Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. I write this weekly newsletter so subscribers can see some of the things I’m writing and sharing without depending on social media algorithms to show them to you. Each week I’ll share information about careers and workplace culture, mental health in the workplace, talent development, and important information about privacy, security, and legal tech.
You can find out all about me here - Mike McBride Online.
It seems odd but I caught an interesting article this week about how social media companies are de-emphasizing news content on the platforms.
The link to the New York Times piece (behind a paywall) can be found in this synopsis by Kevin O’Keefe. I agree with Kevin on this being part of it:
Why the change? Adam Mosseri of Instagram and Elon Musk of Twitter’s successor, X, have openly stated that hosting news often leads to polarized debates and has thus making it more of a liability than an asset.
I’d add those countries wanting Meta, Google, et. al to negotiate to pay news publishers to link to their content when they share it there is what caused them to look at the idea in the first place but there’s no arguing that news consumption on social media has become a mental health nightmare for most of us. The discussions are rarely informative, usually hateful, and make many of us spend less time on social media, which is exactly what the social media companies don’t want.
But for bloggers and other news sources, how do you get your “news” out to readers? I think we’ll be going back in time and focusing on using newsletters like this one, and RSS.
With Social Media Companies Distancing Themselves from News, It's Time For You to Learn About RSS
The reality is that staying informed requires a bit of effort on our part, not just to follow your chosen news sources outside of social media, but to decide which sources you should trust and follow.
At least until we all use AI to read us the news each day, but even then we’ll have to be thoughtful of where our chosen AI model is getting the news.
Are you familiar with using RSS or are you subscribing to more newsletters these days?
Careers and the Workplace
50 Percent of New Hires Change Their Minds - Hmm, after the horrible interview and hiring process they feel no obligation to not keep looking. Wonder why?
Interview Questions That The Smartest Candidates Are Asking - It's your one chance to ask the questions that can help you make the right decision, so ask.
Training and Development
Obviously, I completely agree with this statement - Employee Training Is an Essential Business Activity
One of the hardest parts of training is helping people unlearn things they've identified with for years.
Mental Health in the Workplace
It’s difficult to say that you support employees’ mental health when this is also an important consideration - The double-edged sword of revealing mental health issues at work
This all makes sense - Four-day work week trial in Spain leads to healthier workers, less pollution
Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech
This week on the M365 newsletter I take a look at eDiscovery collection reports.
Always good to get some takeaways from folks attending conferences - 6 Key eDiscovery Tips from Master’s Conference New York
Court Grants Discovery of Former Employee’s Personal Laptop - they downloaded documents three days AFTER the termination date. Umm, someone messed up here.
Linked - The Most Popular IT Admin Password Is Totally Depressing
Well, this isn't great.
"After sifting through more than 1.8 million pages identified as admin portals, researchers made a disheartening discovery — 40,000 of them used "admin" as its password, making it the most popular credential used by IT administrators."
A Powerful Tool US Spies Misused to Stalk Women Faces Its Potential Demise- If you collect it, someone will misuse it.
"Child sexual abuse and exploitation online is a serious issue. Targeting end-to-end encryption is not the solution." - Susan Landau
Maybe the big thing is that most companies are not tech companies. They use tech, and they have an IT department, but it's not their core function. If it's not your core function do you want to be in the data center business? Because if you decide to free yourself from the cloud, someone on your staff is in that business.
That’s all folks. If you found something interesting in this week’s newsletter, please share it with your friends. It’s the best way to help support the effort I put in each week to share this with you.