else 11.11: “You can’t let the algorithms take over”

Last week there was a lot to say about Twitter and bitcoin, and the Guardian offered some reflections on what the NSA revelations mean to the average Joe. As always, if you want to keep up with what we’re reading/thinking about on a weekly basis, the best way is to subscribe to the “else” feed, either as an email newsletter or through RSS.

That Goddamned Blue Bird and Me: How Twitter Hijacked My Mind – New York Magazine
On the occasion of the IPO, a thorough contemplation of the ups and downs of writing and thinking with Twitter. “Collectively, the people I follow on Twitter — book nerds, science nerds, journalists, the uncategorizably interesting — come pretty close to my dream community.”

NSA Files: DECODED – The Guardian
The Guardian puts out a great multimedia package about what the NSA revelations mean to individuals, including descriptions about metadata and the real scale of a “three hops” network.

The Rise and Fall of the World’s Largest Bitcoin Exchange – Wired
The business of bitcoin and currency exchange is pretty complicated. Wired attempts to tell Mt. Gox’s story.

Nest’s Tony Fadell on Smart Objects, and the Singularity of Innovation – NYTimes
Fadell talks about the balance in designing algorithms to address your interests and needs without ending up in an echo chamber: “You can’t let the algorithms take over, because people will geek out on that one dimension.”

In Argentina, there’s a gorgeous apartment for sale and it only costs 409 Bitcoins  – Quartz For now anyway. The way bitcoins are going…it’ll be 205 soon.

Big Data’s Little Cousin  – NYTimes An eyeroll for “hyperdata” but the crowd-sourced real-time price analysis is interesting.

Google tech duo thank Snowden for revealing snooping, issue the NSA ‘a giant f*** you’ – The Next Web Somehow it’s comforting to know engineers inside Google feel this way.

Bitcoin – The Internet of Money  – Startup Boy A good primer if you’re looking to get smarter on the bitcoin phenom.

Self-driving cars are a privacy nightmare. And it’s totally worth it – Washington Post There’s always a tradeoff. This piece argues it’ll be worth it, and we tend to agree.