Thanks to the Barbie movie, my girls have discovered the Indigo Girls. I love it.
My daughter just declared that her favorite font is Times New Roman, and I can’t think of a bigger sign that the kid is destined to be an academic.
I’m at a local coffee shop that’s normally packed with college students. But students aren’t back in town yet. Completely different clientele. It’s funny how a college town changes when school isn’t in session.
My academic research is primarily in branding and visual communication, but I’m discovering that as a media scholar today, part of my research always overlaps with social media in some way.
Spent my morning working on some typeface designs in Glyphs. I really enjoy working with fonts, and I have several designs that I’ve started and not finished. I need to prioritize creative time – not just writing, but also sketching and type design.
Threads as a "federated" brand solution
When the exodus from Twitter first started last year, many tech-savvy people were moving to Mastodon and I wondered if brands would move their accounts to self hosted instances. After all, from a branding standpoint, @offical@starbucks.com is better than @starbucks@mastodon.social. At the end of that post, I posited that someone would come along with a service that handled the fediverse complexity for companies.
That service is Threads.
Lots of people have asked why Meta was interested in providing ActivityPub support. I honestly think part of the story is so Meta can tell brands – their advertisers – that they can just publish on Threads and it will eventually be accessible on any other non-Twitter platform. Of course, they’ve still got to deliver on that promise… right now Threads doesn’t have ActivityPub support.
So far, branded accounts have flocked to Threads. If @BRAND-NAME@threads.com becomes the default for official branded social content, Meta benefits....
The University of Georgia School of Journalism took over a community newspaper that was about to go out of business in nearby Oglethorpe and started running it with students. This reflection digs into what has worked, what hasn’t and what smaller communities want as news…
Finally got around to adding a fonts page to my Micro.Blog site.
I’ve been reading the coverage of the Twitter rebranding and the most interesting framing is related to legal issues. It’s not an issue typically covered when a company rebrands… but it’s not a typical rebranding.
A coworker of mine took Twitter off her iPhone home screen today and replaced it with Threads. She’s been a heavy Twitter user for a very long time. More and more people I know are making the jump away from the service formerly known as Twitter.