Google prepares publishers for the release of Chrome ad-blocking
Joe Mullin, Ars Technica, 2017/06/05
Joe Mullin writes, "At first glance, it's surprising that Google, the world's largest Web advertising company, would want to promote ad-blockers." More...

A toolkit for predicting the future
The Economist, Medium, 2017/06/02
It's a toolbox with only three tools, but they're good tools:

• History lessons - patterns from the history of technology, eg., new forms of crime, concerns about privacy, etc.
• Uneven distribution - in some places, the future is already here, so look for them (eg. in 2001, mobile handsets with cameras and colour screens were commonplace in Japan)
• the imagined futures of science fiction - not only predictive, but often inspirational. More...

Friends don’t let friends use Facebook
Doug Belshaw, Open Educational Thinkering, 2017/06/02
According to Doub Belshaw (assisted with quotes from others), "Personalised advertising isn’t useful. It’s invasive, and it’s used to build a profile to manipulate you and your ‘friends’."  If we say this about personalized advertising, what do we say about personalized content. More...

Facial recognition tech makes it official: There is no privacy anymore
Cate Lawrence, ReadWrite, 2017/06/02
This has actually been going on for a while, but now it is becoming commoditized and widespread: "electronic billboards in restaurants and shopping precincts that utilize advanced facial recognition techniques to not only provide personalized advertisements but also measure and record the consumer and their response." Of course the proprietors don't tell you that they're doing this, but sometimes their actions are exposed by accident. More...

Intro to Firebase and React
Simon Bloom, CSS-Tricks, 2017/06/02
Firebase is a new service from Google enabling you to create and manage a cloud-based database. Reach is a Javascript library from Facebook that creates dynamic forms. More...

Internet Trends 2017 - CODE Conference
Mary Meeker, Kleiner Perkins, 2017/06/01
Mary Meeker is back with her influential report documenting the latest internet trends (355 page PDF). This year's take: overall internet use growth is strong, but the rate of mobile internet use growth is leveling off. More...

Platform Capitalism in the Classroom
Ben Williamson, DMLcentral, 2017/06/01

According to this article, 'platform capitalism' is "a business model based on the extraction of value from connecting people into networks and mining their data. More...

From digital commons to the data-fied urge: Theorising evolving trends in the intersections of digital culture and open education
Giota Alevizou, First Monday, 2017/06/01
This paper could be clearer, but the mapping of trends evolving from open education in digital culture is important, as is the warning it contains. The trends are as follows (quoted, my emphasis):

• not just access to wider availability of resources, but also an element of the processes of continuous improvement from interacting with others in the production of public education goods;
• a vision of ethics around educational entitlement, wider participation and alternative curricula notions of techno-economic efficiency that put forward neoliberal appropriations of education as public good;
• a picture where surveillance is glorified in the name of ‘student engagement’ and teaching excellence, collective intelligence, critical reflection and cultural pedagogy are reduced to a datified ‘learning process’. More...