Friday Reading S02E09

*sings* It’s some stuff 🎶 I read 🎶 That you might like 🎶 Or not. *ends singing*

“After all this, you still think you want to be an information architect because you are in love with the idea of spreading clarity and understanding even though it is thankless, slow and trivialized or ignored by more people than respected.”

I classify this article “So you want to be an IA?” by Abby The IA as “Nail. Head.”

Lovely piece thinking about the constraints of the version of Gotham that has been portrayed in the Arkham games, and what cities mean to us and to the superheroes we imagine protecting them.

Behind the scenes almost ‘Mea culpa’ piece about that Motor Neurone Disease Association campaign ad that appeared to suggest that bad karma for not doing the ice bucket challenge had made a man develop it.

“It’s misguided, irresponsible and frankly pretty offensive that the voices of non-marginalised people are being given precedence like this. Yeah, it was probably horrible for men to watch their girlfriends being harassed. It was probably super uncomfortable for them. What could be worse than that? Nothing, maybe, except BEING THE ONE BEING CATCALLED ON A DAILY BASIS.”

Absolutely spot on from Emily Reynolds: “YouTube ‘social experiments’ just tell marginalised people their voices don’t matter”

Why MoMA’s collection of data was released on Github using Creative Commons Zero.

And why Facebook are releasing their diversity training.

Talking of diversity in tech HOHOHOHOHOHO

“I also can’t stress this enough: if you can’t just let an article lie and need to tell the writer you’re peeved, do so respectfully. If you tweet them with an attitude, dropping snarky, passive-aggressive comments or outright dishing out insults or abuse, you won’t get a reply: if anything, you’ll be blocked. Contrary to what you may think, this doesn’t mean they’re ‘hiding from the truth’ or that you’ve won. It means you’re a fucksmith.”

Wonderful diatribe – “Games Journalism: That Prick” by Chris Cullion

“TL:DR: when Apple’s iOS 9 comes out in September, there’s going to be a dramatic uptake of ad blockers on iOS – and it’s going to have far-reaching effects not just on websites and advertisers, but potentially also on the balance in mobile platforms and even on Google’s revenues.”

“The adblocking revolution is months away (with iOS 9) – with trouble for advertisers, publishers and Google” – Charles Arthur

“Everything I Know About Journalism in 395 Words” from Margaret Sullivan of the New York Times.

“Journalists are, at heart, storytellers more than they are empiricists. If you think that upon reading a single article, or watching a single documentary, you are magically in possession of The Truth – about nail salons or anything else – then you are deluding yourself. You’re only getting a single problematic sliver of the truth. And, sadly, that single problematic sliver is likely to be all you’re ever going to get.”

“Why you can’t trust journalism” by Felix Salmon

“How 7 news organizations are using Slack to work better and differently” – Laura Hazard Owen for Nieman Lab.

I kick myself a bit that I signed up Ampp3d to use Slack when we were first getting started and then never made everybody use it.

Great story of how digitised archives from newspapers proved an academic who said racism against the Irish only existed in their victim mentality minds was wrong.

iTunes is awful, especially for classical music, and this is why. And so is this.

“Why Jeremy Corbyn is winning the Labour leadership race” by Iain Martin, argues interestingly that the appeal of Corbyn is a mirror of the disaffected anti-politics bloc that has fuelled the rise of Ukip.

I love Colin Baker (and all the other Doctors) to absolute bits but he’s gone off on a right one here moaning about polls in the Doctor Who magazine being awful for the people who score badly in them. As Phil Sandifer said on Twitter “if your self-worth is bound up in The Twin Dilemma’s quality, the problem is you.”