This week's notable links
This is my regular digest of links and media I found notable over the last week. Did I miss something? Let me know!
Share Openly: A simple icon for a new social sharing service
A lovely blog post by Jon Hicks on his process for creating the ShareOpenly icon. Characteristically, lots of care and attention went into this.
I'm really glad you get to see the open hand icons, which we eventually decided against, but feel really warm and human.
Jon's amazing, lovely to work with, and has a really impressive body of work. I'm grateful he was able to contribute such an important part of this personal project. #Technology
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Apple, SpaceX, Microsoft return-to-office mandates drove senior talent away
"Taken together, our findings imply that return to office mandates can imply significant human capital costs in terms of output, productivity, innovation, and competitiveness for the companies that implement them."
There's no doubt that there's a lot of value in being in the same physical room together; I'm writing this on the day after a work summit that brought my team together from across the country, and I'm still buzzing from the energy. But I think anyone in tech that proposes a full-time return to office policy needs to rethink.
It comes down to this: "it's easier to manage a team that's happy". People want their lives and contexts to be respected; everyone's relationship with their employers has been reset over the last few years. This goes hand in hand with the resurgence of unions, too: the contract between workers and employers is being renegotiated, and particularly for parents and carers, but really for everyone, working from home yields a kind of freedom that's hard to replace. And asking people to come back reads as a lack of trust and autonomy that erodes relationships and decimates morale. #Business
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Google’s broken link to the web
"A quarter-century into its existence, a company that once proudly served as an entry point to a web that it nourished with traffic and advertising revenue has begun to abstract that all away into an input for its large language models."
This has the potential to be a disaster for the web and everyone who depends on it: for journalism, for bloggers, for communities, for every voice that couldn't be heard without an open, egalitarian platform.
The answer for all of those stakeholders has to be depending on forging real, direct relationships with real people. It doesn't scale; it doesn't fit well with a unidirectional broadcast model for publishing; it's now how most people who make content think about what they do. But it's how all of them are going to survive and continue to find each other.
I've been urging publishers to stop using the word "audience" and to replace it with "community", and to think about what verb might replace "publish" in a multi-directional web that is more about relationships than it is reaching mass eyeballs.
Of course, it might go in a direction we haven't predicted. We'll find out very soon; the only real certainty is that things are changing, and the bedrock that many people have depended on for two decades is shifting. #Technology
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Mozilla Foundation Welcomes Nabiha Syed as Executive Director
This is great news for Mozilla, for everyone who uses the internet, and for everyone who cares about ethics, privacy, and human rights.
We need a well-functioning Mozilla more than ever - and that much-needed presence has been absent for years.
The spirit in the following quote gives me a lot of hope - I think this is how all technology should be built, and how all technologists should approach their work, but it's rarely true:
“After all, the technology we have now was once just someone’s imagination. We can dream, build, and demand technology that serves all of us, not just the powerful few.”
I hope - and believe - that she can make it happen. #Technology
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Former Far-Right Hard-Liner Says Billionaires Are Targeting Texas Public Education
"When Courtney Gore ran for a seat on her local school board in 2021, she warned about a movement to indoctrinate children with “leftist” ideology. After 2 1/2 years on the board, Gore said she believes a much different scheme is unfolding: an effort by wealthy conservative donors to undermine public education in Texas and install a voucher system in which public money flows to private and religious schools."
An interesting ProPublica story about the motivation behind some of the money that's funded these bizarre right-wing school board elections. It's not so much about the ideology as it is about undermining trust in public education itself, so that it can be replaced with a voucher system that would benefit the underwriters.
This quote says it all:
“It’s all about destroying the trust with the citizens to the point where they would tolerate something like doing away with public schools.” #Education
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Facebook news referrals: no sign of the slow-down stopping
"Aggregate Facebook traffic to a group of 792 news and media sites that have been tracked by Chartbeat since 2018 shows that referrals to the sites have plunged by 58%."
I'll bang this drum forever: establish direct relationships with your audience. Do not trust social media companies to be your distribution.
That means through your website.
That means through email.
That means through direct social like the fediverse.
It's long past time that media learned this and internalized it forever. #Media
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The SF Bay Area Has Become The Undisputed Leader In AI Tech And Funding Dollars
"Last year, more than 50% of all global venture funding for AI-related startups went to companies headquartered in the Bay Area, Crunchbase data shows, as a cluster of talent congregates in the region."
In other news, water is wet.
There was a moment during the pandemic when it looked like everyone was going to work remotely and there was an opportunity for startups to be founded anywhere. I think that time has gone: the San Francisco Bay Area is once again the place to found any kind of technology startup.
Yes, there are always exceptions, but the confluence of community density, living conditions, universities, and mindset make for a perfect storm. NYC and London - and maybe Boston / Cambridge - are pretty good too, for what it's worth, but the sheer volume of startup activity in the area gives San Francisco the edge.
This is something I fought earlier in my career: my first startup was proudly founded in Scotland and largely run from England. I wish we'd just moved to San Francisco.
This isn't to completely sing the praises of the city: the cost of living is now astronomical, and there's a contingent of right-wing activists that seem to want to paint it as some doom spiraling hellhole, as if its progressive past isn't something to be proud of. But there is still beauty, there is still that can-do sense of adventure, and if I was founding something new, that's probably where I'd be. #Technology
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