Watching the women’s Olympic cycling time trial this morning and the competitors all have aerodynamic handlebars, helmets and wheel covers. It reminded me of Greg LeMond’s time trial in Paris to win the 1989 Tour de France.
Opened Facebook. Criticized some obvious political spin. Got blocked by my cousin. Sigh. I hate election season.
Open Social vs. Indie Social
Choosing our words carefully
I wrote a blog post in early 2019, trying to make a distinction between “open” social platforms that thrived on interoperability compared to “captive” networks that trap you in their system. As an aside, I also noted the difference between “indie” social and “open” social and added this footnote:
I recognize that the concept of an open social network from a large corporation might seem absurd in today’s environment, but you never know.
Five years later, we have Threads, a somewhat open social network from a large corporation with a track record of building toxic captive networks. The word “open” in this case is distinct from “indie,” since no one can ever claim that Meta is a small independent company. But in the case of Threads, they do seem to be moving toward being more open.1
I think it’s important to make a distinction,...
Picked a really good day to unplug for a week.
Just noticed that the Mercedes F1 team is sponsored by Crowdstrike. Funny that a racing team is sponsored by a company that’s now known for the biggest crash of all time.
Then: 7.20.24
Posts in the “Then” category were originally shared on my “Now” page.
Weird week. I got randomly sick for an evening. I woke up at 2 AM with a fever that only lasted a couple of hours and no other symptoms. So strange. Whenever I get sick now, I worry about COVID and getting others sick, but I’m pretty sure this was just a random virus.
Feels
- I’m excited about upcoming vacation. It’s been too long since I took a significant amount of time off.
- I’m worried about the state of our nation.
- Grateful for some rain. (We needed it.)
Projects
- I published two longer blog posts this week. One about the Star Trek episodes I tend to play in the background, and a second post about the whole Sticker Mule debacle.
- More progress on fonts. I inched closer to releasing my new typefaces. Just some refinements to make sure everything passes...
It’s an early beta, but I really like where Iconfactory’s Project Tapestry is going.
That fact that one bad update to a third-party system can completely shut down businesses, hospitals and airlines… scary. You’d think these systems would be more resilient than that.
Woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep so I finished submitting a manuscript to a journal for peer review.
Sticker Mule: A bad equation
The Sticker Mule email arrived in my inbox, but I didn’t see it at first. Instead, I saw the backlash on Threads.
Here’s the thing, I knew the owner was conservative, but it didn’t really matter to me. I’d randomly order stickers (or keychains) whenever they had a great special. And they ran specials a lot.
Many companies take stands on issues as a way to signal their values. But most of the time, those topics are carefully chosen to align with their customer beliefs. There is an entire discipline in public relations scholarship called Corporate Social Responsibility that studies this strategy.
But this crosses a line. Blasting your entire business mailing list with a political message — a mailing list that is a massive asset to your sales funnel — is just stupid.
Why? You are choosing to voluntarily spam your mailing list with a political message that half of your list likely...