Looking back at my week

Photo Unsplash

Another week is in wind-down mode. I hope your week was more productive and bountiful than my continued struggle with finding a writing rhythm. Despite my best efforts, I didn’t write much this week. I have been caught between the urgent requirements of work and a nagging (and now prolonged) writer’s block. I have a growing pile of proverbial unfinished posts — thanks mainly to shifting attention from one topic to another. It is an affliction that most of us suffer in today’s hyper-information environment.

I read that a crypto-billionaire is buying a big piece of Forbes’ for about $200 million, just ahead of its public offering. Forbes, where I worked, is not really Forbes, and it is hardly a magazine worth its name. It is nothing more than a marketing site for arrivistes and self-promoters to give themselves some imprimatur. I mean, it published articles from Heather


[04.13.2020] Signals

Today’s edition is about the pandemic and its impact. All but one of the articles I found that raised some good questions in my mind.  


Is this the end of influencing as we know it? I suppose everything has a silver lining. [Vanity Fair]

Why the coronavirus lockdown is making the internet stronger than ever. [MIT Tech Review

Watching my family confront the Coronavirus on two continents. A great first-person account by my friend Selina Wang. [Bloomberg]

By the numbers: how the Coronavirus is devastating the restaurant industry. [Eater] Also, check out my Stuck@Om podcast with Eater Executive editor Matt Buchanan

Why are we using Zoom and other conference tools like social networks? I agree with the author here, though I sincerely hope we don’t get trapped in the Facebook video hell. [Glitch

Will the United States Post Office become a victim of the pandemic? I sincerely hope that


5 stories worth reading

  • Facebook’s full of fake accounts. And despite it saying it stopped nearly 538 million so far this year, there are almost 80 million fake accounts on the service. And they are for sale, Charlie Warzel of Buzzfeed reports. After reading the story, it is clear that this is a much broader problem.
  • I once joked with Tony Fadell that I had so many connected toys that it looked like a Sharper Image catalog. That joke is becoming a nightmare, as we are creating mountains of waste with old devices, reports Stacey Higginbotham for IEEE Spectrum.
  • If you think coal is an environmental nightmare, then you haven’t seen the damage done by coal ash. It is as big a problem as massive oil spills. .
  • Doc Searls says GDPR will pop the ad-tech bubble. I don’t know — the ad companies are way too crafty to work around regulation.
  • Google’s employees don’t