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LATEST ARTICLES - PAGE 11

Everything Easy is Hard Again

Jason Tate

Frank Chimero, writing on his blog:

This past summer, I gave a lecture at a web conference and afterward got into a fascinating conversation with a young digital design student. It was fun to compare where we were in our careers. I had fifteen years of experience designing for web clients, she had one year, and yet some how, we were in the same situation: we enjoyed the work, but were utterly confused and overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing complexity of it all. What the hell happened?

Great post.

Podcast Listeners Really Are the Holy Grail Advertisers Hoped They’d Be

Podcast
Jason Tate

Miranda Katz, writing for Wired:

Podcasters and advertisers alike have long suspected that their listeners might just be a holy grail of engagement. The medium is inherently intimate, and easily creates a one-sided feeling of closeness between listener and host—the sense that the person talking into your ear on your commute is someone you know, whose product recommendations you trust, and whose work you want to support.

I really need to find the time to get Encore rolling again on a more consistent basis. I miss doing the show every week.

I Quit Twitter and It Feels Great

Twitter
Jason Tate

Lindy West, writing for The New York Times:

When you work in media, Twitter becomes part of your job. It’s where you orient yourself in “the discourse” — figure out what’s going on, what people are saying about it and, more important, what no one has said yet. In a lucky coup for Twitter’s marketing team, prevailing wisdom among media types has long held that quitting the platform could be a career killer. The illusion that Twitter visibility and professional relevance are indisputably inextricable always felt too risky to puncture. Who could afford to call that bluff and be wrong? So, we stayed, while Twitter’s endemic racist, sexist and transphobic harassment problems grew increasingly more sophisticated and organized.

I think about this all the time. There are times when I find Twitter indispensable (while watching a sporting event and following experts, or when huge news breaks), but at what cost?

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Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify in U.S. Subscribers

Jason Tate

The Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc.’s streaming-music service, introduced in June 2015, has been adding subscribers in the U.S. more rapidly than its older Swedish rival—a monthly growth rate of 5% versus 2%—according to people in the music business familiar with figures reported by the two services. Assuming that pace continues, Apple will overtake Spotify in the world’s biggest music market this summer.

Interesting.

Your Twitter Followers are Probably Bots

Twitter
Jason Tate

Elaine:

The New York Times had an interesting feature over the weekend in which it calls out various social media influencers for follower fraud. Many people who appear to have huge Twitter followings actually don’t, and their fans are in fact paid-for bots. Oooh, busted! Apparently there’s a class of people who make a career out of being popular on Twitter, and it is terribly scandalous that they are not as cool as they might seem. […]

The NYTimes analysis is compelling, but their target account selection was awfully limited. So I reproduced their Twitter tool to continue the investigation.

This is pretty cool. I’ve told this story before, but a few years back we ran a story on AbsolutePunk.net about how a certain band member in a certain band had most certainly paid for followers on Twitter. His (very mature) response was to buy a bunch of followers on my account. To this day I don’t really know how many were part of that (I tried to block and report a bunch of them at the time), but I do know that once my account got “verified” I see random, clearly bot, accounts start following me all the time.

Letterboxd Comes to iPad

Apps
Jason Tate

Letterboxd, an app for tracking movies that I’ve talked a bit about before, has launched version 2.0:

In the 22 months since the launch of our iPhone app, we’ve consistently received the same feedback: please make this work on my iPad! We’re pleased to announce that today we’ve shipped Letterboxd 2.0 for iOS, a universal app with native iPad support that brings the richness of our community to the larger form factor.

You can follow me here if you’re interested.

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Spotify Launches Spotlight, a Multimedia Take on Podcasts

Jason Tate

Megan Farokhmanesh, writing for The Verge:

Spotify announced today that it’s expanding its audio slate to include “visual podcasts” about news, politics, and entertainment. These shows, available in playlist form, will feature a multimedia component that includes text, video, and photos as part of a new format that Spotify is calling “Spotlight.”

Meh, I listen to podcasts while doing other things and have my phone in my pocket, not sure I need “multimedia content” with my podcasts. Spotify should instead open up their directory of podcasts to everyone. The beauty of podcasting is that virtually anyone can do it and share it with the world through an RSS feed. Spotify’s podcast section shuts out thousands of independent publishers.

Pop-Up Mobile Ads Surge as Sites Scramble to Stop Them

Jason Tate

Lily Hay Newman, writing at Wired:

These redirects can show up seemingly out of the blue when you’re in a mobile browser like Chrome, or even when you’re using a service like Facebook or Twitter and navigating to a page through one of their in-app browsers. Suddenly you go from loading a news article to wriggling away from an intrusive ad. What enables these ad redirects to haunt virtually any browser or app at any time, rather than just the sketchy backwaters in which they used to roam? Third-party ad servers that either don’t vet ad submissions properly for the JavaScript components that could cause redirects, or get duped by innocent-looking ads that hide their sketchy code.

Not a day goes by that I don’t get pitched some variation of these kinds of ads for this website. They promise thousands of dollars a month in revenue, and it seems like a lot of big websites are saying yes to these third party ad networks. I think it’s killing the internet.

Nintendo’s Switch Is the Fastest-Selling US Console Ever

Nintendo
Jason Tate

Steve Dent, writing for Engadget:

The Switch has broken the US record for the fastest selling console ever, with 4.8 million units sold in just 10 months, Nintendo says. That shatters the previous record of 4 million US sales in the same time, also held by Nintendo with the Wii. Switch sales first opened on March 3rd, 2017, and it looks like strong holiday sales pushed the Switch over the top.

Intel CEO Sold $24m of Stock in November

Jason Tate

Speaking of that huge security bug, here’s Troy Wolverton reporting for Business Insider:

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich sold off a large portion of his stake in the company months after Google had informed the chipmaker of a significant security vulnerability in its flagship PC processors — but before the problem was publicly known.

The vulnerability, which affects processors from Intel, AMD, and ARM and could allow malicious actors to steal passwords and other secret data, became public this week.

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Researchers Discover Two Major Flaws in the World’s Computers

Technology
Jason Tate

The New York Times:

The two problems, called Meltdown and Spectre, could allow hackers to steal the entire memory contents of a computer. There is no easy fix for Spectre, which could require redesigning the processors, according to researchers. As for Meltdown, the software patch needed to fix the issue could slow down computers by as much as 30 percent — an ugly situation for people used to fast downloads from their favorite online services.

Bad, this is all bad. More information can be found on the official website for these bugs. Yes, there’s an official website.

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