Sparrow Coffee in Naperville is among the best coffee shops in the country for remote work, according to a survey released by MarketBeat.com.

Sparrow in downtown Naperville among best coffee shops for remote work, survey finds – Chicago Tribune

Donald Trump launched into attacks on the judge in his criminal trial and continued to undermine New York’s criminal justice system Friday as he tried to repackage his conviction on 34 felony charges as fuel, not an impediment, to his latest White House bid.

Trump delivers rambling response to guilty verdict, falsely blasting ‘rigged trial,’ slamming Cohen

Sanchez is one of 26 public works interns or beach rangers between the ages of 16 and 24 in the city’s summer intern program which can lead to a fulltime job when they finish their schooling and are ready to enter the workforce.

Young people hit Waukegan's streets, beach as summer interns

Heavy downpours forced organizers of the Latino fest in Grant Park to cancel the event Sunday evening just before the world-renowned headliner, Grammy-winner Peso Pluma, was set to perform.

After abrupt end to Sueños Music Festival, fans to be refunded a portion of ticket price

Van Vossen goes 4-for-4 with five RBIs, including a go-ahead two-run homer, as Lake Central wins its second straight Class 4A regional.

4A softball: MaKayla Van Vossen, Lake Central top Hobart

Marina Mabrey scored 20 points and tied a career high with six 3-pointers as the Chicago Sky beat the Los Angeles Sparks.

Marina Mabrey hits 6 3-pointers, scores 20 as the Chicago Sky beat the Los Angeles Sparks for 1st home win

Bruhat Soma was unbeatable before he arrived at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and neither the dictionary, nor his competitors, nor a lightning-round tiebreaker challenged him on the way to victory.

Bruhat Soma rides an unbeaten streak to the Scripps National Spelling Bee title, winning tiebreaker – Chicago Tribune

Donald Trump may be convicted of a felony and reside in Florida, a state notorious for restricting the voting rights of people with felony convictions. But he can still vote as long as he stays out of prison in New York state.

Donald Trump could still vote for himself after conviction if he’s not in prison on Election Day

Donald Trump became the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes Thursday as a New York jury found him guilty of falsifying business records in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through hush money payments to a porn actor who said the two had sex.

Donald Trump becomes first former U.S. president convicted of felony crimes – Chicago Tribune

The culvert project that closed Indiana 51 in Hobart in July will likely go at least one month past schedule because of delays.

Hobart Indiana 51 road project increases side street traffic, shrinks business at Sapper’s

Chicago Tribune

chicagotribune

Authors, artists, and their employers are furious over generative artificial intelligence (AI) – chatbots that write novels and news copy, image generators that create artwork or music to order in the style of any artist whose work is accessible on the internet.  The list of pending lawsuits is long and growing. Major media outlets including The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune contend that their stories were copied “with impunity,” prominent authors of fiction and nonfiction allege “systematic theft on a mass scale,” and famous artists assert that image generators duplicate their work and threaten to destroy their livelihoods. The authors and artists object not only to the actual generation of prose, images, or music by AI but also to the use of their work to train the AI in the first place. Reading some of the pleadings, you sense genuine anxiety in addition to grievance – the feeling that the more prolific and successful the plaintiffs become, the faster they are training their replacements. Their fears are borne out by well-publicized waves of AI-driven layoffs across the entertainment industry and even among the coders themselves. The legal questions, however, are complex and won’t be settled for years. They involve the reach of copyright and the limiting doctrine of “fair use,” as well as the licensing terms that content creators impose on consumers of their work. Resolving these questions is easier, or at least clearer if we are prepared to attribute agency to a computer and judge its activities as if they were undertaken by humans.  At one level, of course, this is ludicrous. Machines don’t think or create like humans – they just do what we tell them to do. Until very recently, it was easy to see computers as sophisticated tools subservient to human agency, regurgitating pre-loaded content and crunching numbers. Today, we converse with chatbots the way we would with a research or coding assistant, and with image generators the way art directors guide human illustrators and graphic designers. Much as it discomfits us, generative AI learns and, at some level, “thinks.” Trained on a significant slice of human knowledge, ChatGPT aced the “Turing test” – the famous measure of a machine’s ability to exhibit human-like intelligent behavior – the day it was released. Since then, chatbots have passed the bar and medical licensing exams, solved long-standing math conundrums, and written more empathetic responses to patient questions than their doctors. They even outperform humans on tests of creativity, and it is precisely to encourage creativity that copyright laws exist. This is not to argue that we should start according rights to machines – far from it. Rather, it is because humans develop and benefit from generative AI that we must ask if there is any legal basis for treating AI differently under copyright law. Humans read books and newspapers to learn, to become more informed, and to become better writers. No one argues that violates copyright. They may bring sketchbooks to museums and record their impressions of works they see, improving artistic skills and broadening stylistic repertoires. All agree this is “fair use.” Why, then, should training a generative AI on publicly accessible content be prohibited? AI systems may not learn or think like biological beings, but learn they do, and, whether or not we choose to call their inferential processes “thinking,” they clearly exhibit intelligent behavior. Leave questions of ontology and the roots of knowledge to the philosophers (or, if you prefer, to their imitative chatbots). We benefit humankind by making the rudiments of knowledge creation accessible to generative AI. AI helps us perform better. It juices our game, as long as we don’t forget how to think for ourselves. We expect doctors to keep up with the medical literature and lawyers to read the latest cases, so if we value the assistance AI provides, we should want to see it exposed to the broadest possible swath of human understanding. It is hard to see how this violates anyone’s rights. The copyright plaintiffs have another theory: that the trained chatbot is so directly derived from their proprietary content as to constitute an infringing work in itself. But chatbots are based on “large language models,” which organize massive numbers of basic text elements into a complex representation that captures meaning and word relationships. This allows the chatbot to formulate coherent answers to queries. It seems difficult to argue that such an esoteric representation, based on so many written works, is any more infringing than a human brain exposed to The New York Times. Whether generative AI, once trained, might produce stories or images that infringe on someone’s copyright is a completely separate question. In its lawsuit, The New York Times cited instances of verbatim copying of its content by ChatGPT. Depending on how much was copied, those specific instances could represent copyright infringement regardless of whether the culprit is man or machine. (OpenAI, the proprietor of ChatGPT, insists such cases are rare and thinks their chatbot may have been tricked into copying.) Artists have a tougher case to make because style has never been protectable by copyright. Today, anyone is free to hire an artist to create a work in the style of another artist. That may be crass but, as long as no specific work by the other artist is copied, it isn’t legally actionable.  Why should we hold image generators to a different standard? While the artist side of the story pits individuals against corporate behemoths like Microsoft, the chatbot wars are a clash of titans: the plaintiffs are Big Media and wealthy authors. They’ve sought to bolster their copyright case with terms of service that prohibit scraping content for use in AI training. Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, you can’t enlarge copyright using contractual restrictions. If the use of your content is either noninfringing or falls within “fair use,” which places activities such as research and teaching beyond the reach of copyright, those restrictions are unenforceable. Like all technology revolutions, the advent of generative AI will produce winners and losers, but potentially on a vaster scale – and with a greater share of losers – than any previous advance due to the sheer number of jobs it affects. No career is truly safe because the imperative to save money is universal. Of course, it’s easy to say that technology has been coming for jobs since the Industrial Revolution and the net effect has always been more jobs, not fewer – until it’s your job. But the galloping popularity of generative AI attests to the undeniable and widespread benefits it delivers. Fettering it with legal hopples that benefit one set of big players over another will not, in the long run, and probably much sooner than that, reduce the inevitable dislocation. Authors, artists, and their employers are furious over generative artificial intelligence (AI) – chatbots that write novels and news copy, image generators that create artwork or music to order in the style of any artist whose work is accessible on the internet.  The list of pending lawsuits is long and growing. Major media outlets including The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune contend that their stories were copied “with impunity,” prominent authors of fiction and nonfiction allege “systematic theft on a mass scale,” and famous artists assert that image generators duplicate their work and threaten to destroy their livelihoods. The New York Times The Chicago Tribune The authors and artists object not only to the actual generation of prose, images, or music by AI but also to the use of their work to train the AI in the first place. Reading some of the pleadings, you sense genuine anxiety in addition to grievance – the feeling that the more prolific and successful the plaintiffs become, the faster they are training their replacements. Their fears are borne out by well-publicized waves of AI-driven layoffs across the entertainment industry and even among the coders themselves. The legal questions, however, are complex and won’t be settled for years. They involve the reach of copyright and the limiting doctrine of “fair use,” as well as the licensing terms that content creators impose on consumers of their work. Resolving these questions is easier, or at least clearer if we are prepared to attribute agency to a computer and judge its activities as if they were undertaken by humans.  At one level, of course, this is ludicrous. Machines don’t think or create like humans – they just do what we tell them to do. Until very recently, it was easy to see computers as sophisticated tools subservient to human agency, regurgitating pre-loaded content and crunching numbers. Today, we converse with chatbots the way we would with a research or coding assistant, and with image generators the way art directors guide human illustrators and graphic designers. Much as it discomfits us, generative AI learns and, at some level, “thinks.” Trained on a significant slice of human knowledge, ChatGPT aced the “Turing test” – the famous measure of a machine’s ability to exhibit human-like intelligent behavior – the day it was released. Since then, chatbots have passed the bar and medical licensing exams, solved long-standing math conundrums , and written more empathetic responses to patient questions than their doctors. They even outperform humans on tests of creativity , and it is precisely to encourage creativity that copyright laws exist. solved long-standing math conundrums more empathetic responses outperform humans on tests of creativity This is not to argue that we should start according rights to machines – far from it. Rather, it is because humans develop and benefit from generative AI that we must ask if there is any legal basis for treating AI differently under copyright law. Humans read books and newspapers to learn, to become more informed, and to become better writers. No one argues that violates copyright. They may bring sketchbooks to museums and record their impressions of works they see, improving artistic skills and broadening stylistic repertoires. All agree this is “fair use.” Why, then, should training a generative AI on publicly accessible content be prohibited? AI systems may not learn or think like biological beings, but learn they do, and, whether or not we choose to call their inferential processes “thinking,” they clearly exhibit intelligent behavior. Leave questions of ontology and the roots of knowledge to the philosophers (or, if you prefer, to their imitative chatbots). We benefit humankind by making the rudiments of knowledge creation accessible to generative AI. AI helps us perform better. It juices our game, as long as we don’t forget how to think for ourselves. We expect doctors to keep up with the medical literature and lawyers to read the latest cases, so if we value the assistance AI provides, we should want to see it exposed to the broadest possible swath of human understanding. It is hard to see how this violates anyone’s rights. The copyright plaintiffs have another theory: that the trained chatbot is so directly derived from their proprietary content as to constitute an infringing work in itself. But chatbots are based on “large language models,” which organize massive numbers of basic text elements into a complex representation that captures meaning and word relationships. This allows the chatbot to formulate coherent answers to queries. It seems difficult to argue that such an esoteric representation, based on so many written works, is any more infringing than a human brain exposed to The New York Times . The New York Times Whether generative AI, once trained, might produce stories or images that infringe on someone’s copyright is a completely separate question. In its lawsuit, The New York Times cited instances of verbatim copying of its content by ChatGPT. Depending on how much was copied, those specific instances could represent copyright infringement regardless of whether the culprit is man or machine. (OpenAI, the proprietor of ChatGPT, insists such cases are rare and thinks their chatbot may have been tricked into copying.) The New York Times tricked Artists have a tougher case to make because style has never been protectable by copyright. Today, anyone is free to hire an artist to create a work in the style of another artist. That may be crass but, as long as no specific work by the other artist is copied, it isn’t legally actionable.  Why should we hold image generators to a different standard? While the artist side of the story pits individuals against corporate behemoths like Microsoft, the chatbot wars are a clash of titans: the plaintiffs are Big Media and wealthy authors. They’ve sought to bolster their copyright case with terms of service that prohibit scraping content for use in AI training. Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, you can’t enlarge copyright using contractual restrictions. If the use of your content is either noninfringing or falls within “fair use,” which places activities such as research and teaching beyond the reach of copyright, those restrictions are unenforceable. Like all technology revolutions, the advent of generative AI will produce winners and losers, but potentially on a vaster scale – and with a greater share of losers – than any previous advance due to the sheer number of jobs it affects. No career is truly safe because the imperative to save money is universal. Of course, it’s easy to say that technology has been coming for jobs since the Industrial Revolution and the net effect has always been more jobs, not fewer – until it’s your job. But the galloping popularity of generative AI attests to the undeniable and widespread benefits it delivers. Fettering it with legal hopples that benefit one set of big players over another will not, in the long run, and probably much sooner than that, reduce the inevitable dislocation.

Does Generative AI Violate the Rights of Authors and Artists?

জেনারেটিভ এআই কি লেখক এবং শিল্পীদের অধিকার লঙ্ঘন করে?

Verletzt generative KI die Rechte von Autoren und Künstlern?

¿La IA generativa viola los derechos de los autores y artistas?

L’IA générative viole-t-elle les droits des auteurs et des artistes ?

क्या जनरेटिव एआई लेखकों और कलाकारों के अधिकारों का उल्लंघन करता है?

生成 AI は著者やアーティストの権利を侵害しますか?

Generative AI는 작가와 예술가의 권리를 침해합니까?

A IA generativa viola os direitos de autores e artistas?

Нарушает ли генеративный ИИ права авторов и художников?

Üretken Yapay Zeka Yazarların ve Sanatçıların Haklarını İhlal Ediyor mu?

AI sáng tạo có vi phạm quyền của tác giả và nghệ sĩ không?

生成式人工智能是否侵犯了作者和艺术家的权利？

This story was originally published on by by and . ProPublica Jennifer Smith Richards Jodi S. Cohen Prosecutors in Illinois have dropped at least 15 court cases that hinged on the word of a former Chicago police officer who’s now charged with perjury and forgery after he got dozens of traffic tickets dismissed by testifying each time that his girlfriend had stolen his car. Jeffrey Kriv is accused of lying under oath 44 times to get out of speeding, parking and red light camera tickets involving his personal vehicles. In his 26 years as a Chicago officer, Kriv was known for being one of the city’s most prolific drunken-driving enforcers, which means many more pending cases in which he was an arresting officer could be in peril. The most recent DUI arrests he made involve allegations of dangerous driving. On just one morning this month, an assistant state’s attorney made motions declining to prosecute seven cases where Kriv was the arresting officer, some of which dated to 2021. The assistant state’s attorney offered no reason, but in court, defense attorneys mentioned Kriv’s alleged credibility issues. “This is the officer who has been charged with a felony,” one defense lawyer told Judge Chloe Pedersen after his client’s DUI case was called. “This is a Kriv matter,” another defense attorney said as his client’s case was dismissed. While Kriv retired in January just before he was charged criminally, he had faced nearly 100 misconduct complaints from citizens and fellow officers in his tenure on the force. ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune previously detailed Kriv’s long history of alleged . misconduct as an officer and his current legal trouble Prosecutors charged him in January with four counts of perjury and five counts of forgery, all felonies, in connection with four of the traffic tickets he accrued. He has pleaded not guilty. The Chicago Police Department knew in early 2022 that the Office of Inspector General was investigating Kriv for lying to get out of tickets. Then, on Oct. 28, the state’s attorney’s office added Kriv to its list of officers whose credibility issues meant the office would not call them to testify in criminal cases, sometimes called the do-not-call list. But the Police Department would not answer ProPublica when asked why it kept Kriv on the streets until January, when it stripped him of police powers. In those few months, Kriv made two dozen arrests and issued seven traffic citations, according to Police Department records obtained by ProPublica. He was the primary arresting officer in 18 of those cases; charges already have been dropped in seven of them. A spokesperson for the Police Department declined to comment. The state’s attorney’s office said there are 10 pending felony cases in which Kriv was the arresting officer. Two cases filed after he was put on the do-not-call list are moving forward; the other eight cases remain under review, a spokesperson said. There may be other cases — most of them likely misdemeanor DUIs — involving Kriv that are still pending. The state’s attorney’s office said it does not track misdemeanors, and the Cook County clerk’s office and chief judge’s office also said they did not have that information. Most DUI cases are misdemeanors, however, and Kriv regularly made about 100 arrests a year on DUI charges, according to annual counts published by an anti-drunken-driving group. Kriv estimated last year that hundreds of his cases might be awaiting an outcome. Kriv’s attorney, Tim Grace, told reporters that he and his client would not comment for this story, though Kriv has twice emailed reporters to defend himself against misconduct complaints and call ProPublica’s reporting biased, including in an email last week. In a 2,000-word email sent in June, he said that he had nearly 150 honorable mentions and two life-saving awards and was consistently one of the city’s top arresting officers for DUI charges. He also criticized other officers, a judge and the Police Department as a whole. “I’ve been on the job for 27 years and I was a worker. Any officer that works will get complaints. Some false, some true,” Kriv wrote. “I could do what many, many officers do and that would be nothing.” Kriv also sent a strongly worded email to a prosecutor last November, while he was still working as a police officer, after he learned he would not be allowed to testify about arrests he made. In the email, he defended his honesty and threatened to “not go out of my way to arrest people for DUI” going forward. “My reputation as a Chicago Police Officer is immaculate and all my testimony on any case that I have been involved in is spot on,” he wrote to Assistant State’s Attorney Emily Leuin, after calling her a coward. ProPublica obtained the email through a public records request. “Go ahead and dismiss my cases where someone was seriously hurt because the offender was drunk. This is something you have to live with but by all accounts, you obviously have no qualms about doing so. I’m sure [anti-drunk-driving groups] will like to know what is going on with the dozens, if not hundreds of cases of mine that are currently pending an outcome,” he wrote. The beginning of an email that Kriv sent to Assistant State’s Attorney Emily Leuin. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica. Redacted by ProPublica Leuin did not respond to a request for comment. Despite his threats, Kriv did make DUI arrests for the rest of his tenure as an officer. He arrested a Chicago man in December 2022 after he said he watched the driver go the wrong way on a one-way street and then go through a stop sign. “Very strong odor of alcoholic beverage on breath, slurred/thick-tongued speech, glassy eyes, confused,” Kriv wrote in the charging documents. That case was dismissed in April. Other cases, meanwhile, are moving forward despite Kriv’s indictment. In traffic court this month, defense attorney Steve Roach asked the prosecutor whether Kriv, who made the arrest, would be subpoenaed in his client’s DUI case. The prosecutor said no, leaving Roach to wonder how the state could continue with its case. “Because you’ve got a primary arresting officer who has an indictment against him which involves questions of one’s honesty, I wouldn’t be playing games with these cases,” Roach said in an interview. The Cook County public defender’s office is representing several people in Kriv’s arrest cases. A spokesperson said that in cases the state continues to pursue, the office will demand trials and the state will have to decide whether to make its cases without Kriv. The collapse of Kriv’s cases shares some similarities with the problematic DUI arrests made by Chicago police officer John Haleas nearly 20 years ago. Even after the police administration confirmed that Haleas had falsified reports in DUI arrests, he remained on duty. (In fact, he is still a Chicago police officer, though he was later convicted of attempted obstruction of justice and the department tried to fire him.) There’s also a key difference between Haleas and Kriv: how the state’s attorney has reacted to pending court cases. The state’s attorney dismissed more than 150 of Haleas’ pending cases when he was found to have lied. The state’s attorney’s office in July made public its list of officers in Cook County who it has barred from testifying in criminal cases — more than 300 officers in all, the vast majority of them from the Chicago Police Department. About 60 officers were added this year, and the office adopted a new policy last month that spells out prosecutors’ duty to disclose its problematic witnesses to defendants. “The culture that allowed disreputable law enforcement officers to testify in court propelled Cook County’s reputation as the wrongful conviction capital of the country,” State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said in a press release about the disclosure list. Chicago has a long history of scandalous cops whose cases fell apart when their own corruption or misdeeds were revealed. Over the years, officials have grappled with how to handle the fallout in court, as well as what to disclose to defendants and the public about these cases. A spokesperson for the state’s attorney’s office said the list of officers with credibility issues is public and that disclosures to defendants would be made when evidence is typically shared. ProPublica contacted more than a dozen defense attorneys currently representing clients arrested by Kriv, and only one said he had been notified by a prosecutor that Kriv was barred from testifying. Other lawyers were unaware that Kriv would not be called as a witness. One said the state’s attorney’s office had left his case “in limbo” and he is skeptical that the prosecutor can mount a case without Kriv. “Every time I show up, the state’s attorney doesn’t know what’s going on,” said defense attorney Marco Rodriguez, who is representing a client in a DUI case. Among the Kriv cases that have been dismissed is one from October 2022 involving a woman who was idling in a crosswalk but asleep, according to Kriv’s police report. He noted in the report that there was vomit on the car seat and on the woman’s pants. Her blood alcohol content was 0.19%, more than twice the legal limit to drive, according to the report, obtained through a public records request. Prosecutors dropped the case against her in March. Even in his last weeks as a police officer, Kriv arrested at least five people over four days on DUI charges, including a 41-year-old driver he said he’d found on Dec. 10 passed out behind the wheel of his running Honda Accord in the middle of a dead-end street. The man “seemed confused” and the “whole front end” of his car was damaged and the tires shredded. Kriv noted that the driver had an explanation for the car’s damage. He wrote that the man “stated his car was like that from his girlfriend as it was her fault previously.” That case also has been dismissed. Photo by on Giammarco Boscaro Unsplash

Prosecutors Were Forced to Drop Cases Because They Were Linked to Ex-Cop Accused of Perjury

How This Cop Managed to Get Out of 44 Traffic Tickets

এই পুলিশ কিভাবে 44টি ট্র্যাফিক টিকিট বের করতে পেরেছে

Wie es diesem Polizisten gelang, aus 44 Strafzetteln herauszukommen

Este policía logró salir de 44 multas de tránsito

Ce flic a réussi à échapper à 44 contraventions

यह पुलिसकर्मी 44 ट्रैफिक टिकट निकालने में कामयाब रहा

この警官は44枚の交通違反切符を切られた

이 경찰이 교통 위반 딱지 44장을 구한 방법

Este policial conseguiu se livrar de 44 multas de trânsito

Как этому полицейскому удалось избежать 44 штрафов за нарушение правил дорожного движения

Bu Polis 44 Trafik Cezasından Nasıl Çıkmayı Başardı?

Cảnh sát này đã thoát khỏi 44 vé phạt giao thông

这位警察成功摆脱了 44 张交通罚单

How This Man Fueled Election Fraud Conspiracy Theories in Wisconsin

and believe that self-driving vehicles have the ability to reduce automotive accidents dramatically. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's data shows that 90 per cent of automobile crashes involve human choice. can be used in automobiles to allow drivers to make better and/or quicker choices while preventing human errors such as texting or drunk driving. Many have expressed concerns over fear of loss of control and allowing to oversee our driving. Critics question whether , obstacles and pedestrians in complex situations. Google Tesla AI robots AI can make ethical decisions involving cars Car accident prevention becomes more than defensive driving with artificial intelligence. Accidents can be as obsolete as the abacus or the spinning camera. The prospect of automotive manufacturing continues with the development of . Some observers are considering self-driving vehicles the next health movement. self-driving vehicles Many question what the effect in America is going to be. Some researchers have explained that due to , the effect of reduced is difficult to predict. insubstantial data and testing car accidents Prevention of Car Accidents Chicago-specific traffic problems include lots of pedestrians, confusing highway signs and constant gridlock. A 2014 report in the Chicago Tribune reports that traffic collisions have jumped to 800 a day across Illinois. In the past decade, manufacturers have been gradually to help drivers navigate. Most cars, for example, also come with cameras and images showing a driver their blind spots. Advanced technology utilizes sensation or sound to warn drivers as their car moves into a particular lane by utilizing their turn signal. automating features in cars Although there are undisputed advantages to providing AI in vehicles, the federal government ought to enforce . Before the technology was even a concept, current governing statutes and regulations were developed. How these strategies evolve and how much human input can always be needed would be important to see. autonomous vehicle control , where human interaction is either restricted or totally removed, grab much of the stories on how artificial intelligence (AI) will affect driving in the future, but drivers now have other special developments at work. Automated vehicles Those figures are frightening. What is shocking is that if people drive responsibly all of this can be avoided. It is here that technology can help. Companies are working to create "connected" cars that will provide real-time and contextual navigation that could help drivers ride better reducing the number of car accidents. World Health Organization

The Future of Technology: Advanced AI Technology on the Roads

Gregory Robinson’s Fundraising Journey For A Market That Helps Women Return To The Workforce ( As told to Nathan Beckord ) It began with a stunning statistic. After we had our first son, my wife Allison was on maternity leave from her role as a Proctor & Gamble executive. She was evaluating what going back to work would look like as a mother. She stumbled across a that found that 43 percent of college-educated women who have children “off-ramp” from the workforce entirely. Harvard Business Review study That was the original insight that led Allison to found , a digital talent marketplace and community that connects talented women (and men) with world class employers that understand work/life balance. The Mom Project We need to be more thoughtful about work and parenthood. We want to enable a continuous experience so moms (and dads) don’t have to take a step back or “opt out” if they take a break from their career for parenting. The companies on our platform offer two key things: flexibility (through non-traditional schedules or work-from-home days, for example) and respect. You can bring up family in an interview and not feel prejudice. Your manager and the executive team support that you equally prioritize your family to your work. We launched in April 2016 in Chicago. It’s been a busy three years. We have 100,000 women on our platform and over 1,000 employers, 50 of which are Fortune 1000 companies. I’ve been at The Mom Project since the beginning, as the chief financial and operating officer. In our first year, even though I had more fundraising experience, I actively took a back seat. This is a mission-based business, and Allison is the face of it. There couldn’t be a better face and a better representative for this mission. So far, we’ve raised two rounds of funding. We did our seed round at the beginning of 2018, totaling just over $2.5 million. In December of that year we announced our Series A, which brought in about $8 million. So we raised $11 million in total — all in the past 15 months. Here’s how we did it. We didn’t participate in an accelerator program. The first two years of the business, we ran quite lean. We had the ability to fund ourselves for a period of time. 1. Bootstrap through the ‘first-time founder wait’ When we came to market, the Chicago Tribune wrote a about us. We signed with enterprise businesses within our first six months. We had traction. But business traction and ability to raise funds in your first year don’t necessarily correlate. business page cover story We originally planned to raise an angel round much earlier, but we encountered a few hurdles. You can’t underestimate the “first-time founder wait,” especially for early investors who are really betting on a founder. There is an unquestionable difference between successfully running a business and the ability to grit through and grow one from nothing. It’s hard for investors to evaluate that. A family business is an uncertainty for an early investor as well. They have a formula: how many risk factors can I control? They know startups are a grind. It’s going to be really hard before it’s good. Adding a family dynamic on top of that? People get squeamish about it. There are so many examples of how family makes a startup stronger, though. A strong partnership and mutual trust is an advantage. I consider us to be in that latter camp. But couples starting a business together have to be pragmatic about these factors. Another factor was that our product is people. We had decent technology but we weren’t investing millions in it. We’re a transformative marketplace focused on enterprise sales. Venture investors are predominantly technology investors. It was hard for investors to quantify just one or two good contracts — $50,000 from an enterprise customer could quadruple our revenue in a year and make the growth chart look phenomenal. But that’s not all it’s going to take to succeed. So we had to prove out our product. It ended up taking a little bit more time than we anticipated. Some of our earliest commitments came from corporate-backed funds, rather than traditional tech funds. in Atlanta is the first Fortune 1000-backed venture fund, with partners like Delta, Home Depot, AT&T and Georgia Pacific. They invest in innovative businesses, but they tend to pick companies they envision using. 2. Find investors who become customers Engage Ventures Another investor was BBG Ventures in New York, a great seed fund run by (founder of Premiere Magazine, former CEO of Martha Stewart Omnimedia and Gilt.com). Susan Lyne When we began to raise money in the Chicago ecosystem, we were lucky enough to get involved — Notre Dame’s alumni investment fund, run by some incredibly smart women. Irish Angels From raise to raise, we grew about 350 percent. We were able to do it in a sustainable way, growing month over month rather than spiking revenues sporadically. 3. Grow strategically and sustainably Investors care about liquidity, which is the balance of how many buyers and sellers you have. So we were thoughtful when driving new companies to the platform that they were based where lots of people are looking to work. At first, it was Chicago. After the seed, we were able to expand to Atlanta and San Francisco. Once we had three markets performing well, we were able to take the next step toward bigger investments. The lead investors in our Series A round were — founded by Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian — and Grotech Ventures, a great shop based out of Washington, D.C. They’re a very disciplined, opportunistic firm that really liked the marketplace and we connected with them right away. Initialized Capital Allison pitched Alexis and Garry in person. (Save the finance guy for when the deal is basically done). Alexis is the . He embodies a new generation of parents. spokesman for Unilever’s parental leave campaign Staffing companies usually open physical offices to serve a market. But that model is dead, in my opinion. Going to a staffing office is just not how professionals engage with opportunities now. We reach out to them on Facebook and LinkedIn. We work through referrals. We were able to grow a marketplace just through digital and social media relatively quickly. It’s an advantage for us. We can evaluate opening markets or following major customers in an agile way. 4. Know your selling points Nowadays funds really care about . Is this a valuable convenience play, or is this something that can improve the world we live in? People who invest in marketplaces and HR tech understand how work is transforming. The gig economy is a major theme for a lot of funds. Plus, we live in a world that is more aware of the challenges around gender, ethnicity and disabilities. The general trend to try solving these problems played in our favor as well. what you’re solving Many CEOs now make diversity pledges. Their businesses are working to meet giant targets like “gender parity by 2025.” That created a relationship of mutual benefit and helped us grow. When you’re raising earlier, it’ll take longer. If it happens really quickly, be thankful but wary. Investors who lend money quickly might lock onto what I like to call a false consensus — something they think makes the business work, but maybe it’s not the bigger opportunity. 5. Understand investor dynamics The biggest thing about raising money is not running out of time. Understanding your cash flow is so important. I didn’t fully appreciate the difficulty of raising the first rounds. Angel and seed investors are looking for validation. They really get comfortable when a “super angel” writes a $100,000 check or makes an introduction. It wasn’t until Eddie Lou, the founder of , another talent marketplace based in Chicago, joined our board and helped communicate what we were doing to the investment community, that we really started to take off. Shiftgig If we could have gotten that kind of person in the mix earlier, things might have happened more quickly. Next, know that growth is a thousand pivots. Our overall strategy hasn’t really changed since the day we started the business. But how we got there evolved as we learned along the way. Initially, we thought The Mom Project would focus on the return to work audience: the 10 million educated women not currently participating in the workforce. But then as we were running the business, we saw that more than two-thirds of users on our platform are currently in the workforce. So this isn’t just about bringing people back in, though it’s a critical piece of what we do. It’s really about solving larger [work-life balance] topics for a broader audience. One last piece of advice: when working with your spouse, do not run the same parts of the business. Have clear lanes. Nathan Beckord is the CEO of Foundersuite.com which makes software for raising capital. Foundersuite has helped entrepreneurs raise over $1.5 billion in seed and venture capital since 2016. This article is based on an episode of Foundersuite’s How I Raised It podcast, a behind-the-scenes look at how startup founders raise money.

How Allison and Gregory Robinson  Raised $11 Million For "The Mom Project"

I’ve been writing online for as long as I can remember. My first real interaction with the digital publishing world was a gaming blog I started as a teenager. When I was 17 years old, I was one of the highest ranked World of Warcraft players in North America, and the next logical thing for me to do (as an aspiring professional gamer) was build my digital presence in the gaming industry. In 2007, the concept of blogging on the Internet was just starting to become more mainstream. Especially in the niche (but emerging) world of competitive gaming, players were starting to use blogs as a way of attracting attention to their teams, and leveraging their audiences as a means of opening new doors of opportunity—such as sponsorships, tournament invitations, etc. At the end of my junior year of high school, a social blogging site called GameRiot hit the scene. I was one of the first bloggers to join the platform. On the front page was a Top 10 ladder of the site’s most popular blog posts for the week—and as a competitive gamer, I was enthralled by the idea of my writing being “better” than someone else’s. I saw GameRiot as a way for me to measure my own success as a writer. For months, I studied the most popular blogs on the site. As I began to work to find my name on that Top 10 list, I started to notice that the most popular blogs on the site all shared one similarity: they were dramatic. All of the content that accumulated the most views and comments, in some way, poked at a trigger point in the reader. Either the author was revealing some sort of drama within the community (X gamer betrayed Y), or the author was detailing a “secret” about the game—a hack, a hidden treasure, or an unknown fact. Either way, the information being alluded to in the title of the blog post piqued your curiosity, and the information enclosed delivered on that promise to the reader. As a result, I acquired arguably one of the most valuable skills a writer could ever gain. I learned how to write things people wanted to read. During my entire senior year of high school, I was not only one of the highest ranked World of Warcraft players in the country, but I was also one of the most viral World of Warcraft bloggers on the Internet. I had close to 10,000 people reading my blog on a daily basis, and my blog was regularly the #1 or #2 most-read blog on all of GameRiot. From a metrics standpoint, I was . killing the game A few years later, after graduating college with a degree in creative writing, I began to approach the world of content writing with a similar ferocity. I was no longer a gamer—I was an aspiring author and professional writer. And with GameRiot a nostalgic website of the past (the site was shut down my freshman year of college due to lack of funding), I started my writing career on a website called . Quora Out the gate, I applied many of the same tactics I had learned as one of the Internet’s most popular gaming bloggers. And I saw many of the same results. In less than 3 months, my first answer had gone massively viral—landing on the front page of Reddit and accumulating over 1M views. In less than 9 months, I had become one of Quora’s most popular writers, earning the highly coveted title of Top Writer on the platform. My work had been republished by TIME, Forbes, Fortune, Business Insider, CNBC, The Chicago Tribune, and many more. I had so many pieces republished by , that they eventually offered me my own column. Inc Magazine Within a month of writing for Inc Magazine, I became one of their Top 30 contributors. Today, my writing has accumulated over 25 million views on Quora alone, and over 50 million views across a variety of different platforms. And after a decade of mastering the art of writing high-performing content online, I’m now the founder of a content writing agency called —working with founders and C-suite executives all over the world. Digital Press Unfortunately, the digital publishing world is far from “fair.” About a year ago, I was introduced to an interesting project called . RedPen I had just moved to Los Angeles, and had begun to think about the publishing space from a much higher point of view. When you’ve been “in the weeds” of something for so long, you eventually reach a point where you start to question the forest you’re playing within—and how the entire landscape can be improved. And one of the things I had begun to question was the longevity of the game I was playing. How sustainable is an Internet where the only way to be heard is to be more clever, or more dramatic than the next person? And conversely, how does a reader extract real value and educate themselves about a given topic, when they are constantly being led down halls of mirrors? When I was connected to the RedPen founders, I realized they were asking themselves the same questions—except on an even larger scale. 5I first spoke with RJ Smith, RedPen’s CEO/CTO, and later the company’s Chief Creative Officer, Ryan Lewis, a Grammy-winning music producer with a wide-ranging talent for innovative production (in capacities ranging from music to graphic design to film and beyond). What I gathered from both of them was a fascination with the way the Internet currently prioritized information—and a real vision for how to address it’s most fundamental issues from the ground, up. Because after 10 years of writing online, I had learned a brutal truth about the game I was playing. My content, no matter how popular, was far from “the whole story.” Part of being a writer, an author, a thought leader, or an industry expert, means taking a stand. In order to take a stand, you have to pick a side. And when you pick a side, when you declare a belief or sculpt a perspective, you are, by definition, distancing yourself from “the dark side of the moon.” After working with 100+ entrepreneurs, investors, and executives on their written content, I can say from experience this is the thing everyone struggles with. In order to stand out and be heard above the news, you have to speak with certainty. And in order to be certain, you have to declare what you believe (on any given topic) what is right and what is wrong. And nobody wants to be “wrong.” RedPen, a blockchain-based platform, is building an information aggregation platform that ensures the reader understands that bias at the onset. Let me explain: When a major event happens in the world, where do you go to educate yourself on that topic? Do you turn to ? ? Twitter? Maybe your favorite publication? Google Facebook As a columnist, I’ll be the first to tell you that my interests (as someone chasing page views) is not to give you, the reader, an objective perspective on that topic. If Kanye West drops a new album, an unbiased and qualm-free article isn’t going to make anyone click. No, it’s in my best interest to publish a headline like: . Kanye West Just Dropped A New Album, And It’s About To Cost Him His Entire Career That’s dramatic. It’s also not the full story—and that’s the problem. When I started to talk about RedPen with RJ and Ryan, their perspective was to flip the entire model. If you’re a reader—whether you’re searching for news, or simply the most relevant information on a given topic—then what you care about isn’t what one person has to say (unless you’re a die-hard fan of that person’s writing). You want to know: What’s the full story? Who else is relevant to this story? What’s the timeline of this story? What does the entire Internet think about this topic/event? Do people agree or disagree? What’s the takeaway? The last question is the one that stuck with me the longest, and was ultimately what excited me to join RedPen as an advisor to the project. Right now, the Internet is a massive publishing platform that does a whole lot of talking—and not very much listening. When a news story breaks, thousands of perspectives hit the scene, all of which are looking to shout over the next—none of which have any interest in giving a well-rounded perspective of the event. As a writer, this is the approach that attracts the most attention. The result of this sort of publishing ecosystem is that a reader has no consensus of what the “final takeaway” is regarding a given event. If Kanye West drops a new album, do people love it or hate it? And within that vague term, “people,” who are the credible sources with valuable perspectives to add to the overarching narrative? For example: the opinion of a musician from Juilliard is probably more valuable than an 11 year old who doesn’t play a musical instrument — or a business writer looking to capitalize on a trending topic. Right now, there is no way to know what the entire Internet is thinking or feeling regarding a given topic. That’s what RedPen wants to solve for—and I couldn’t align with the mission more. The publishing world is in desperate need of an overhaul. Innovation in this space won’t be a faster, better platform. And it certainly won’t be “more seamless banner ads.” In order for the digital publishing landscape to make strides, the issue needs to be addressed at the root. And right now, the biggest problem facing the Internet is a lack of clarity around what millions and millions of separate voices are really saying, all at once.

RedPen, A Blockchain News Aggregator, Is What The Internet Desperately Needs

More than 1,000 websites are still unavailable months after GDPR, a new European Union regulation. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. This is the error message you get in most European countries if you try to connect with the . The same happens with the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, and , operated by Tronc Inc., formerly Tribune Publishing. Los Angeles Times The Baltimore Sun In addition, 15 web properties owned by Fox News network in local markets are also unavailable, as are the websites of local stations in the ABC and CBS networks. If you try to access , you get this message instead: USA TODAY Welcome to USA TODAY Network’s European Union Experience. It appears that you’re visiting us from a location in the European Union. We are directing you to our EU Experience. This site does not collect personally identifiable information or persistent identifiers from, deliver a personalized experience to, or otherwise track or monitor persons reasonably identified as visiting our Site from the European Union. In fact, , which owns USA TODAY, has rolled out a European version of its daily news website, what they call their “European Union Experience.” This apparently translates into a simplified version of the website, without ads or easy methods of searching for stories and articles. Gannett Many other websites, news-related or not, are either blocked or not available. Those include for instance the Daily Collegian, published by students at Penn State, and the South End, a student publication by students at . Wayne State University Joseph O’Connor — aka @ VerifiedJoseph on Twitter — on his page as of August 10, 2018. The list includes 1,060 websites to which anybody in Europe has yet no access. published a list of unavailable or blocked websites GitHub This is “frustrating many American tourists, business travelers, and ex-pats as well as Europeans interested in news from the States,” as . reports Nieman Lab , a journalism professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and author of the NiemanLab report, asked Portugal-based journalist to comment about the block or unavailability of many websites. Jeff South Flávio Nunes “Usually, your media is seen as an example for ours. I think is safe to say that, in Portugal, there’s a big community of people that not only reads the Portuguese media but reads the U.S. press as well on a daily basis,” said Nunes. “I was surprised when I saw that, a couple of months after, they’re still blocking our access,” Nunes commented about Tronc’s publications not being available after GDPR entered into force il late May. “It’s crazy because Europe is a massive market. We have over 500 million people living in the EU.” GDPR stands for , a set of data protection rules implemented by the — approved by the in April 2016 and enforced 2 years later this past May for all companies operating in the EU, wherever they are based. General Data Protection Regulation European Commission European Parliament — GDPR has been both criticized and praised. : “Once mocked, Europe’s new data protection has become a source of transatlantic envy.” “When GDPR was first passed, US commentators dismissed it as a piece of jealous protectionism,” explains, citing a recent editorial in . WIRED wrote Rowland Manthorpe The New York Times now calling for similar rules In April, when Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified on Capitol Hill, asked him: “What the Europeans got right with the GDPR?” Rep. Scott Peters Zuckerberg responded: “GDPR in general is going to be a very positive step for the Internet. It codifies a lot of things we have already done for a long time; but it also has new things which are good steps for us to take, like putting privacy controls in front of people constantly — which we have done randomly in the past.” In a recent tweet while traveling to Europe, professor talked about GDPR as the Balkanization of the Internet. CUNY J-School Jeff Jarvis “Thanks, Europe,” he ironically tweeted. “Nothing to do with Europe and everything to do with the US publishers,” somebody responded on Twitter. “A bit of time and consideration would resolve it.” Another said: “Not GDPR. It’s US publishers blocking IP addresses. Same happens with European media when you try and access from US.” To which Jarvis answered: “It has everything to do with Europe. They are doing it *because* of GDPR.”

The European Internet vs the Internet

From remote controlled water pumps to light switches, learn how these students are using sensors to build IoT applications. Students at Lane Tech High School do not have your typical curriculum ― they are learning about embedded sensor , digital fabrication, design and problem solving, data analytics, teamwork, and acquiring hands-on experience with the Internet of Things ( ). technology IoT This past spring, students in Dan Law’s physical computing lab at Lane Tech worked with different electronics and tools to build , , , and other sensor experiments. These students connected their objects and sensors to the Internet using a , which gave them the ability to monitor and manage these objects wirelessly. By connecting these objects to the Internet, the students were able to collect data on how they behave, how often they are used, or whatever data they wished to track with their sensors. remote controlled blinds smart lamps thermostat controllers Particle Photon In the same school, students in Jeff Solin’s Innovation and Creation Lab worked on that incorporated laser cutters, 3D printers, vinyl cutters and 3D carvers. This gave the students practice with digital design, digital fabrication, prototyping, and other computer science (CS) skillsets. At first, Dan and Jeff’s classes might seem utterly unrelated, but they are actually giving students all the skill sets they need to design the products of the future. 10″ cube environments Internet of Things + Array of Things = Lane of Things Welcome to the Lane of Things (aka LofT), an integrated program between Jeff and Dan’s courses that teaches students how to design and build devices that can help them solve problems for themselves and their communities. The program is inspired by, and a spin-off of, the project, an urban sensing program that deploys sensors around Chicago. Array of Things Mosaic Chicago Flag Created by LofT students. In previous years, the students have deployed sensors and other experiments around their communities to gather data and learn how people react to them. One of their experiments even allowed students to combine their cultures and experiences by creating a . This flag unexpectedly caught the attention of WGN 9 news, along with other major newspapers and magazines, after Jeff about the project. The flag is now being toured around Chicago’s major scientific institutions and will come back home to Lane Tech for a permanent installation after the tour is finished. mosaic Chicago flag wrote a blog post While Jeff and Dan have done many innovative projects with their students over the past couple years, they decided to take an even bigger innovative step this year by partnering with an outside organization to give the students real-world experience deploying sensors. Credit: Chicago Tribune Taking Tech to the Big Leagues Last Spring, the Chicago Cubs transformed the student’s projects by turning Wrigley Field into a subject of IoT experimentation. Jeff and Dan reached out to Heather Way Kitzes, the Cub’s Director of Community Relations, and Andrew McIntyre, the Cub’s Vice President of Technology, with the intentions of using sensors to learn more about the stadium’s temperature, audio levels, and more. Not only did the Cubs agree to this plan, they allowed students to collect data during the Cubs’ upcoming game against the Cleveland Indians and the San Francisco Giants. Many of the environmental and sound nodes are still deployed today and are still collecting data. Credit: Chicago Tribune Before the event, students tested weather sensors and checked lines of code to make sure every sensor was gathering data correctly. Students worked all day, building final sensor designs that could withstand crowded and heated environments. Unlike the students’ class projects, these sensors relied on both the Photon and which allowed them to connect their sensors to the Internet over cellular networks since some of the nodes were out of the park’s WiFi range. Particle’s Electron, On May 22nd, fans left the Wrigley Field stadium to find a kiosk with sensors attached to it. The kiosk asked them about their experience and if they would recommend Wrigley Field to others. Other sensors deployed around the field measured temperature, humidity, barometric, pressure, wind speed, wind direction, and the amount of sound emanating from the ballpark. The partnership with the Chicago Cubs not only allowed students to practice and use IoT development kits, but gave them an opportunity to create IoT applications that had real-impacts on the world. The Bottom Line Jeff and Dan said none of this would have been possible without funding from Motorola Solutions, their partnership with the broader Array of Things (AoT) project and AoT team members like Doug Pancoast, Satyajit Basu, Robb Drinkwater, and Kate Kusiak Galvin. Jeff and Dan have begun sharing the program with other schools, hoping to give all students an opportunity to learn physical computing and embedded technology. If you’re interested to learn more about Lane of Things’ other major projects and experiments, you can learn more by visiting the site, or searching for Lane of Things projects on . LTmaker’s Hackster.io This post originally appeared on the Particle Blog.

How Lane Tech Students are Using IoT to Drive Real-World Sensor Initiatives

Nicolas Cole Instagram I have written over 400 columns for . Inc Magazine Before I landed my own column, with several million views on my work (this was back in 2015). My “claim to fame” was the fact that I had reached Top Writer status in less than 9 months of writing on the platform, had over a dozen of my articles go viral (100,000 to 1,000,000+ views each), and had been republished by just about every major publication on the Internet: , and —to name a few. I was a Top Writer on Quora TIME, Forbes, Fortune, Business Insider, Slate, Observer, Thought Catalog, Hacker Noon, Medical Daily, The Chicago Tribune Inc Magazine During the second half of 2015, there was a 6-month period during wherein was republishing one of my Quora answers . Inc Magazine every single week I had found my stride as a writer focused on personal development—and took notice. Inc When I was offered my own column with , I turned the afterburners on and doubled my output. Inc Magazine I was already writing an Answer per day on Quora (which I deliberately structured as a full article). But instead of replacing Quora with , I worked the night shift writing a column per day there as well. Inc 1 month later, I was one of ’s most popular writers (and one of their only paid writers). And in 2017, I was named one of their Top 30 columnists for the entire publication. Inc Magazine There are very few columnists that write as much as I do. Most people don’t believe me when I say I ( ). write close to 10,000 words per day while running a company To me, writing is a sport as much as it is a form of art. I view the craft the same way I viewed hockey as a teenager, eagerly chasing the dream of one day making it to the NHL. I do not subscribe to the mantra that . I think that’s a cop out. If one is truly a writer, they write regardless of whether they feel like writing or not—because writing, just like everything else in life, requires practice in order to master. one writes when one is inspired When I became a columnist for Inc Magazine, I saw it as a venue for me to express my thoughts and opinions with the world. What I found instead was a world of press pitches and marketers that wanted what I had—a column. Within days of my being listed on the site, my inbox started to flood with pitches from PR companies. And aside from the fact that half of them couldn’t even spell my name correctly (there is no “h” in Nicolas), I had no interest in writing about the “revolutionary ” some up-and-coming company claimed they had. technology What separates me from a lot of other people in the business world is that I am not a marketer. I am a writer. I know what people want to read because I . I know what works because I publish and iterate, publish and iterate. I know what resonates because I work hard to share who I am as a person, human to human, through my writing. And I know how to get exposure because I take the time to learn what it is people want to read—and why. write So, as someone who has written thousands of articles on the Internet, I want to pull back the curtain and debunk some myths about getting exposure onto your written content. 1. Writing for (or being featured in) a major publication does not mean “millions of views.” Not a single day goes by where I don’t hear someone make the Hail Mary statement that if only their company could be mentioned by a major publication—then they’d get the exposure they’re looking for. People love data, so let me give you some data. Of the 409 columns I’ve written for , only 44 of them exceeded 10,000 views in 2017. Inc Magazine 28 of them were 10,000 to 19,000 views. 5 were 20,000 to 29,000 views. 4 were 30,000 to 39,000 views. 2 were 40,000 to 49,000 views. 2 were 50,000 to 59,000 views. 1 was 90,017 views. 1 was 128,041 views. And 1 was 133,000 views. Out of my top 10 performing columns, 9 had to do with personal development. The 1 that had to do with a company was about Facebook. You’re not Facebook. 2. Social content is still king. Side by side, my column has out performed my viewership on Quora or Medium. Inc Magazine never once Big publications are idolized because people assume that “70 million unique monthly readers” means that every single piece of content receives 70 million views. That’s like saying in a city of 70 million people, everybody knows everybody. What most people don’t know is that while the entire site might yield tens of millions of views, the site is also publishing thousands of articles per month (hundreds every day). On my best month writing for Inc Magazine, I cracked 300,000 views. I wrote 30 columns that month. In comparison, 300,000 views is considered a weak month for me on Quora and Medium—where I consistently average closer to ~400,000+ views month over month. And when I was writing original content every single day on Quora, I averaged over a million views per month for a year straight. If you’re publishing content on your company blog (or worse, a single byline in a major publication) and expecting millions of views to appear overnight, you’re in for a rude awakening. The single best place to write on the Internet right now is Quora and Medium. 3. People do not read articles that pamper a company. They just don’t. Unless I was talking about Facebook or Amazon or Tesla in the news, all of my most popular articles have been devoid of a company mention. All. Reason being, nobody reads an entire piece talking about how great someone is, how “game-changing” their unique ( ) approach to their industry is and thinks, “Wow, I have to share this with all of my friends!” it’s not unique I know what people want to read, and I know because I have written and tested and iterated and learned and refined and delivered. I know what it takes to write a viral article because . 99.99999% of marketers and PR companies cannot say the same—and yet, every single day, another business gets sold on the pipe dream that from a columnist on a popular site will drive significant ROI for their business. I frequently write viral articles a single mention The average column on a major publication barely receives 1,000 views. Let me say that again: The average column on a major publication barely receives 1,000 views. The ones that “go viral” only fall into three categories: They mention an insanely successful company (Apple). They talk about a controversial and trending topic. They are focused around personal development/life advice. And in the off-chance your company gets a soft mention in a viral articles ( that’s the one part of the article nobody is paying any attention to. “According to company, 49% of Millennials actually hate their jobs…”), 4. Building consistent exposure online requires 2 things nobody wants to do. Be patient. Be consistent. There is no other way around it. You can’t buy a real audience. You can’t cheat a real audience. And you certainly shouldn’t expect a real audience after your company writes 3 blog posts. It astounds me how many PR companies and agencies promise eons of exposure, when they can’t even get exposure for themselves. I don’t know about you, but I would have a hard time getting my hair cut by a bald barber. marketing As someone who has racked up 50,000,000+ views on my written content, who has gone viral dozens of times, and who has had work published in just about every major publication on the Internet, . I am telling you from first-hand experience that nobody wakes up to that overnight The rewards I have seen for myself as a writer and for my business were not paid for (I’ve never spent a dollar on PR or advertising). They were . earned And that’s not to say you can’t earn it too. Because you can. Just don’t expect it to happen overnight. 5. If you truly want to be a thought leader, you have to be willing to say what nobody else wants to say. Read enough leadership articles, and there is only 1 thing that separates the stuff worth reading from all the rest. Vulnerability. There are thousands upon thousands of companies in the world. Thousands upon thousands of founders and CEOs. Thousands of writers, thousands of “industry experts,” thousands of everybody, everywhere. So, what does the Internet sound like when they all say, at the exact same time, “Being an effective leader is all about open communication.” Noisy. The Internet sounds very, very noisy. A thought leader isn’t the person on the front of the magazine, or the lucky name drawn out of a hat and quoted in a column. A thought leader isn’t the person with the biggest ad spend, or necessarily even the one with the keynote speech. Those are all just stages to stand upon. What makes someone a thought leader is what they say—not where they say it. Again, speaking from my own experiences here, I would like to share a few of my most popular articles on the Internet: 2M+ views: 7 crucial lessons people often learn too late in life. (This piece has been reposted on Business Insider 3 times now. The first time it racked up 1.5M views. The second, 200,000+ views. And now ~100,000 for the 3rd time.) 1M+ views: Is it possible to change yourself so much that you no longer recognize yourself? . 800,000+ views: How to become more confident 783,000+ views: How to stop being average. 507,000+ views: What it feels like to go from unattractive to attractive . 425,000+ views: A stranger I met once that changed my life forever. 412,000+ views: Why having everything you want won’t make you happy. There are lots more, but they all follow a similar theme. Every single one of my most popular articles plays at what I like to call “The Golden Intersection.” I am answering the reader’s question—providing them value. I am telling them a story, my unique and personal story, which helps them relate to me as the author. That’s it. What makes a great piece of written content online requires a conflict. The reader wants to know the journey you’re about to take them on. What was the challenge? What were you afraid of? What was holding you back? And how did you overcome that challenge and make your way safely to the other side? Again, most people (in any industry) don’t want to do this. And the reason is because they think they can achieve the same result (“Look how impressive I am”) without having to reveal the vulnerable part. But the irony is the more open and honest you are, the more people will relate to you, hear you, and ultimately share your message with others. But trying to prop yourself up behind this facade that you have it all together, you’ve had it all together, and you’ve never once sat in front of an obstacle and thought, “Shit, I have no idea how I’m going to overcome this,” is a lie—to yourself, and to your readers. always Anyone can write something thoughtful, meaningful, and exposure-worthy on the Internet. Literally anyone. In order to do that, however, you have to be willing to put your audience before yourself. Some people call that “effective marketing.” I call it Writing. Thanks for reading! :) Want to learn how I built my Personal Brand online, attracting over 50 million readers? Click here to take the free Personal Branding email course! Want to work with Digital Press? Check us out !

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