it was theoretically worth in 2016, when it got a two hundred million dollar investment from NBCUniversal. Since BuzzFeed merged with the SPAC—and subsequently acquired Complex Networks, a global content network targeting millennials, which itself had a theoretical market value of three hundred million dollars—the new entity’s market capitalization has plummeted by close to forty percent, to the point where it is worth less than eight hundred million dollaes, or less than half what it was supposedly worth when it got the NBCUniversal funding. BuzzFeed had seventy-two million unique visitors in May of this year, according to Comscore; even after the merger with Complex Networks, it will only be slightly larger than Vox (by that measure, at least).

Continue reading “Chasing the ever-changing goal of media scale”

This office photo might look like something out of a bizarre retro science-fiction movie like Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.” but this is a real office — located at the Central Social Institution in Prague, in a picture taken in the late 1930s. The desks that slide up and down the wall are essentially tiny, open individual elevators with a desk and chair built into them, and were designed to make it easy for staff to access the files held in the massive card catalogue that the CSI maintained at the time — 3,000 drawers, 10 feet high, reaching from floor to ceiling and covering approximately 4,000 square feet, which at the time (and probably even now) was the largest filing cabinet in the world.

This profile of a New York mayoral candidate who goes by the name Paperboy Love Prince is fascinating — not just because of the personal quirks like the name, or the fact that they (Prince uses “they/them” pronouns, and also goes by “god/goddess”) wear four wristwatches and a variety of outlandish costumes, but because when you get past all of that, Prince seems like a remarkably level-headed person with some pretty good ideas:

This past Wednesday morning, Paperboy Love Prince, a twenty-eight-year-old activist, performer, content producer, and prankster whom a small but pollable number of people would like to see take office as the next mayor of New York City, sat at a computer behind the front desk of the PaperboyPrince.com Love Gallery, a pink storefront on Myrtle Avenue, in Brooklyn, which operates as a vintage store, community space, and campaign headquarters. Every week, Prince’s campaign gives away food donated by churches and other community groups to anyone who shows up.

Prince, who uses the personal pronouns “they” and “them,” as well as “god” and “goddess,” wore a gold turban, four wristwatches, a red-and-yellow short-sleeved shirt open at the front, blue-and-black flowing pants, and sparkly gold high-tops with Teddy-bear tongues. At one point in the day, Prince described themself to me as “the Steve Jobs of mutual aid.” Prince is an artist, rapper and entrepreneur whose Utopia Plan includes a universal basic income of $2,000 and health care and housing for all. Prince’s Utopia Plan proposes to turn the police into a “Love Team” and NYCHA developments into mansions. Prince studied journalism at the University of Maryland before moving to New York City to work as a performer, party planner, web developer and brand consultant.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Three years ago, a United Nations’ fact-finding mission looking into what it called a genocide committed against the Rohingya community in Myanmar—which saw hundreds of thousands of people displaced, and more than ten thousand tortured, and killed—released a report looking into the causes of the violence. One of the contributing factors, the UN mission found, was hate speech and propaganda spread via Facebook pages and accounts, including some that were maintained by Myanmar’s military police, known as the Tatmadaw. Although Facebook eventually took action to ban some of the most egregious examples, UN observers said these accounts and pages were able to foment violence and hatred against the Rohingya for months, if not years.

Facebook admitted that its own report on the violence in Myanmar—prepared by an independent non-profit called Business for Social Responsibility, and released at the same time as the UN report—found “we weren’t doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence.” The company apologized for not doing more to prevent violence being fueled by its platform, and promised to expand its policies and add moderation in Myanmar. Some believe it needs to do a lot more, however: this week, in a multi-country effort, lawyers representing thousands of members of the Rohingya refugee community filed legal claims against Facebook demanding $150 billion in compensation for the harms their people suffered.

In the UK, the BBC reported that a British law firm representing some of the refugees has written a letter to Facebook, saying it plans to file a suit in Britain’s High Court because Facebook’s algorithms “amplified hate speech against the Rohingya people,”and that the company failed to hire moderators familiar with the political and cultural situation in Myanmar. The letter also claims that Facebook failed to “take appropriate and timely action” to remove posts or ban accounts that incited violence against the Rohingya. In the US, a law firm representing some Rohingya refugees filed a class action complaint in California, alleging that Facebook was “willing to trade the lives of the Rohingya people for better market penetration” in Myanmar.

Continue reading “Myanmar refugees sue Facebook for $150 billion”