New York Magazine: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’. “Over the last few months, Select All has interviewed more than a dozen prominent technology figures about what has gone wrong with the contemporary internet for a project called ‘The Internet Apologizes.’ We’re now publishing lengthier transcripts of each individual interview. This interview features Dan McComas, the former senior vice-president for product of Reddit and the founder and CEO of Imzy, a community-focused platform.”
Internet history
CBR: Tim Berners-Lee fights Google, Facebook, Twitter over internet control
CBR: Tim Berners-Lee fights Google, Facebook, Twitter over internet control . “Tim Berners-Lee has called for more action to be taken against technology firms, in a bid to make the internet a safer and fairer place. The creator of the World Wide Web has said Facebook, Google and Twitter have become too dominant in the online world. In order to squash this power the scientist has called for more regulations to be put in place in order to tackle the increasing problem.”
Fader: A new Twitter project finds the origin of your favorite GIFs
Fader: A new Twitter project finds the origin of your favorite GIFs. “Director and Twitter favorite Matthew A. Cherry took on a bold task Friday afternoon. The self-proclaimed GIF Connoisseur announced he’d begin sourcing classic GIFs to their original video, and has so far made it through at least 20 well-used memes, sometimes with help from others.” What a terrific idea!
The Register: Open source turns 20 years old, looks to attract normal people
The Register, with a bit of a mean headline: Open source turns 20 years old, looks to attract normal people. “The Open Source Initiative, a non-profit that advocates open source development and non-proprietary software, pegs the date of inception at February 3, 1998. That’s when the term ‘open source’ was proposed by Christine Peterson during a meeting convened to build upon interest arising from the decision by browser maker Netscape to release its source code.”
The New Yorker: The End of the Awl and the Vanishing of Freedom and Fun from the Internet
The New Yorker: The End of the Awl and the Vanishing of Freedom and Fun from the Internet. “Blogs are necessarily idiosyncratic, entirely about sensibility: they can only be run by workhorses who are creative enough to amuse themselves and distinct enough to hook an audience, and they tend to publish like-minded writers, who work more on the principle of personal obsession than pay. The result is editorial latitude to be obscure and silly and particular, but the finances are increasingly hard to sustain; media consumption is controlled these days by centralized tech platforms—Facebook, Twitter—whose algorithms favor what is viral, newsy, reactionary, easily decontextualized, and of general appeal.”
20 Years of SEO: A Brief History of Search Engine Optimization (Search Engine Journal)
Search Engine Journal: 20 Years of SEO: A Brief History of Search Engine Optimization . “Search engine optimization (SEO) very much revolves around Google today. However, the practice we now know as SEO actually pre-dates the world’s most popular search engine co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Although it could be argued that SEO and all things search engine marketing began with the launch of the first website published in 1991, or perhaps when the first web search engine launched, the story of SEO ‘officially’ begins a bit later, around 1997.”
Bloomberg: Father of the Web Confronts His Creation in the Era of Fake News
Bloomberg: Father of the Web Confronts His Creation in the Era of Fake News. “The World Wide Web is 28 years old. But these days it often appears to have the growing pains of a teenager. There’s the scourge of fake news, growing pockets of censorship around the world, the fiery debate over net neutrality and more. When teens get into trouble, you typically talk to the parents. As it happens, I had the opportunity last week to interview Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist who was working for the European research organization CERN back in 1989 when he proposed the idea of using a tool called a web browser to visit distinct pages on the internet, each with an individual domain name and connected via a network of hyperlinks.”
