Perhaps you’ve heard of neither Gawker nor Reddit. That would make you (a) isolated from internet culture and (b) quite arguably lucky.
—Now that’s how your write a damn lede.
Knight News Challenge Round 3: Semi-finalists advance in News Challenge: Mobile
Bad news, Evening Edition fans. We didn’t make the cut for the Knight News Challenge.
Which is, frankly, disappointing but I’d be lying if I said it was entirely surprising. “Mobile”, despite the rather generic phrasing, seems to mean something rather specific in this case: apps.
There are some great projects here, I can’t wait to see what comes out of them. In the meantime, we’ll keep building the best daily commuter news site we can.
So I’ve decided to believe in Heaven. God too, if that’s what it takes, but it’s Heaven I’m really after here, because the only way I’ll be able to find it in myself to continue trudging along through a life I already know to be ultimately meaningless, to be veering hopelessly and irrevocably towards an anonymous, lonely, forgotten death, is if I can at least rest assured knowing that all of these tech founder types will some day have to stand before the pearly gates and testify to what good they did during their time on this Earth, and one by one these people will look up ever so briefly from the glow of the handheld screens on which they furiously refresh their Klout scores and declare, by rote, in language so rehearsed as to suggest that admission into this industry comes with a prepared set of self-congratulatory talking points, that they used technology to change the world for the better—and this is when St. Peter will laugh a great thunderous mocking laugh, and he will lean over and press the button that opens the hole in the clouds and every last one of these assholes who ever deceived themselves or anyone else into believing that “changing the world for the better” means “making it easier for well-off upper-middle class urban types to catch cabs home after a night out on the town” will fall the many miles back to the fiery Inferno below and spend the rest of eternity in a dark corner of Hell where there is no light save for the glow of an old flickering cathode ray set in the corner playing this video on repeat, forever, until the end of time.
Augustine heard the voice of a child singing in a garden; I got trolled by a YouTube video. We don’t get to choose our conversion experiences. Blessed be the lord, etc.
Sounds like Happy Matt Langer has found a purpose in life.
Holy crap!
(via Bay Area weekend bursting at the seams - Santa Cruz Sentinel)
Picked the wrong week to come back from vacation.
Now is the most toxic time ever in Silicon Valley
—Says Sean Parker, one of the guys responsible for opening another sewer into the cesspool. Oh, and it turns out that his dumb, massively overhyped startup is going nowhere.
Knight News Challenge Round 3: Evening Edition
A few months ago, we launched a small project called Evening Edition over at Mule Design. We built it because it was something we wanted to exist and, much to our delight, people really seem to like it. We want it to be even better so we’re applying for a grant from the Knight Foundation to take it to the next level.
The first thing we want to do is hire more editors. Last month, we expanded beyond the U.S. West Coast to our first international edition. Our London editor, Felipe, has been doing phenomenal work and we want to bring the idea to more places and even more languages.
We also want to rethink our platform. Right now, we’re running on WordPress, which is great if you’re running a blog, but we’re already running into limitations. We’ve got some ideas about how to do a better job publishing as well as lots of lessons learned from building our own podcast network. We know we can build a world-class mobile news site.
All of this is going to take time and money. We’ve found some awesome sponsors to help us keep get started but if we really want to expand, to pay our editors, to build our platform, we’re going to need some help. We love what The Knight Foundation is doing to enable new ideas with the News Challenge and we hope that Evening Edition is something they’ll consider.
Here’s how you can help: if you like the idea of Evening Edition, if you’d like to see us expand around the globe, if you want to see us build a kick-ass mobile platform for news, heart this post. If you think it’s really great, feel free to reblog, tell your friends, send a tweet, do … a … whatever it is people do on facebook. (Quick-n-dirty: go here and click the heart in the blue box to the left)
We’d really appreciate it. Thanks.
People will tell you that Bill raped the place clean, was greedy, didn’t know when to stop
—
This is sort of a throwaway line from today’s Rolling Stone article about how the Federal Government bailed out Romney’s Bain & Co.
It’s sourced to “a former Bain consultant” who could be anyone. But the phrase “raped the place clean” says a lot about the kind of person attracted to a place like Bain.
“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”
-Joseph Conrad
This is amazing.
The once-dignified portrait now resembles a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic (via BBC News - Spanish fresco restoration botched by amateur)
I really love the idea behind my pal Dave’s new show. It’s gonna be great fun to watch (oh, and Leah does a great job leading off).