The Other Web

Michaell Magrutsche is a multidisciplinary artist, and has given over 160 interviews worldwide last year on issues of leadership, creativity, neurodiversity, and human-centric systems.  We reached out to Michaell to discuss his views on the ecosystem of news and how it evolved, and how it can potentially be made more accessible to neurodiverse audiences.

Vinnie is an Emmy® Award-winning Media Advisor who grows personal brands & founder-led companies by scaling content distribution, brand visibility, & media reach. We reached out to Vinnie to get his unique perspective on what it takes for founders to get media coverage, and, viewing the same question from the opposite direction - what does it take for journalists to make a living in today's environment. Why would journalists want to talk to.. well, anyone? Hopefully Vinnie can help us find out. 

The basic premise of a search engine is that users want to find the best content for them; content creators generate the best content they can; and search engines come up with the most efficient ways to match the two together. But what happens in reality, is that every time the search engine comes up with a heuristic to determine which content is best, it creates an incentive for content creators to try and game the system by adjusting their content to match this heuristic - and instead of creating the BEST content they can create, they focus on creating content that mentions the right keywords, or entices the right websites to link back to it, etc. It seems like a broken system that results in a lot of junk content being generated. We reached out to Brandon Leibowitz, an SEO expert and the founder of SEO Optimizers, to discuss this state of affairs. Brandon is a search engine guru and a renowned public speaker, whose opinion on search engine optimization carries a lot of weight. He has been in this space since 2007, which is several generations in search-engine years.

John Lee is the founder and CEO of https://custommobile.app/, a boutique agency that builds individualized mobile apps for content creators.   We reached out to John to discuss his views on monetizing content and how one can make a living creating content on the internet.

Nicket has spent the past 10 years helping startups scale from hundreds of users to millions of users by integrating core DevOps philosophies into product lifecycles. Now he is leveraging his past experience to bridge the global digital accessibility gap by making the type of content under-served communities have historically lacked. Sudokra is an automated media production company, and their goal is to make the most reliable programmatic content on the internet. We invited Nicket on the show to discuss programmatic content in general, and its use as a way to cover the long tail of events and topics specifically.

Raphael Cohen-Almagor, DPhil, St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford; Professor of Politics, Founding Director of the Middle East Study Centre, University of Hull; Olof Palme Visiting Professor, Lund University, and Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC. Raphael taught, inter alia, at Oxford (UK), Jerusalem, Haifa (Israel), UCLA, Johns Hopkins (USA) and Nirma University (India). He was also Senior Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and Distinguished Visiting Professor, Faculty of Laws, University College London. In 2022, he was a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and in 2023 The Olof Palme Guest Professor, Lund University, Sweden. Raphael has published 19 books and more than 300 articles in the fields of politics, philosophy, education, law, sociology, history, media ethics, medical ethics, business ethics, and poetry, including most recently Confronting the Internet's Dark Side (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Just, Reasonable Multiculturalism (CUP, 2021) and The Republic, Secularism and Security (Springer, 2022). He is now writing Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Critical Study of Peace Mediation, Facilitation and Negotiations between Israel and the PLO and another book on Euthanasia in Belgium. Raphael was a co-founder of Israel’s “Second Generation to the Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance” Organization, the founder of The University of Haifa Center for Democratic Studies and The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute Medical Ethics Think-tank, and is presently the Founding-Director of The University of Hull Middle East Study Centre. We invited prof. Cohen-Almagor to the Otherweb to discuss his views on the tradeoff between free speech and social responsibility, and how the two can be reconciled.  

Bob Fine is the Editor-in-chief of the Social Media Monthly. Executive director at the IVRHA. Part-time professor at West Virginia University and Champlain College. He also appeared on this year "Worthy 100" list for his work on VR in healthcare.   In this episode I wanted to interview Bob about his views on VR, but he turned the tables on me and.. interviewed me instead.

Peter Saint-Andre is a former CTO of 2 startups with successful exits. Former head of partnerships at Mozilla. Philosopher. Coach. Former technologist now focused on advising and training to help people flourish at work and in life.   We sat down with Peter to discuss his approach to news consumption, and how a healthy information diet can affect one's emotions and anxiety levels.

My friends, welcome to the Otherweb! I think we all sense that something is wrong with the internet but most of us can’t articulate what exactly. I was reading google news the other day, and the first article it offered me when I opened the app was from CNN - titled “stop what you’re doing and watch this elephant play with bubbles”.  That’s the internet in a nutshell, isn’t it? Now, it doesn’t have to be like this. It’s just the logical conclusion of this downward spiral we’ve been on since we started maximizing engagement above all else. In this podcast, we're going to interview guests from various walks of life - techies, journalists, philosophers, etc - and ask all of them the same question. What's wrong with the information system, what caused it, and how can we fix it? Let's explore this question together and see what we come up with. Sincerely yours, Alex.