Ryan Sholin

May Linkdump

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by

Ryan Sholin
in

⚠️ This post is more than five years old. Links may rot, opinions may change, and context might be missing. Proceed with cautious optimism.

I read a lot of stuff. Or look at it, anyway. I save some of it. I tweet some of it. Not much, really.

Here are some of the most interesting/useful/provocative/linkbaitey things I set aside for repeated/deeper/continued consumption since I last published a Linkdump post on April 10, 2013.

  1. Teacher Testimonial: How Rap Genius Fixed My English Class: If you haven’t been following my interest in emerging annotation platform Rap Genius, you’re missing out. I like it. I like the annotation tools, complete with a simple Redditish flavor of Markdown, I like the casual copyright infringement (so sorry I uploaded your image to Imgur instead of hotlinking to it, but hey, that’s a courtesy, too). Anyway, they’re expanding. Poetry Genius. Rock music. And, inevitably, News Genius, although they don’t quite have the formula quite right there yet, mostly annotating speeches and public records, whereas I’d like to apply these tools to articles. Anyway. In this link, the Rap Genius platform is used by an English teacher to get his students to annotate Siddhartha.
  2. The Guardian launched a UGC photo platform. This is relevant to my work. Read the comment thread on this and other related posts from around the launch to get an idea of some of the issues people enjoy debating on this topic.
  3. Flat design is a trend. It’s OK.
  4. Twitter is hiring someone to lead their News team, which is, more accurately, a News Partnerships team. Even more accurately, it’s a team heavily populated by brilliant and talented people I respect. This is not a job application. But somebody has to manage them, apparently. Much of the conversation around this job listing completely missed the point of the team and their role in driving adoption and increase of use of a product called Twitter at news organizations. It was silly.
  5. What it’s like to be a Jew in a state prison in the United States of America. (Hint: Awkward.)
  6. Propublica open-sourced a tool to search Instagram by time and location, if you’re into that sort of thing. (Again, relevant to my work.)
  7. Relevant to your arguments about building things for an audience that is comprised of a number of people somewhere between one and a number less than everyone, here’s some light film theory discussion about “the public” and Hitchcock’s construction of his audience.
  8. How the Syrian Electronic Army hacked The Onion: Love, love, love this new genre of show-your-work DevOps explainer where we explain how vandals snatched our keys. (Spoiler: Phishing. It’s always phishing. No actual hackery involved, really.)
  9. Speaking of new genres, Mat Honan has the whole “I went to a horrible tech conference so I’m going to write a crazy Gonzo piece about what it felt like and what these guys believe in and it scares me” thing down. I mean, down.
  10. Casual onlookers will have spotted some casual language in the public communication about Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr. I didn’t make the connection at first, but of course, “Fuck Yeah” is part of Tumblr’s history.