Adrienne LaFrance

[Commentary] The drumbeat of diversity data coming from tech companies like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter has been anticlimactic, not least because it shows what most people already expected: that leaders in technology are overwhelmingly hiring white men.

All the companies say they need to do more. Few are willing to talk about the issue beyond what they've released in charts and blog posts.

As important as it is to get diversity numbers on the record, if what we're interested in is changes to that record, it's worth asking: Does releasing the numbers alone catalyze change? We have some evidence on this question. The answer is no.

[Commentary] People tend to talk about the Internet the way they talk about democracy -- optimistically, and in terms that describe how it ought to be rather than how it actually is.

This idealism is what buoys much of the network neutrality debate, and yet many of what are considered to be the core issues at stake -- like payment for tiered access, for instance -- have already been decided. Internet advocates have been asking what regulatory measures might help save the open, innovation-friendly Internet.

But increasingly, another question comes up: What if there were a technical solution instead of a regulatory one? What if the core architecture of how people connect could make an end run on the centralization of services that has come to define the modern net?

It's a question that reflects some of the Internet's deepest cultural values, and the idea that this network -- this place where you are right now -- should distribute power to people.

In the post-NSA, post-Internet-access-oligopoly world, more and more people are thinking this way, and many of them are actually doing something about it. Among them, there is a technology that's become a kind of shorthand code for a whole set of beliefs about the future of the Internet: "mesh networking." These words have become a way to say that you believe in a different, freer Internet.

If you've tried listening to any of your old CDs lately, if you even own them anymore, you may have noticed they won't play.

CD players have long since given up on most of the burned mixes I made in college. And while most of the studio-manufactured albums I bought still play, there's really no telling how much longer they will. My once-treasured CD collection -- so carefully assembled over the course of about a decade beginning in 1994 -- isn't just aging; it's dying. And so is yours.

"All of the modern formats weren't really made to last a long period of time," said Fenella France, chief of preservation research and testing at the Library of Congress. "They were really more developed for mass production." "If you want to really kill your discs, just leave them in your car over the summer."

France and her colleagues are trying to figure out how CDs age so that we can better understand how to save them. This is a tricky business, in large part because manufacturers have changed their processes over the years but won't say how. And so: we know a CD's basic composition -- there's a plastic polycarbonate layer, a metal reflective layer with all the data in it, and then the coating on top -- but it's impossible to tell just from looking at a disc how it will age.

"We're trying to predict, in terms of collections, which of the types of CDs are the discs most at risk," France said.

Just 2 percent of the British Library's massive archive of print newspapers have been digitized. That's going to change. The institution is completing a seven-year effort to upgrade its news archives, a $55 million (£33 million) project that's aimed at expanding the library's definition of "news."

Curator Luke McKernan said that "news" can mean "anything of relevance to a particular community at a particular point in time." Most people by now will acknowledge that news is recorded in newspapers and on Facebook and on Twitter and on blogs, etc., etc., but McKernan said he's also thinking about "diaries, oral history, recordings, maps, posters, letters," and so on.

McKernan wants to establish links between different kinds of resources, a strategy that's becoming increasingly important as institutions like libraries rethink how their resources will fit into a larger network of interconnected data and information online.

If a website is designed haphazardly, it doesn’t just look messy; it can be messy for someone who can’t see, too. The problem with much of the web -- and, in particular, its newsier corners -- is that it's designed without consideration for people who aren't navigating by sight.

In many cases, the busier a website looks, the harder it is for people who use tools like audio screen-readers to get where they want to go, or even figure out where to go in the first place. But design for accessibility is getting much better, albeit largely by accident.