Gillmor Gang: Off The Record
Of all the gin joints etc. etc. Clubhouse continues to confound those who don’t believe in the restorative powers of the Next Big Thing. It doesn’t make sense, they say, that an audio service based on live podcasts will change the course of human history. And they are right. Social computing is in the doghouse in the wake of January 6 and the former president. But the folks behind Clubhouse have gotten a few key things right.
The main thing is that in the beginning of the return to some rational possibility for the suppression of COVID, we’re opening our hearts to the hope we’ve abandoned for more than a year. Our children are crying at the prospects of returning to school, to the classroom, to the hallway rendezvous with friends, to the safety of the arc of life translating across generations and family stories. We’re tentatively daring to believe in things we took for granted even as we rebelled against them in our youthful exploration of th
Gillmor Gang: Leave Quietly
It turns out the most important decision made was not the vote to choose (and remove) in the election but Twitter’s permanent banning of the former president from the social network. Suddenly the temperature cooled, the new administration engaged with the details of vaccine rollout, and the second impeachment trial ended with an expected outcome. Twitter’s move was bipartisan if the trial was not.
Twitter’s other big move was the acquisition of Revue, a Substack competitor we’re moving to in production of the Gillmor Gang newsletter. It features tools to drag and drop articles from Twitter, Feedly and other newsletters, but crucially the ability to reorganize these chunks as the writing develops. It’s my bet that the newsletter container will absorb blogs, podcasts and streaming into a reorganized media platform available to creators small and large.
Gillmor Gang: Leave Quietly yahoo.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from yahoo.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Gillmor Gang: In My Room
No sooner did we start developing a newsletter, the newsletter industry exploded. Twitter jumped in with a purchase of Revue, Facebook was rumored to be investigating the platform, and each new day brought further experiments. You could blame it on the post-Trump lifting of the fog of despair. The pandemic continued apace, with new variants spurring distribution of vaccines and a transparency in communications with the new president and his team.
After years of social mining of our behavior, interests and transactions, inference has been replaced by direct evidence. The politics of data pressure mandate that we expect free software bundled with increasingly powerful hardware. The core utility of a phone culture shifted as people kept to their homes and mostly used the televisions for entertainment and news, and the phones as notifications consumers. The desktop remained the creation engine for business documents, analytics and information triage.
Gillmor Gang: Twitter+
The best thing about 2020 is we survived it. No need to say what the worst thing is, it’s hands down our collective stupidity in the choices we’ve made. That reality has forced us to refactor what we do moving forward.
If we had correctly understood the massive changes ahead, we would not be wondering when we will return to the old, new or any normal. The normal is what got us here. Unlimited air travel, freedom to do whatever we wanted without regard to the impact it would have on anybody else. Nationalism. What the hell is that all about? Keeping us in, everybody else out.