The Monday 6: Kickoff Edition - March 1, 2021

I’m setting a goal to get out one newsletter every Monday, with a mixture of 6 stories, articles, podcasts, data, tools, and really anything else I find provocative or useful. Hence: The Monday 6.

What I share will likely bias toward my interests in technology, marketing, business, software tools/tips, personal finance, and other stuff I like — but maybe not!

If you found something useful, let me know or share it with a friend.

Finally, if you have anything you’d like to share with me, just reply and let me know!

First up is the best news aggregation app I’ve ever used: Winno.

Their homepage explains the product best:

I’m a subscriber to the New York Times & Wall Street Journal, but I can’t stand being bombarded by “breaking news alerts” that just…aren’t “breaking news”.

I want a balance between:

Winno delivers on both in spades. You’ll get alert push notifications for truly important, breaking news, and a simple badge update for lower priority updates.

The setup is easy: you simply select from the ~30 topics you’d like to follow. Winno then notifies you actively for critical news and passively for regular updates related to topics you care about.

I feel informed without being overwhelmed: exactly what I want. Winno is the only news app on my phone that has notifications turned on.

I’m not stepping too far out in saying: Facebook doesn’t have the best reputation. Personally, I’m quite a bit more sympathetic to Facebook vs. what I hear from others, but I’ll save that monologue for some time in the future. 😊

Anyway, you may have seen stories in the news about Facebook blocking the sharing of news links for Australians and from Australian news organizations. The coverage of this story is what I want to highlight & comment on. Almost all coverage & takes on this topic contained:

Right on cue, after Facebook started blocking links in Australia, The Chairmen of the House Subcommittee on Antitrust David Cicilline made his stance clear:

It’s almost as if David predecided how he’d feel about any Facebook vs. government story! I’m shocked!

However, virtually all of the coverage & responses to the link blocking get the Facebook vs. the Australian government spat completely backward. This article by Mike Masnick (no fan of Facebook, by the way) of TechDirt is the most straightforward explanation I can find. Here’s the summarizing excerpt, but I encourage you to read the whole piece:

In short, you can think what you want about Facebook, but this is a terrible, no-good, very bad law that Australia drafted. It’s hard to think of an alternative course of action for a company like Facebook.

Check out the full article to dig in deeper.

Facebook has since reportedly struck a deal to offer news links on its properties again. Still, my point remains: journalism (broadly speaking) blames their business model collapsing on Facebook, and virtually everything the company does is viewed through that lens, even when the underlying facts don’t support the narrative.

Also, apropos of nothing, this chart is interesting. 😉

Ben Thompson’s article in Stratechery dives in even deeper and is worth a read.

For looking at comparative & trending data on COVID-19 cases & death across countries & states in the United States, I find the Financial Times’ interactive tool the most useful. I particularly like how this tool focuses on per 100K rates by default versus total numbers. Having the ability to switch between logarithmic (great for understanding rates of change) and linear charts is also handy.

My preferred filters:

I’m probably not breaking any news here, but the NYT has a multitude of different tools to help paint a picture of the spread of COVID-19 as well as the best explainers of how all vaccine candidates work.

While the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in the United States started off rocky, with backward incentives galore, we now seem to be hitting our stride. The single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine was approved for emergency use yesterday, vaccine supply should increase significantly very soon, and we gave 1.5 million shots the day Biden was inaugurated. We’re on the way!

I use the Bloomberg vaccine tracker to keep track of vaccination progress. It’s a hopeful page to check every day as we look to end this thing.

These are several years old, but NASA’s spacecraft Juno has some breathtaking pictures of the largest planet in our solar system. Worth marveling at for a few minutes.

Audiblogs is a simple Chrome extension (and iOS beta app) that turns any article into a podcast episode, subscribable via a private RSS feed in almost all podcast players.

I find the audio quality to be great, and it couldn’t be easier to set up. I now use this daily to queue up articles I’d like to read hear. It’s missing some features like cross-browser support, paywall logins, etc., but I’m still quite impressed.