Popular vendors like Cloud Socials and BoostUp Social charge fledgling influencers $35 to $799 a month for a steady stream of interactions from prominent Instagrammers. Or aspiring influencers can go full automatic: For $10 to $100 a month and your login, automation apps will send your social media profile into a frenzy of liking, commenting, and following other accounts en masse, in an attempt to snag you a follow back.

Inside the Weird, and Booming, Industry of Online Influence | WIRED

Just when you start getting used to “Voice as the Interface”….

Yet it’s still just a room. Not virtual reality. Not augmented reality. Certainly not blockchain-reality. It’s a mostly normal room. That is until you get it started. Or look up.

Now you look up. The ceiling is quite full. There suspended are dozens of high-powered projectors, cameras, and speakers, all pointed down at the room, waiting for your code to make them come alive.

Dynamicland is a new kind of computer. It’s not a gadget that you keep in your pocket, nor one you can slip into your bag. The whole darn room is the computer.

via The Phenomenal World | The “Next Big Thing” is a Room

This statement, coming from these folks, is kind of like the emperor saying “I have no clothes”. Really interesting articulation of their ideas that i need to spend time with and  dig into.

We propose a radical change in design from experts designing for people to people designing for themselves. In the traditional approach, experts study, design, and implement solutions for the people of the world. Instead, we propose that we leverage the creativity within the communities of the world to solve their own problems: This is community-driven design, taking full advantage of the fact that it is the people in communities who best understand their problems and the impediments and affordances that impede and support change. Experts become facilitators, by mentoring and providing tools, toolkits, workshops, and support.

via COMMUNITY-BASED, HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN

I’ve been waiting for an article like this for a while. I think this is just the beginning of the reckoning for advertising-based apps/sites. Too much BS in the metrics.

Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what’s the point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there’s something not quite real about them: My favorite statistic this year was Facebook’s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day — though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn’t need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes.

via How Much of the Internet Is Fake?

Good read for any founder:

There are a lot of technically-focused guides on YC interviews, like Yuri’s at Hackernoon that I highly recommend. As a 3-time alum, former partner, and someone with close ties to the YC community today, I’ve seen the best and worst and wanted to share my own perspective.

via Founder’s Guide to the Y Combinator Interview – atrium

Well, this explains a lot. I always thought the internet was making me dumber, but now there may be science to back that hunch up:

In doing that analysis, Wagner noticed a trend emerging in the literature: People who frequently use many types of media at once, or heavy media multitaskers, performed significantly worse on simple memory tasks.

Here’s the story: Heavy multitaskers have reduced memory

Amazon’s growing success could pose a rare threat to Google parent company Alphabet, which generated $95.4 billion in ad revenues last year, 86 percent of its total revenue. Google is the dominant digital advertising platform in the U.S., and will take in an estimated 37 percent of digital ad budgets in 2018. Although Alphabet does not disclose the breakdown of its ad revenue, most estimates believe the vast majority comes from search ads — approximately 83 percent in the year to date, according to research from eMarketer.

via Google search losing some advertising business to Amazon, agencies say

I love great brands and KUIU has been one of my favorites since Jason Hairston founded it a couple years ago.  I also love football and athletes. And, i love entrepreneurs. When you combine the three, Hairston was an entrepreneur i followed closely.

He passed away by suicide earlier in the month after dealing – openly, transparently – with the effects of CTE from playing football.

I’m sad for his family. I’m sad for his co-workers and the people who love the company. I’m also sad because this is another tragic example of what football can do to a man’s brain. As difficult as these stories are to hear about, its important to listen. Something’s gotta change in football. We need some radical changes or the sport will die off .  We can’t keep sacrificing players for our weekend enjoyment.

 

via Jason Hairston death: former 49ers LB, KUIU found dead Wednesday | SI.com

I try not worry about the economy too much, but articles like this one (about college debt), and now this one about the potential impending farm crisis make it hard not to worry.

While the big farms have been able to absorb losses and weather ups and downs—at least until recently—the many farmers who have not gotten big or gotten out have struggled day-to-day for decades. Seventy percent of farmers make less than a quarter of their income from farming and only 46 percent have positive net income from their operations.

via Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us? | Civil Eats

Panoply just decided to get out of the content business. This seems like a clear signal (albeit from one company) that the space is starting to mature. For a while, they were all over the place, strategically. Creating content, distributing, creating a paid app, etc. But, as the market grows and goes from “interesting” to “real”, they are focusing their strategy to zero in on monetizing via ads and adtech. It’s their way to win in a market that could be analyzed via what Ben Thompson would call “aggregation theory“