Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
I made a mistake and got optimistic on New Year’s Eve. I blow dried my hair, and put on mascara, and got a bottle of bubbly wine that was much nicer than the kind I usually buy and not nice enough to be called champagne. I put on a silly pink jumpsuit and played a…
On Monday, Google released a few more details on its proposed tracking alternative to third-party cookies, a “privacy-first” technology that, from any angle, seems like just another way for the company to maintain its stranglehold on digital ad sales. Google’s calls its new creation “Federated Learning of Cohorts” (FLoC, for short), and promises that it’s…
Even if you aren’t knee-deep in tech news all the time, chances are you’ve heard a tech critic mention the so-called “attention economy,” or as I like to call it, the “cash-for-eyeballs” economy. It’s a concept that, at least in theory, makes a lot of sense: Companies like Facebook make their multi-billion dollar empires, in…
These Fortune 500 keyword blocklists are defunding the news This unprecedented leak by Integral Ad Science shows us the news stories the world’s biggest companies refuse to fund — and it gets weird. Welcome back to BRANDED, the newsletter exploring how marketers broke society (and how we can fix it). Here’s what’s new with us:…
.entry-header In December 2016, when then-President-elect Donald Trump summoned tech leaders to Trump Tower for a roundtable discussion, there was considerable debate about whether or not executives like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Larry Page, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella should accept the invitation. I argued that they absolutely should in this Daily Update…