Roundup: On Net Neutrality, #BringBackOurGirls, GIFs and Humans vs People
As we were watching Netflix the other night and it appeared our bandwidth was being throttled as the movie flickered in and out a couple of times, it occurred to me that the one benefit of the loss of Net Neutrality would be that I'd go back to reading books more instead of surfing the Internet so much.I kid, of course, because the end of Net Neutrality is no laughing matter, but when you don't want to cry or rage, it's good to laugh, right? I figured I'd start this week's links worth sharing with an excellent piece by Annalee Neuwitz in io9 that really explains what the net neutrality issue is about. It's the best I've seen so far, rounding up all the articles and explaining many of the finer points. This paragraph really sums things up well, but I encourage you to click through and read the whole piece:
An internet without network neutrality will look a lot like television does now. You'll depend entirely on your cable company to get broadcasts, and they will only deliver their handpicked channels in their cable packages. There will probably be a little room for the web equivalent of public access television, but it will be so underfunded and slow to load that almost nobody will see it.
The other super-serious issue going on lately is the kidnapping of 300 female students in Nigeria. It's an astounding story, and rage-inspiring because so little is being done in official channels about it. Rather than share any one story about it, I thought I'd share this Flipboard magazine, "Nigeria's Kidnapped Students, which Marcelle McGhee has been keeping updated with the latest news.On a slightly lighter note, I loved this piece on Medium by web guy Andy Baio that, to me, finally puts an end to the whole JIF vs GIF debate. Yeah, yeah, we know that the inventor says it's with a soft "j" sound, but I didn't realize that the inventor didn't invent what we actually consider a gif today. So I like the solution here: "JIF" for the format, "GIF" for the cultural phenomenon it brought on.Finally, my friend, Danny Brown, had a post that really resonated this week (not unusual for him, mind you) about how brands need to stop trying to be human and just treat customers like people. Gasp! Treating people like people? Imagine that. Anyway, read his post.What did you read this week that you want to share?