Rebecca Greenfield, writing for Fast Company, traces the return of the internet newsletter to the death of Google Reader. A representative from TinyLetter told her that there was an uptick in users just as Google pulled the plug last year. Some of us switched to other RSS readers, nevertheless a number of bloggers saw their community and traffic take a hit, and posted less as a result.

…

We subscribe to newsletters because we like someone and take interest in their unique points-of-view. Unless I am mistaken, hate-subscribing isn’t actually a thing.

Tiny Letters to the Web We Miss

As pointed to in the last part of the quote, part of the allure of email newsletters is more perfectly “capturing” (I don’t know what more concise word to use) your audience and directly knowing who they are. There’s much value in that for people who are trying to establish their independence by building up a “captured” audience - that’s what, for example, Scoble’s value is: he’s a “channel” of “eyeballs” that follow him around. That may all sound creepy - feel free to use the word “conversation” if you want to be all Cluetrain - it’s all synonyms to me.

Also, this is another case of the cobbler’s kids wearing no shoes for me.

Here’s what happened in America between April 14 and 17. In the state of Washington, a 6-hour downtime of the 911 emergency phone system was caused by a third-party vendor’s router failure, resulting in 4,500 missed emergency calls. Police responding to an unrelated incident at the home of a New Jersey man found three containers of radioactive material he had stolen from a military arsenal. A bomb threat was made against a Verizon call center in Tennessee. Copper thieves stole cabling, causing internet and phone outages in New Mexico, and then again in Hawaii. A routine police traffic stop found four people with over 100 counterfeit Walmart gift cards, $32,000 in blank money orders, and a credit card coding device. And a new piece of malware was discovered that compromises Android devices and makes them mine for the cryptocurrency Litecoin, among other things. This is only a sampling of the 90-plus events that were reported over a three-day period, but it is more than enough for the plot of a cyberpunk novel.

Adam Rothstein, on DHS’s Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report, which compiles a list of news stories about threats and calamities affecting United States infrastructure on a daily basis (via mikerugnetta)