Paul Ford continues to be an inspiration, even if ftrain.com isn’t as active as it once was. You really should go read the archives if somehow you haven’t explored them before.

20 years is arbitrary nonsense. A blip. Our software is bullshit, our literary essays are too long, the good editors all quit or got fired, hardly anyone is experimenting with form in a way that wakes me up, the IDEs haven’t caught up with the 1970s, the R&D budgets are weak, the little zines are badly edited, the tweets are poor, the short stories make no sense, people still care too much about magazines, the Facebook posts are nightmares, LinkedIn has ruined capitalism, and the big tech companies that have arisen are exhausting, lumbering gold-thirsty kraken that swim around with sour looks on their face wondering why we won’t just give them all our gold and save the time … In the spirit of this thing I won’t be editing this paragraph.

Thanks for sharing what you know!

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I wrote a post over on the Mapzen blog that I think came out nicely.

The territory means different things to different people. Depending on your perspective, the kinds of data that are captured about places may be missing, insufficient, or downright hostile. Who’s On First is opinionated_—like all datasets, no collection is truly unbiased—but we hope to be aware of when we’re asserting our own opinions about places and create a framework where a polyglot of _place-feels will be welcome.

The multifaceted maps we make simply reflect the weird and wonderful territory they represent.

I’m going to be adapting this as a talk at csv,conf. If you’ll be in Portland May 3, come out and say hello. (Bring your CSVs!)

Today I tweeted a snarky thing about Google’s featured snippets and then a bunch of people faved/retweeted it. I’m pretty sure this is the closest I’ve gotten to something “going viral.”

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If you used Twitter today, you’ve probably heard it’s the social network’s 10th birthday. I used their API to recreate what Twitter’s first day looked like, by plugging in a sequence of ID numbers starting at number 20.

I’m curious what happened to those first 19 tweets, and some other subsequent missing ID numbers (e.g., 24, 27, 28). Were they deleted? If so, why? Also notable: missing tweet ID 105 returns “Sorry, you are not authorized to see this status.” instead of the usual “No status found with that ID.”

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Consider these happy users of couchsurfing.com, the old school zero-cost precursor to Airbnb.

From Adam Greenfield:

A few years ago, I would have had to wonder whether these images did in fact represent happy Couchsurfers; now, of course, we have Google Image Search. It only took me a few seconds’ clicking around to confirm what I had suspected — or actually, something even more troubling.

It’s not merely that are these not at all images of actual Couchsurfers; in itself, that might readily enough be forgiven. It’s that the images appear to have been downloaded, altered and used in a commercial context without their creators’ knowledge or consent — in one case, in fact, in direct contravention of the (very generous) terms of the license under which they were offered. Here, let’s take a look:

– The image labeled “Jason” is one of photographer David Weir’s 100 Strangers, originally labeled with a copyright notice;

– “Dang” is a crop of commercial photographer Anthony Mongiello’s headshot of actor Stanley Wong

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From Alan Taylor’s In Focus, this year’s top news photos.

See also the three part 2014 year in photos: part 1, part 2, part 3.

Link via Jason Kottke

From Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed in the New York Times:

For three weeks American politicians have been fulminating about the peril posed by Syrian refugees, even though in the last dozen years no refugee in America has killed a single person in a terror attack.

In the same three weeks as this hysteria about refugees, guns have claimed 2,000 lives in America. The terror attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., and at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs were the most dramatic, but there’s an unrelenting average of 92 gun deaths every day in America, including suicides, murders and accidents.

See also: Friday’s front-page editorial, “End the Gun Epidemic in America,” the first since 1920. Also: The Guardian’s visualization of mass shootings.

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Anil Dash wrote a very coherent critique of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s initiative to use their wealth for good.

I do believe that Mark and Priscilla want to have a meaningful positive impact on the world, and I am unapologetically enthusiastic about the fact they’re articulating that vision in a way that will lead others. I am also grievously concerned about the greatest threat to those intentions: The culture of Silicon Valley. Many of the loudest, most prominent voices within the tech industry, people who have Zuckerberg’s ear, are already thoughtlessly describing smart critique of the Initiative as “hating”, absurdly dismissing legitimate concerns as jealousy.

Here’s the truth: No matter how good their intentions, the net result of most such efforts has typically been neutral at best, and can sometimes be deeply destructive. The most valuable path may well be to simply invest this enormous pool of resources in the people and institutions that are already doing this work (including, yes, public institutions funded by tax dollars) and trust that they know their domains better than someone who’s already got a pretty demanding day job.

As Anil said on Twitter, “the best thing they could do is listen to critics.”

See also: Zuckerberg: give your stocks to Facebook users, and from NY Times Dealbook, How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself

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Yesterday, for the first time in 137 years of operation, while world leaders meet in Paris for COP21, The Hindu did not go to print because of heavy flooding.

Consequent to the heavy rain, print editions of The Hindu dated December 2, 2015, in Chennai, Vellore, Puducherry and Tirupati have been cancelled after taking into consideration the safety of those in the distribution network.

The Indian daily newspaper, with a circulation just above that of the New York Times, did not print yesterday’s Chennai edition, but uploaded PDFs from the issue to their website.

Link via Democracy Now

You may have heard Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has promised to donate 99% of his stock in the company “to charity.” (It’s unclear what “charity” means precisely at this point, but one might want to look in the direction of Newark.)

Here is an interesting suggestion from Nathan Schneider, published today in America Magazine:

First, the stock could go back to the Facebook users who made it valuable in the first place. As I have noted here before, Facebook’s business model depends on gathering, mining and selling the personal information that its users post on the platform. That includes our networks of relationships, our photos, our worries, our milestones, our passions and our preferences. It’s barely understood what exactly Facebook knows about us and how, except that it’s a lot. This is part of what has made Mr. Zuckerberg so controversial, and rightly so; early on, he referred to his users as “dumb” (followed by a word even more insulting) for trusting him with such data. What if, rather than papering over that controversy, he could resolve it at the root?

Consider what it would mean if a substantial portion of Facebook stock were held in a trust that acts on behalf of the platform’s users. (This is a model I’m borrowing from the employee-owned John Lewis Partnership in the United Kingdom, explained in Marjorie Kelly’s extraordinary book Owning Our Future.) Users could then vote on what positions the trust should hold at shareholder meetings, and it could distribute dividends based on the stock’s value back to users, or reinvest them by buying more ownership in the company. The trust, therefore, would have a dual incentive: to protect user interests and privacy in Facebook’s business model, and to ensure that the company remains solvent.

The other suggestion, to sell the stocks and distribute the proceeds to every person alive, is also noteworthy, effectively saying: “Do you really know better what to do with all that money than the collective wisdom of everyone on Earth combined?”

Link via Caroline