Kevin Rothermel

No Spoilers.

Indie Brand Strategist
Professor, VCU Brandcenter
No Spoilers.
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Pastebot for Mac

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I haven’t been using my Mac much since getting an iPad Pro over the summer. It’s just been more fun to use than the laptop.

Then I bought Pastebot, and I’ve been back on the Mac ever since.

Pastebot remembers everything you copy. Then you can paste any of it later, anywhere you want, in any order you want. You can also create filters that transform text in the clipboard into another format.

If you’re anything like me, and you probably are me if you’re reading this, then you’ll appreciate what this means for doing research or trying to put together a document that includes bits of text or images from elsewhere.

It’s the most useful app I have right now.

Highly recommended.

Also, Tapbots is a developer well worth supporting. They make great apps.

Media has become simpler than it should be

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Seth Godin wrote a post about media’s race to the bottom that stuck with me for the last few days.

The opening is a good one:

The bestselling novel of 1961 was Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent. Millions of people read this 690-page political novel. In 2016, the big sellers were coloring books.

Algorithms have no care for cultural richness. All they care about is grinding culture into a viscous listicle-slurry that can be measured and sold for fun and profit.

I used to hate it when people made arguments about the Internet being bad for us. It’s not helpful.

So I won’t. Because really this is about media.

Indie Microblogging: owning your short-form writing

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Manton Reece is launching an independent platform for microblogging:

Do you remember how the web used to work? How the web was supposed to work?

In the earlier days of the web, we always published to our own web site. If you weren’t happy with your web host, or they went out of business, you could move your files and your domain name, and nothing would break.

Today, most writing instead goes into a small number of centralized social networking sites, where you can’t move your content, advertisements and fake news are everywhere, and if one of these sites fails, your content disappears from the internet. Too many sites have gone away and taken our posts and photos with them.

Check out the Kickstarter page. It might not work. But neither will Twitter.

The First Cyberwar

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Martin Belam at the Guardian thinks we’re living through the world’s first cyber war:

This always makes me wonder what broader patterns we might be missing in our own lives, and I’ve come round to thinking that we might already be living through the first world cyberwar – it’s just that we haven’t acknowledged or named it yet.

Really interesting article. Though I’m not sure this is going to be something that starts and stops like conventional wars. He mentions espionage in the article, which feels like a better parallel. Just as there are always spies doing spy work, there will always be states hacking other states.

There’s no way to prevent it, it’s difficult to know when it’s happened, and there doesn’t seem to be any real deterrent.