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Trend of the Day: NFT
Doc Searls
MARCH 12, 2021
NFTs—Non-Fungible Tokens —are hot s**t. Wikipedia explains (at that link), A non-fungible token ( NFT ) is a special type of cryptographic token that represents something unique.
Doc Searls
A toast to the fools standing high on broadcasting’s hill
Doc Searls
MARCH 1, 2021
In Winter, the cap of dark on half the Earth is cocked to the north. So, as the planet spins, places farther north get more night in the winter. In McGrath, Alaska, at close to sixty-three degrees north, most of the day is dark. This would be discouraging to most people, but to Paul B.
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Enough with the giant URLs
Doc Searls
MARCH 10, 2021
A few minutes ago I wanted to find something I’d written about privacy. So I started with a simple search on Google: The result was this: Which is a very very very very very very very very very very very very very way long way of saying this: [link].
Why is the “un-carrier” falling into the hellhole of tracking-based advertising?
Doc Searls
MARCH 11, 2021
For a few years now, T-Mobile has been branding itself the “un-carrier,” saying it’s “synonymous with 100% customer commitment.” ” Credit where due: we switched from AT&T a few years ago because T-Mobile, alone among U.S.
Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act
Doc Searls
MARCH 27, 2020
As quarantined millions gather virtually on conferencing platforms, the best of those, Zoom , is doing very well. Hats off. But Zoom is also—correctly— taking a lot of heat for its privacy policy , which is creepily chummy with the tracking-based advertising biz (also called adtech ).
The eventual normal
Doc Searls
MARCH 11, 2021
One year ago exactly (at this minute), my wife and I were somewhere over Nebraska, headed from Newark to Santa Barbara by way of Denver, on the last flight we’ve ever taken. Prior to that we had put about four million miles on United alone, flying almost constantly somewhere, mostly on business. The map above traces what my pocket GPS recorded on various trips (and far from all of them) by land, sea and air since 2007. This life began for me in 1990 and for my wife long before that.
Be the hawk
Doc Searls
DECEMBER 14, 2020
On Quora the question went, If you went from an IQ of 135+ to 100, how would it feel? Here’s how I answered :::: I went through that as a kid, and it was no fun. In Kindergarten, my IQ score was at the top of the bell curve, and they put me in the smart kid class.
Radio 2.x
Doc Searls
FEBRUARY 21, 2021
On Quora , somebody asks, How can the radio industry stay relevant in the age of streaming music and podcasts? Here’s my answer: It already is, if you consider streaming music and podcasting evolutionary forms of radio.
Time to unscrew subscriptions
Doc Searls
OCTOBER 17, 2020
The goal here is to obsolesce this brilliant poster by Despair.com : I got launched on that path a couple months ago, when I got this email from The_New_Yorker at e-mail.condenast.com: Why did they “need” a “confirmation” to a subscription which, best I could recall, was last renewed early this year? So I looked at the links.
Bad $20
Doc Searls
JUNE 1, 2020
I once tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. Actually, twice. The first was when I paid for a lunch at Barney Greengrass in New York, about two years ago. After exposing the $20 to a gizmo at the cash register, the cashier handed it back to me, saying it was counterfeit.
Time for advertising to call off the dogs
Doc Searls
AUGUST 4, 2020
Is this the way you want your brand to look? Digital advertising needs to sniff its own stench, instead of everybody’s digital butts.
About a pretty pole
Doc Searls
APRIL 20, 2020
The tallest structure in Santa Barbara’s skyline is a 200-foot pole painted red and white. It stands in a city equipment yard, not far from the ocean and the city’s famous Wharf. You can see it in the photo above, with the Wharf behind it.
Higher education adrift
Doc Searls
OCTOBER 15, 2020
In Your favorite cruise ship may never come back: 23 classic vessels that could be laid-up, sold or scrapped , Gene Sloan (aka @ThePointsGuy ) named the Carnival Fantasy as one those that might be headed for the heap.
Will our digital lives leave a fossil record?
Doc Searls
MAY 15, 2020
In the library of Earth’s history, there are missing books, and within books there are missing chapters, written in rock that is now gone. The greatest example of “gone” rock is what John Wesley Powell discovered in 1869, on his expedition by boat through the Grand Canyon.
How early is digital life?
Doc Searls
SEPTEMBER 26, 2020
Bits don’t leave a fossil record. Well, not quite. They do persist on magnetic, optical and other media, all easily degraded or erased. But how long will those last? Since I’ve already asked that question , I’ll set it aside and ask the one in the headline.
So far, privacy isn’t a debate
Doc Searls
JUNE 22, 2020
Remember the dot com boom? Doesn’t matter if you don’t. What does matter is that it ended. All business manias do. That’s why we can expect the “platform economy” and “surveillance capitalism” to end.
Why the Chiefs will win the Super Bowl
Doc Searls
FEBRUARY 7, 2021
I think there are more reasons to believe in the Bucs than the Chiefs today: better offensive line, better defense, Brady’s unequaled Super Bowl experience, etc. But the Chiefs are favored by 3.5
More on Zoom and privacy
Doc Searls
MARCH 28, 2020
Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act , which I posted yesterday, hit a nerve. While this blog normally gets about 50 reads a day, by the end of yesterday it got 15000. So far this morning (11:15am Pacific), it has close to 8000 new reads.
Just in case you feel safe with Twitter
Doc Searls
JANUARY 26, 2021
Just got a press release by email from David Rosen ( @firstpersonpol ) of the Public Citizen press office. The headline says “Historic Grindr Fine Shows Need for FTC Enforcement Action.” ” The same release is also a post in the news section of the Public Citizen website.
Saving the Internet—and all the commons it makes possible
Doc Searls
FEBRUARY 10, 2020
This is the Ostrom Memorial Lecture I gave on 9 October of last year for the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. Here is the video. The intro starts at 8 minutes in, and my part starts just after 11 minutes in.)
How we save the world
Doc Searls
JANUARY 11, 2021
Let’s say the world is going to hell. Don’t argue, because my case isn’t about that. It’s about who saves it. I suggest everybody. Or, more practically speaking, a maximized assortment of the smartest and most helpful anybodies. Not governments. Not academies. Not investors. Not charities. Not big companies and their platforms. Any of those can be involved, of course, but we don’t have to start there. We can start with people. Because all of them are different.
Coming From Every Here
Doc Searls
JULY 4, 2020
To answer the question Where are SiriusXM radio stations broadcasted from? , I replied, If you’re wondering where they transmit from, it’s a mix. SiriusXM transmits primarily from a number of satellites placed in geostationary orbit , 35,786 kilometres or 22,236 miles above the equator.
Social shell games
Doc Searls
DECEMBER 15, 2020
If you listen to Episode 49: Parler, Ownership, and Open Source of the latest Reality 2.0 podcast, you’ll learn that I was blindsided at first by the topic of Parler , which has lately become a thing. But I caught up fast, even getting a Parler account not long after the show ended.
Do you really need all this personal information, @RollingStone?
Doc Searls
JANUARY 22, 2020
Here’s the popover that greets visitors on arrival at Rolling Stone ‘s website: Our Privacy Policy has been revised as of January 1, 2020. This policy outlines how we use your information. By using our site and products, you are agreeing to the policy.
We’ve seen this movie before
Doc Searls
DECEMBER 27, 2020
When some big outfit with a vested interest in violating your privacy says they are only trying to save small business, grab your wallet. Because the game they’re playing is misdirection away from what they really want.
Wonder What?
Doc Searls
DECEMBER 26, 2020
Our Christmas evening of cinematic indulgence was watching Wonder Woman 1984 , about which I just posted this, elsewhere on the Interwebs: I mean, okay, all “super” and “enhanced” hero (and villain) archetypes are impossible. Not found in nature. You grant that.
Reality 2020.05.08
Doc Searls
MAY 8, 2020
In The Web and the New Reality , which I posted on December 1, 1995 (and again a few days ago ), I called that date “Reality 1.995.12,” and made twelve predictions. In this post I’ll visit how those have played out over the quarter century since then.
We haven’t seen this movie before
Doc Searls
MARCH 25, 2020
Three weekends ago, we drove from New York to Baltimore to visit with family. We had planned this for awhile, but there was added urgency: knowing the world was about to change in a big way. Or in many big ways.
A simple suggestion for Guilford College
Doc Searls
DECEMBER 23, 2020
Guilford College made me a pacifist. This wasn’t hard, under the circumstances. My four years there were the last of the 1960s, a stretch when the Vietnam War was already bad and getting much worse.
Is Flickr in trouble again?
Doc Searls
DECEMBER 9, 2020
I have two Flickr accounts, named Doc Searls and Nfrastructure. One has 73,355 photos, and the other 3,469. They each cost $60/year to maintain as pro accounts.
The universe is a start-up
Doc Searls
MARCH 4, 2020
Earth is 4.54 billion years old. It was born 9.247 years after the Big Bang , which happened 13.787 billion years ago. Meaning that our planet is a third the age of the Universe.
On fire
Doc Searls
SEPTEMBER 10, 2020
That above is the Bobcat Fire , in the San Gabriel Mountains , against which Los Angeles’ suburban sprawl (that’s it, on the right) reaches the limits of advance. It makes no sense to build very far up or into the mountains, for two good reasons.
Going #Faceless
Doc Searls
FEBRUARY 29, 2020
Facial recognition by machines is out of control. Meaning our control. As individuals, and as a society. Thanks to ubiquitous surveillance systems, including the ones in our own phones , we can no longer assume we are anonymous in public places or private in private ones.
On humanity, surveillance and coronavirus
Doc Searls
APRIL 14, 2020
Just learned of The Coronavirus (Safeguards) Bill 2020: Proposed protections for digital interventions and in relation to immunity certificates. This is in addition to the UK’s Coronavirus Bill 2020 , which is (as I understand it) running the show there right now.
How to get fans inside the NBA’s playoff bubble
Doc Searls
JULY 12, 2020
Sell tickets to attend online through Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, Webex, GoToMeeting, Jitsi or whatever conferencing system can supply working tech to the NBA.
The Future of Now
Doc Searls
JULY 10, 2020
There is latency to everything. Stub your toe and a second or two passes before the pain kicks in. The crack of a bat on a playing field takes half a second before it reaches the ears of the watching crowd. The sunlight we see on Earth is eight minutes old.
How the once mighty fall
Doc Searls
NOVEMBER 4, 2020
For many decades, one of the landmark radio stations in Washington, DC was WMAL-AM (now re-branded WSPN ), at 630 on (what in pre-digital times we called) the dial. As AM listening faded, so did WMAL, which moved its talk format to 105.9
The smell of boiling frog
Doc Searls
SEPTEMBER 8, 2020
I just got this email today: Which tells me, from a sample of one (after another, after another) that Zoom is to video conferencing in 2020 what Microsoft Windows was to personal computing in 1999.
The GDPR’s biggest fail
Doc Searls
MAY 25, 2020
If the GDPR did what it promised to do, we’d be celebrating Privmas today. Two years after the GDPR became enforceable, privacy would be the norm rather than the exception in the online world. That hasn’t happened, but it’s not because the GDPR is poorly enforced.
On KERI: a way not to reveal more personal info than you need to
Doc Searls
OCTOBER 22, 2020
You don’t walk around wearing a name badge. Except maybe at a conference, or some other enclosed space where people need to share their names and affiliations with each other. But otherwise, no. Why is that?
Remembering Gail Sheehy
Doc Searls
SEPTEMBER 28, 2020
It bums me out that Gail Sheehy passed without much notice—meaning I only heard about it in passing.
On Dion Neutra, 1926-2019
Doc Searls
DECEMBER 7, 2019
The Los Angeles in your head is a Neutra house. You’ve seen many of them in movies , and some of them in many movies. Some of those are now gone , alas, as is the architect and preservationist who also designed, or helped design, many of the buildings that bear his surname.
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