I just posted Rupert Murdoch vs. The Web, over at Linux Journal. In it I suggest that the Murdoch story (played mostly as Bing vs Google) is a red herring, and that the real challenge is to free the Web and ourselves from dependencies from giant companies I [...]
@robpatrob (Robert Paterson) asks (responding to this tweet and this post) “Why would GBH line up against BUR? Why have a war between 2 Pub stations in same city?” (In this tweet and this one, Dan Kennedy asks pretty much the same [...]
The longest thread in the history of this blog belongs to Why WQXR is better off as a public radio station, which I posted on July 26, and still has comments this month. The post followed a complex deal by which the New York Times divested its legacy classical [...]
I’m back in Boston after a great few days in Utah at the Kynetx Impact conference, where VRM and related stuff was brought up and discussed at length. It was an inaugural effort by Kynetx, which has what I think is a novel and profound take on the [...]
Two posts worth noting over at the ProjectVRM blog.
The first is Intention Economy Traction, which riffs off David Gillespie’s illustrative and wise 263-slide narrative Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet). Both of us see The Intention Economy as [...]
[Note: Jump to the bottom first, to see how this went... and may keep going.]
So I called SuperShuttle to book a ride to the airport in Denver. The first thing the robot voice said was that I could also book this on the Web. So I thought, cool, I’ll do [...]
– to Colette Searls, JP Rangaswami, Chris Locke, Neil Young. Two of whom will join me on stage at Defrag shortly.
[...]
Before the salt in evaporating sea water turns white, it goes through stages of color that range from jade green to brick red, with variations of orange, yellow and other colors. From above the salt ponds around San Francisco Bay look like giant panes of stained [...]
Consider the possibility that “social media” is a crock.
Or at least bear with that thought through Defrag, which takes place in Denver over today and Thursday, and for which the word “social” appears seventeen times in the agenda. (Perspective: “cloud” appears three times, and “leverage” twice.)
What prompts [...]
Not long after I overheard a Comcast ad on a college football broadcast, the doorbell rang. It was a guy wearing a Comcast shirt and carrying a clipboard-type contraption with some kind of a phone-like keyboard at one end. Under the clip was a list of channels. We greeted each [...]
So I just went to look up Debora Spar’s Ruling the Waves, on Amazon, and was greeted by the above. Never mind that I wasn’t looking for what they said I just looked at. Consider instead the strangeness of having something with my name [...]
For my readers in Santa Barbara, I highly invite you to come over to the open house, Noon-2pm today at CITS — the Center for Information Technology and Society at UCSB. This is a great bunch of people, doing great work, in a nice new [...]
In response to my essay Framing the Net, on Publius, Rikke Frank Jørgensen has posted Metaphors We Regulate By. Her summary lines: “I have found four categories to be dominant in both Internet-related literature, and in current regulatory battles at the international level. The metaphors suggested [...]
About a month ago I offered myself to my kid as an example of good dental hygeine practices. While I have a mouthful of gold (owing mostly to molars that came with deep gooves that no brush could reach), all my teeth are alive. Wisdom teeth and all. I [...]
Had a great time mixing it up with the BlogTalkRadio folks a couple nights ago, talking Cluetrain after 10 years. Here’s the show. Big thanks to Allan Hoving for lining up and co-hosting it with Janet Fouts and Jim Love. Janet tweeted [...]
Wow: Regis McKenna’s Wikipedia entry is one short paragraph. Geoffrey Moore’s is barely more than a stub. We’re talking here about two of the greatest marketing minds in human history. I’m not joking. Amazing.
Neither has a picture, either. I just checked my own 31,000-shot gallery, and didn’t [...]
The dark and gathering sameness of the world. An excerpt:
The consequence of this is a “plague of sameness” and the loss of a distinct species every ten minutes. Some types of fruits and vegetables have lost 90% of their variants. An entire language disappears every two weeks. “We are [...]
Looks like legislation opening up the FM band to more LPFM (low power FM) stations is moving through Congress. While Prometheus Radio celebrates, I gotta wonder if Calvary Chapel of Everywhere isn’t going to gobble a lot of those new licenses up. Since I can’t link directly to [...]
Blog search is mighty thin in Wikipedia. Technorati’s entry is stale. IceRocket and BlogPulse are stubs. BlogScope is minimal.
It’s really wierd. While “real time” is heating up as a topic, real time search seems to have fallen off the radar of everybody other than itself.
Take [...]
In The new Technorati: advertiser-friendly, foreigner-free? Ethan Zuckerman unpacks a bit of what remains (”highly-targeted, advertiser friendly content”) and what’s gone (everything but English) at Technorati. (This blog is still there, at #2659 and falling, with an authority of 549. I was informally advising Technorati when [...]
Three days ago Jonathan MacDonald witnessed an altercation in the London Underground at the Holborn Station, between — as Jonathan reports it — a uniformed Underground staffer an elderly man whose arm had just been released from doors that had closed on it while he was leaving. The staffer [...]
The older I get, the earlier it seems.
So many gone things once looked like final stages: AM radio, nuclear bombs, FM, stereo, FM stereo, TV, color TV, quadrophonic sound, answer machines, PCs, online services, bulletin boards, home PBXes, newsgroups, instant messaging, cell phones, HD, browsing, pirate radio, free wi-fi, friending, [...]
The original Technorati was born during a writing project David Sifry and I were doing for Linux Journal. Late at night David pinged me and said “Look at this,” and I was amazed. It was the first search engine for what we then called The Live Web [...]
I am the teacher of atheletes.
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own.
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
That’s what came to mind when I heard that Denver beat New England [...]
Hey, Twitter has its Follow Fridays. So I suggest blogs have Subscribe Sundays. For pointing to other blogs you think are worth subscribing to.
I haven’t subscribed to particular blogs in awhile (mostly I subscribe, temporarily, to topics, or search strings). But two I just came across seem extra interesting [...]
Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. — Thomas Jefferson
Near the start of his Institutional Corruption talk the other day, Larry Lessig sourced the quote above, from Thomas [...]
My first reaction to the news this morning aligns almost exactly with Matt Welch’s…
My wife woke me with the ridiculous news that Barack Obama, who has been in office for eight months and achieved no notable peace, won the Nobel Peace Prize. “Seriously, what has he done?” I [...]First, Larry Lessig gives some of the best sermons in academia. Or anywhere. He is so freaking good. That Larry’s a master presentationist is secondary to his excellence in the art of homiletics, in the sense that Ray Charles’ piano mastery was secondary to his transcendent skills as [...]
There’s something new on the FM dial in Boston. You might think of it as a kind of urban renewal. Grass roots, up through the pavement. (There’s a pun in there, but you need to read on to get it.)
You might say that fresh radio moved in where stale TV [...]
I’m on the East Coast for the rest of the current fire season in California. Which is cool, literally. I miss Santa Barbara, but not the fear of destruction (which I generally don’t have there, but I need my rationalizations). Speaking of which, here’s The Mania of Owning [...]
Craig Burton in Open Letter to Steve Ballmer:
Well F*&% me. Dude, after all of these years, you are still micro managing the Windows release!
Now I know why Microsoft is now been relegated to insignificance in the identity market.
The reason is simple. Internal policy, managed by you, prohibits product [...]
Interesting volley between Cliff Gerrish (also @cgerrish) and myself, centered on the topic of silos vs. pipes, beginning with my post Values and Valuation, then continuing in Cliff’s The Silo & The Pipe: Doc Searls gets Venezuelan, and in the comments below that post. While I don’t [...]
What are we to make of Sidewiki? Is it, as Phil Windley says, a way to build the purpose-centric Web? Or is it, as Mike Arrington suggests, the latest way to “deface” websites?
The arguments here were foreshadowed in the architecture of the Web itself, the essence [...]
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has an excellent Earthquake Center for all the earthquakes in the world, which is very handy at a time when many are happening at once, followed in some cases by tsunamis that cross seas to strike coastlines minutes [...]
Above is the best (or the widest) shot I could get of Lake Manicouagan, which is the largest visible impact crater on Earth. Only three (or maybe four) are larger and none are visible.
The Manicouagan impact event happened about 214 million years ago, give or [...]
Over in Fast Company, Tim Beyers nicely threads quotable pearls from Cluetrain’s four authors, including yours truly, in Twitter’s Investors Missed the Cluetrain – Here’s Why. The context of the story is continued investment in Twitter at a reported $1 billion valuation of the company. [...]
Over in Fast Company, Tim Beyers nicely threads quotable pearls from Cluetrain’s four authors, including yours truly, in Twitter’s Investors Missed the Cluetrain – Here’s Why. The context of the story is continued investment in Twitter at a reported $1 billion valuation of the company. [...]
VRM East Coast Workshop 2009 is coming up soon — on 12-13 October, at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA. It’s hosted by the Berkman Center and ProjectVRM at the Center.
As with earlier VRM workshops, it’s a free unconference, organized on the open space model. [...]
I blog by grace of something I hardly expected to find: a free open wi-fi hot spot in London. Way back in (it says 1969, but it was actually) 2002, I had a ball discovering many free wi-fi hot spots in London, got to make many new friends, and [...]
First, links to a pair of pieces I wrote — one new, one old, both for Linux Journal. The former is Linux and Plethorization, a short piece I put up today, and which contains a little usage experiment that will play out over time. The latter is [...]
The Excellent Adventure is the name of the blog. Its subhead is The tale of TeamHudson, as they discover that all they need is a tall ship…. Its About page says,
In July of 2006, Laureen and Jason were startled to discover that despite all the various hopes, dreams, and [...]
That’s my take-away from Fawn Germer in It’s the Cynicism That’ll Kill You. The encompassing lines:
So many of my former colleagues who are forced to transition and re-invent actually expected to report for newspapers until the final days of their careers. Change of this magnitude was so unexpected [...]
The shot above, made on Sunday out the window of a plane on approach to Las Vegas, comes three and a half years after this shot, which I took from the ground at Hoover Dam. Here’s a whole set of the fly-by. Not [...]
I’m not there, in that shot above. That was in Denver, en route from Santa Barbara to Boston last Monday. Now I’m at a different airport — O’Hare in Chicago — en route from Boston to Las Vegas.
Still, I thought it as a nice shot in [...]
For years I’ve been watching my old pal Britt Blaser work to improve the means by which citizens manage their elected politicians, and otherwise improve governance in our democracy.
Now comes Diane Francis, veteran columnist for the National Post in Canada (but yes, she’s an American), summarizing the good [...]
On 9/11/2001 I had already been blogging for nearly two years. It’s interesting to see what I wrote this day, back then. Since my blog then was not on local time, my first four posts were actually the last from the day before. My first 9/11 post was [...]
Above is a picture of the Station Fire, taken from the plane I was riding from Santa Barbara to Denver on Monday afternoon. I believe the water body at the bottom is the San Gabriel Reservoir. It lies in the midst of the San [...]
My postings last week on the Station Fire (below) brought an invitation from Dave to contribute something along the same lines for InBerkeley. I did, and the title is The Next Berkeley Fire. Since fire is one of the two big dangers of living in this corner [...]
Above is the latest (as of this morning) MODIS satellite map (on Google Earth) of Station Fire spottings in the Angeles National Forest north of the Los Angeles basin. Near the center I’ve marked the Stony Ridge Observatory. While less familiar than the [...]
United Airlines, for which I am a 1K (>100,000 miles per year) flyer, and which I fly so close to exclusively that I’m almost too familiar with their methods, has in the last year added a number of opt-out inconveniences to booking and check-in systems. Here is one [...]
Why do mainstream broadcasters keep calling that big fire north of Los Angeles “the so-called Station Fire?” You never hear “so-called Hurricane Bill” or “so-called Hurricane Erika”. Why is that?
The main reason is that hurricanes have a much better naming convention. The surnames of hurricanes are first names of [...]
Why do mature redwood trees have trunks that rise two hundred feet before branches commence, live for centuries and have bark that’s a foot thick? Because they are adapted to fire.
Why does the silver-green chaparral that covers California’s hills and mountains [...]
Just arrived at my house in Santa Barbara after a long drive down from Monterey. Most of the way I listened to live coverage of the Station Fire on KNX/1070, both through the car radio (KNX has a huge signal that covers the whole [...]
A couple days ago I responded to a posting on an email list. What I wrote struck a few chords, so I thought I’d repeat it here, with just a few edits, and then add a few additional thoughts as well. Here goes.
Reading _____’s references to ancient electrical power science [...]
Following Tristan Louis‘ Fauxpenness, I posted Open vs. Fauxpen at Linux Journal. Includes hat-tipping toward Dave’s recent work on URL shortening (the latest of which is here).
[...]It’s been a long travel day, and we’ve got an hour to go before getting unstuck here in the Denver airport, which is in Nebraska, I think. Got an early flight out of Boston, then failed to get on by standby with two flights so far. But we’re reserved on [...]
Imagine a “News from Lake Wobegon” without the homespun prairie jive, lasting for more than an hour every weeknight, and packed with great stories, mostly of being a normal kid from greater blue-collar Chicago. That was Jean Shepherd, who was Required Listening in New York — and the whole [...]
David Weinberger’s latest JOHO is up. He unpacks the highlights here. One among many typically quotable nuggets: Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.
[...]Two new posts over at the ProjectVRM blog: Testing the all-tip system, and Appreciating TipJoy. Oddly, I didn’t know until after I posted the first one that TipJoy was folding.
What Abby and Ivan Kirgin did with TipJoy was great pioneering work that we can all learn from. [...]
Christopher Musico, writing in the Destination CRM Blog: “According to a new study by research firm Pear Analytics, less than one in ten tweets have any real ‘pass-along value’,as more than 40 percent of tweets are ‘pointless babble.’”
I look forward to seeing more when the whole study [...]
Mostly I work like a hermit: in an attic with two window air conditioners fighting the heat and providing an endless source of dull noise that furthers my sense of productive isolation. For the last few days of record-high temperatures, the AC units have been losing the fight. Today they’ve [...]
Alan M. Dershowitz: “If it is immoral to kill an innocent fetus, how could it not be immoral to execute an innocent person?” That’s the bottom line of Dershowitz’ dissent from Antonin Scalia’s dissent in this matter here. I might dig into it if I had more time [...]
The best insights compound the obvious. They make so much sense that you struggle to comprehend their many implications. Such is the case with the first line, and then the first paragraph, of Kevin Kelly’s Better than Free:
The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, [...]
Allan Gregory (a 3rd year law student and my summer intern at the Berkman Center) and I have spent a lot of time this summer looking at the history of copyright and royalties, mostly in respect to music. What I’ve noticed in the course of this work is how [...]
Suspicious white man reported in minority neighborhood:
Rock legend Bob Dylan was treated like a complete unknown by police in a New Jersey shore community when a resident called to report someone wandering around the neighborhood.
Dylan was in Long Branch, about a two-hour drive south of New York City, on [...]
According to the latest Inciweb report, the LaBrea fire is now at close to 70,000 acres, and 10% contained. And according to the latest from Ray Ford in the Independent, the fire is “almost impossible” to contain.
Here’s the latest from MODIS, wrapped onto Google Earth, showing [...]
I love this:
… and I hope the good (or evil, depending on your perspective) folks at Despair.com don’t mind my promoting their best t-shirt yet. (If it helps, I just ordered one.)
You’ll notice that blogging isn’t in the diagram (though Despair does feature [...]
The country behind Santa Barbara is burning again. This one is the LaBrea fire, east of Santa Maria. It has grown past 36,000 acres and is 10% contained. This is far north of the fire in Santa Barbara earlier this year. Still, it’s a big one.
Here’s a mashup of [...]
For the form of life we call business, we are at a boundary between eras. For biological forms of life, the most recent of these is the K-T boundary between the Mesozoic and the Cenozoic Eras. The Mezozoic Era ended when Earth was struck by an object [...]
In Align the interests of: 1. Users and 2. Investors., Dave make a radical yet sensible case for users becoming investors. It’s very consistent with what we’re learning from Scoble plus FriendFeed turning into Friendfeed minus Scoble, which Dave wrote about in Scoble, your blog [...]
I’m a born researcher. Studying stuff is a lot of what I do, whether I’m looking out the window of an airplaine, asking a question at a meeting, browsing through the Web and correspondence, or digging through books and journals in libraries.
Most of my library work, however, isn’t in [...]
Ry Cooder singing “I’m a fool for a cigarette”: 1401 views, 4 ratings.
WritingHanna singing “Coffee Ditty“: 704 views, 101 ratings.
Hannah sounds a lot like Maria Muldaur, no?
[...]Kevin Marks in The Flow Past Web: even better than the RealTime thing:
Much of the supposed ‘Real-Time’ web is enabled by the relaxation of realtime constraints in favour of the ‘eventually consistent’ model of data propagation. Google Wave, for example, enables simultaneous editing by relaxing the ‘one person can [...]
If Twitter does everything Dave says they should do, they’d make a helpful move toward bingo on Joe Andrieu’s checklist of user-driven services. Here’s the list:
Impulse from the User Control Transparency Data Portability Service Endpoint Portability Self Hosting User Generativity Improvability Self-managed Identity Duty of [...]In the mid-1990s, when I couldn’t find anybody to publish my essays (I didn’t want to cover what I still call “vendor sports”, which eliminated most of the tech magazine market ), I followed Dave Winer’s footsteps and published my own on the Web. One was The [...]
Sez the Wall Street Journal headline, No More Perks: Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users — They Sit for Hours and Don’t Spend Much; Getting the Bum’s Rush in the Big Apple.
Erica Alini, writes, “…in a growing number of small coffee shops, firm restrictions on laptop use [...]
Mark Finnern has a great idea: Wikipedia papers. Specifically,
Every student that takes a class has to create or improve a Wikipedia page to the topic of the class. It shouldn’t be the only deliverable, but an important one.
The Wikimedia organization could help the professors [...]
Well, the first try at the other blog failed. Let’s see if I unscrewed what I lost at this blog. Yep. Did. Backups are a good thing to have.
Okay, just imported all my categories. That was cool too. I think I’ll stop pressing my luck now. It’s good just to [...]
If this appears, then I’ve got my OPML editor running again.
It does. YAAAAY.
Next step: adding editing for the ProjectVRM blog.
[...]In Curation, meta-curation, and live Net radio, Jon Udell begins, “I’ve long been dissatisfied with how we discover and tune into Net radio”, but doesn’t complain about it. He hacks some solutions. First he swaps time for place:
I’ve just created a new mode for the elmcity calendar aggregator. Now [...]
I dunno why the New York Times appeared on my doorstep this morning, along with our usual Boston Globe (Sox lost, plus other news) — while our Wall Street Journal did not. (Was it a promo? There was no response envelope or anything. And none of the neighbors [...]
… customers are so empowered that they don’t feel especially empowered. The new normal is that we expect businesses to listen to us. The companies that don’t are now perceived as Dinosaurs. — David Weinberger, from the new Introduction to 10th Anniversary edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto.
That’s from [...]
One of the reasons I liked Dish Network (to the extent anybody can like a purely commercial entertainment utility) was that their satellite receivers included an over-the-air tuner. It nicely folded your over-the-air (OTA) stations in with others in the system’s channel guide. Here’s how it looked:
It helps to recognize that the Associated Press is exactly what its name denotes: an association of presses. Specifically, newspapers. Fifteen hundred of them. Needless to say, newspapers are having a hard time. (Hell, I gave them some, myself, yesterday.) So we might cut them a little slack [...]
Seems I share a birthday with Benito Mussolini, Dag Hamarskjöld, Elizabeth Dole, Peter Jennings, Ken Burns, Wil Wheaton and about 1/365th of the world’s population. I also see here that ENIAC, “the first general-purpose electronic computer“, and I were fired [...]
“Saving newspapers” is beginning to look like saving caterpillars. Or worse, like caterpillars saving themselves. That’s was the message I got from Rick Edmonds’ API Report to Exec Summit: Paid Content Is the Future for News Web Sites, in Poynter, back in early June. In The Nichepaper Manifesto [...]
So I just got a “courtesy call” from Sprint, a company I’ve been talking up for a couple years becuase I’ve had nothing but positive experience with my Sprint EvDO data card.
Well, that’s over. The call was to inform me that I’d gone over the 5Gb monthly usage limit for [...]
In the month since it hit the streets (at least here in the U.S.), I’ve been surprised at how little those who like Cluetrain know about the new, 10th anniversary edition of the book. Many assume that it’s a fancy new edition of the [...]
In his comment to my last post about the sale of WQXR to WNYC (and in his own blog post here), Sean Reiser makes an important point:
One of the unique things about the QXR was it’s relationship with the Times. The Times owned' [...]
The kid goes to bed every night lately while treating himself to a classical piece on his bedroom stereo. Tonight, our last (a bonus, thanks to a plane that didn’t fly) in Santa Barbara before returning to Boston tomorrow, he played one of his favorites: The Planets, by Gustav [...]
I understand Zappos selling out to Amazon (even the Amazon logo, which leads from A to Z, makes sense of it) but the news still depresses me. Zappos is a cause as well as a brand. That cause is relationship. As Wikipedia (currently) puts it,
Zappos uses a [...]
When I read that an impact had been spotted on Jupiter, I figured it was somewhere other than the equator, which would be a bulls-eye. Even Shoemaker-Levy, a huge comet broken into a string of pieces, slammed like a series of machine gun bullets [...]
Edward Rosten and I have been having an interesting dialog in the comment section of my last post, which was mostly about WNYC buying WQXR from the New York Times (which has owned it forever) for $11.5 million — and moving QXR’s classical programming up New York’s [...]
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