Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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About a year and a half ago, Google began the chance to be one of the search engines that European users as their default on Android devices. And for the past year and a half, we’ve seen some familiar ad-targeting giants continue to take those expensive slots. This auction was the result of a spearheaded…
We just think we are. A few days after the January 6th insurrection, shareholders at two major companies filed a resolution asking that Home Depot and Omnicom undertake audits to prove that their ad budgets haven’t been funding disinformation and extremism online. This, as far as we know, is the first time the link between…
On journalism, ideas, “ideas”, free speech, and tech. A while ago, I did a Q&A with a venture capitalist who had formerly worked in media. The conversation took place on Clubhouse, the explosively growing audio-driven social network. The topic was the tech industry and journalism, and the discussion had been precipitated by a few weeks…
This weekend, the New York Times published a piece by Cade Metz about Scott Siskind, the brilliant blogging psychiatrist formerly known as Scott Alexander, and the so-called “rationalist” community that grew up around his former blog, Slate Star Codex (SSC), which Siskind sunk to the bottom of the sea this summer because Metz was working…
How a controversial rationalist blogger became a mascot and martyr in a struggle against the New York Times. Illustration by Ben Wiseman On June 22nd, visitors to Slate Star Codex, a long-standing blog of considerable influence, discovered that the site’s cerulean banner and graying WordPress design scheme had been superseded by a barren white…
Facebook, which along with Google accounts for around 60% of advertiser spending online, has knowingly built some of its astonishing success on incorrect data, newly unsealed court documents allege. Incidentally, this may pose a problem for a business which generates of its revenue from selling ads. In a nutshell, this class action suit, which was…
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:…