This week…
One hundred editions of The Starting Block. What a run. Thanks for sticking around. Which one is your favourite Block? Here’s the most viewed, the most shared, and the most bizarre comment section.
And here’s a selection of top stories (on longevity) on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
After 25 years, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive are still working to democratize knowledge
Joshua Benton for Nieman Lab:
In 1996, Kahle founded the Internet Archive, which stands alongside Wikipedia as one of the great not-for-profit knowledge-enhancing creations of modern digital technology. You may know it best for the Wayback Machine, its now quarter-century-old tool for deriving some sort of permanent record from the inherently transient medium of the web. (It’s collected 668 billion web pages so far.) But its ambitions extend far beyond that, creating a free-to-all library of 38 million books and documents, 14 million audio recordings, 7 million videos, and more.
That work has not been without controversy, but it’s an enormous public service — not least to journalists, who rely on it for reporting every day. (Not to mention the Wayback Machine is often the only place to find the first two decades of web-based journalism, most of which has been wiped away from its original URLs.)
Twitter transformed science communication during the pandemic. Will it last?
“Enthusiasm for the social media platform changed science communication during the pandemic—but will it last?” asks Jeffrey Brainard for Science:
The marriage of Twitter and science came later than researchers who study scholarly communication expected. A decade ago, many predicted that scientists would flock to social media as a complement to traditional channels such as email alerts, Google searches, and scientific meetings. But at first many researchers expressed apathy or disdain for Twitter, which debuted in 2006. Some saw little value in the platform’s large, nonscientific audience. Others bridled at the initially tight limits on message length—just 140 characters per tweet (now 280). As a result, studies before the pandemic suggested as few as 2% of published scientists, and no more than one in five researchers in the United States and Europe, had Twitter accounts. (The disparate results reflect differences in the studies’ methods, the authors say.) Researchers working in the health and social sciences were more likely to have an account. And scientists who did tweet typically drew little engagement.
11 years, 10 arrests, at least 62 women: How did Britain’s worst cyberstalker evade justice for so long?
“His victims are triggered by unknown numbers – which meant contacting survivors for this piece was challenging. When we spoke, many expressed fears that I was a stalker pretending to be a journalist,” writes Sirin Kale for The Guardian.
What I read, watch, and listen to…
I’m reading Sorry, I Lied About Fake News by Daniel Engber for The Atlantic.
I’m watching Open Shutters on the spy-cam epidemic in South Korea by Youjin Do.
I’m listening to Nasty Dumps And The Success Of BlogTO. Jesse Brown speaks with BlogTO founder Tim Shore on Canadaland.
More stray links:
Journalism should take a cue from entertainment — diversity grows audiences by Paul Cheung for Poynter.
Who’s behind this website? A checklist by Priyanjana Bengani and Jon Keegan for CJR.
That smiling LinkedIn profile face might be a computer-generated fake by Shannon Bond for NPR.
Chart of the week
Martin Armstrong shows the growing demand for secure messaging in Ukraine and Russia for Statista.