“According to [account owner Gene X Hwang], no one from the company formerly known as Twitter has yet to reach out to him about the @x account he operates, but notes he would be happy to have a conversation if they ever did so. ‘I’m kind of waiting to see what might happen,’ Hwang tells TechCrunch. ‘And I would be willing to part with the handle if they made an offer for it that made sense.’”

“Publishers, like Wirecutter, also focused on audiences who come from platforms other than search. [Wirecutter’s executive director of commerce Leilani Han] said these shoppers, coming from social media platforms and on-site traffic coming funneled through The New York Times’s website, were particularly impactful to increase pageviews of commerce content.”

“‘What was lost is the gathering space for in-person gathering and hanging out — the communal sharing of food, sharing a dream, being together in the same space,’ Ricardo Gomez, an associate professor at the University of Washington who conducted a definitive survey of public internet access in the late 2000s, said.”

“SmarterChild wasn’t the first AI-powered chatbot, but it bridged the gap between current technology like Siri and Alexa and earlier efforts like Dr. Sbaitso on MS-DOS and ELIZA. Like SmarterChild, these earlier bots could process natural language, but they didn’t have large swaths of data like SmarterChild to make its conversations more productive or useful.

SmarterChild grew from zero to 30 million users in under six months, solidifying itself as a phenomenon of the early aughts internet.”

“Google notes that although its systems are getting better at surfacing women’s sports coverage, it recognizes that there are imbalances across the web in terms of how men and women’s sports are covered. For example, if there’s a prevalence of content about men’s sports, that might mean Search is more likely to surface such information. To address this, Google is working with content creators and news publishers to increase the amount of relevant and high-quality media coverage of women’s sports.”

“…the true shape of Musk’s project, which is best understood not as a money-making endeavor, but as an extended act of cultural vandalism. Just as he graffitis his 420s and 69s all over corporate filings; and just as he paints over corporate signage and office rooms with his little sex puns; so does he delight in erasing the Twitter that was.”

“The U.K. said it will force social media platforms and services like Alphabet Inc.’s Google Ads to stop scam advertisements, including fake celebrity endorsements, and take tougher action to prevent children from age-restricted ads for drinking and gambling.”

“With the acquisition [of NDTV] going through, the free press in India has been whittled down to a handful of newsrooms, including The Wire, Scroll, and The Caravan, that cover the government critically. India’s veteran journalists — elbowed out of legacy newsrooms — mostly eke out a living as freelancers by taking their investigative work to digital platforms.”

“During a bout of financial instability nearly three years later, however, Reveal laid off six people of color from its staff of roughly 50 workers, including every single Black employee working on the editorial side of the company except the radio program’s host, Al Letson.”

“The articles — which have appeared in financial news subdomains of at least 32 websites including the Arizona Republic and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — include Chinese state media stories and scathing critiques of U.S. policymakers, academics and others critical of Beijing.”

“In an initial poll posed to its Threads followers, Texas Monthly asked what content they wanted to see on the platform: a good news story, a true crime story or a story from its BBQ coverage. The majority of the 150 replies were split evenly between good news and BBQ. Based on that response, Texas Monthly hasn’t shared true crime, hard news and political coverage on Threads, but that’s not to say that O’Donnell and her team will outright avoid posting any of that content on there forever.”

“Paris-based press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said the action was now the longest strike in French media since a 28-month strike by staff at the daily newspaper Le Parisien began in 1975.”

“The plain black pages, which appeared in Yediot Aharonot, Calcalist, Israel Hayom and Haaretz, were paid for by the Hi-Tech Protest movement. The Hi-Tech Protest movement is a group comprising of representatives and employees from hi-tech companies.”

In Spanish: “Correio da Manhã is the best-selling newspaper in Portugal (41,810 circulation copies in the first quarter of 2023), although with low digital penetration. The private life and business of the star, who now plays for the Al-Nassr club in the Saudi League , has been a gold mine that the tabloid’s front pages have conscientiously exploited.”

“Front Porch Forum is a hyperlocal for-profit website and newsletter with over 230,000 active members, almost exclusively Vermonters … The site hosts reports on anything from lost cows to major state and federal government updates.”