Expert insights. Personalized for you.
This is what greets me when I go to the Washington Post site from here in Germany: So you can see it too, wherever you are, here’s the URL I’m redirected to on Chrome , on Firefox , on Safari and on Brave. All look the same except for Brave, which shows a blank page. MORE
In The Big Short , investor Michael Burry says “One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud.” ” (Burry shorted the mania- and fraud-filled subprime mortgage market and made a mint in the process.). MORE
[Because it’s too @#$% hard to edit a long piece in WordPress (especially when one’s vision has not fully recovered from recent surgery), the latest edits of this are over here in Medium. Thanks.]. MORE
Take a look at this chart : CryptoCurrency Market Capitalizations. As Neo said , Whoa. To help me get my head fully around all that’s going on behind that surge, or mania, or whatever it is, I’ve composed a lexicon-in-process that I’m publishing here so I can find it again. MORE
I’ve been wanting to fly on the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” ever since I missed a chance to go on an inaugural junket aboard one before Boeing began delivery to the airlines. But three days ago I finally got my chance, aboard United Flight 935 from London to Los Angeles. MORE
In a press release , Amazon explained why it backed out of its plan to open a new headquarters in New York City: For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term. MORE
It’s time to move past the toxic and destructive business called adtech : surveillance-based advertising. Adtech is the Agent Smith of digital advertising: a rogue programmatic approach to digital advertising that rationalizes tracking people like marked animals. MORE
In a Columbia Journalism Review op-ed , Bernie Sanders presents a plan to save journalism that begins, WALTER CRONKITE ONCE SAID that “journalism is what we need to make democracy work.” He was absolutely right, which is why today’s assault on journalism by Wall Street, billionaire businessmen, Silicon Valley, and Donald Trump presents a crisis—and why we must take concrete action. Real journalism is different from the gossip, punditry, and clickbait that dominates today’s news. MORE
Personal data, that is. Because it’s good to give away—but only if you mean it. And it’s bad to take it, even it seems to be there for the taking. I bring this up because a quarter million pages (so far) on the Web say it “data is the new oil.” MORE
In Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened? Justin Lee ( @justinleejw ) nicely unpacks how chatbots were overhyped to begin with and continue to fail their Turing tests , especially since humans in nearly all cases would rather talk to humans than to mechanical substitutes. MORE
This was to be my September column for the subscriber edition of Linux Journal, which was terminated last week after 25 years in business. The theme for that month’s issue was to be Cool Projects. The website is still up, however, so now the coolest project for its owner is to save it, so none of that long and valuable history gets 404’d. MORE
GlobalWebIndex ‘s Global Ad-Blocking Behavior report says 47% of us are blocking ads now. It also says, “As a younger and more engaged audience, ad-blockers also are much more likely to be paying subscribers and consumers. Ad-free premium services are especially attractive.” MORE
Let’s start with Facebook’s Surveillance Machine , by Zeynep Tufekci in last Monday’s New York Times. MORE
The Spinner* (with the asterisk) is “a service that enables you to subconsciously influence a specific person, by controlling the content on the websites he or she usually visits.” ” Meaning you can hire The Spinner* to hack another person. MORE
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. MORE
Where does public radio rock—or even rule? And why? To start answering those questions, I looked through Nielsen ‘s radio station ratings , which are on the Radio Online site. MORE
A Route of Evanescence, With a revolving Wheel –. A Resonance of Emerald. A Rush of Cochineal –. And every Blossom on the Bush. Adjusts it’s tumbled Head –. The Mail from Tunis – probably, An easy Morning’s Ride –. Emily Dickinson. ( via The Poetry Foundation ). MORE
The term “ fake news ” was a casual phrase until it became clear to news media that a flood of it had been deployed during last year’s presidential election in the U.S. MORE
Advertising used to be simple. You knew what it was, and where it came from. Whether it was an ad you heard on the radio, saw in a magazine or spotted on a billboard, you knew it came straight from the advertiser through that medium. MORE
We can know more than we can tell. That one-liner from Michael Polanyi has been waiting half a century for a proper controversy, which it now has with facial recognition. MORE
Who Owns the Internet? What Big Tech’s Monopoly Powers Mean for our Culture is Elizabeth Kolbert ‘s review in The New Yorker of several books, one of which I’ve read: Jonathan Taplin ’s Move Fast and Break Things—How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. MORE
When the Los Angeles Clippers open their first game at home this season, I want them to pause and celebrate their first franchise player: Bob Kauffman , the team’s all-star center for its first three seasons, when they were the Buffalo Braves. Bob died on July 27 at age 69. MORE
I’m at the ID2020 ( @ID2020 ) Summit in New York. The theme is “Rising to the Good ID Challenge.” ” My notes here are accumulating at the bottom, not the top. MORE
Nothing challenges our understanding of infrastructure better than a crisis, and we have a big one now in Houston. We do with every giant storm, of course. New York is still recovering from Sandy and New Orleans from Katrina. MORE
Last night I watched The Great Hack a second time. It’s a great documentary, maybe even a classic. (A A classic in literature, I learned on this Radio Open Source podcast , is a work that “can only be re-read.” ” If that’s so, then perhaps a classic movie is one that can only be re-watched.*). MORE
“What’s the story?” ” No question is asked more often by editors in newsrooms than that one. And for good reason: that’s what news is about: stories. I was just 22 when I got my first gig as a journalist, reporting for a daily newspaper in New Jersey. MORE
Deepfakes are a big thing, and a bad one. On the big side, a Google search for deepfake brings up more than 23 billion results. On the bad side, today’s top result in a search on Twitter for the hashtag #deepfake says, “Technology is slowly killing reality. MORE
I’ve been involved with Linux Journal since before it started publishing in 1994, and have been on its masthead since 1996. MORE
How would you feel if you had been told in the early days of the Web that in the year 2018 you would still need logins and passwords for damned near everything. Your faith in the tech world would be deeply shaken, no? MORE
Here’s what I wrote about pirate radio in New York , back in 2013. I hoped to bait major media attention with that. Got zip. Then I wrote this in 2015 (when I also took the screen shot, above, of a local pirate’s ID on my kitchen radio). MORE
That was the view to the south over center of Greenland a few hours ago: a late afternoon aurora over a blue dusk. I departed London about four hours before taking this shot, and am writing this in Santa Barbara. MORE
Journalism is in a world of hurt because it has been marginalized by a new business model that requires maximizing “content” instead. That model is calle d adtech. We can see adtech’s effects in The New York Times ’ In New Jersey, Only a Few Media Watchdogs Are Left , by David Chen. MORE
We live in two worlds now: the natural one where we have bodies that obey the laws of gravity and space/time, and the virtual one where there is no gravity or distance (though there is time). MORE
A few days ago a Twitter exchange contained an “OK Boomer” response to one of my tweets. At the time I laughed it off, tweeting back a pointer to Report: Burying, Cremating Baby Boomers To Generate $200 Trillion In GDP , which ran five years ago in The Onion. But it got me thinking that “OK Boomer” might be more—and worse—than a mere meme. Still, I wasn’t moved to say anything, because I had better stuff to do. MORE
I posted this Cluetrain retrospective at doc.blog last year. I’m putting it here now because it’s timely again. Dig: 1) The original site and book are online in full at [link] and [link]. 2) The 10th anniversary edition has new chapters by the four original authors, plus additional ones by JP Rangaswami , Dan Gillmor and Jake McKee. 3) David Weinberger and I posted an addendum to Cluetrain in 2015 called New Clues: [link]. MORE
The Cluetrain Manifesto went online for the world o n March 26, 1999. “People of Earth,” it began. Nothing modest about it. . Chris Locke and David Weinberger both had newsletters with real subscriber bases ( Entropy Gradient Reversals and JOHO , respectively). MORE
Note the date on this map : That was more than a month before huge rains revised to red the colors in the mountains above Montecito. The LA Times also ran a story a week before last, warning about debris flows , which are like mud slides, but with lots of rocks. MORE
I thought the Rockets were great in last night’s game—and say that as a Warriors fan. (I I even had season tickets back in the Run TMC era, when tickets were still affordable). MORE
This is wrong: Because I’m not blocking ads. I’m blocking tracking. In fact I welcome ads—especially ones that sponsor The Washington Post and other fine publishers. I’ll also be glad to subscribe to the Post once it stops trying to track me off their site. Same goes for The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal and other papers I value and to which I no longer subscribe. MORE
In Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking , @JuliaAngwin and @ProPublica unpack what the subhead says well enough: “Google is the latest tech company to drop the longstanding wall between anonymous online ad tracking and user’s names.” MORE
Doc Searls
DECEMBER 16, 2019
Deepfakes are a big thing, and a bad one. On the big side, a Google search for deepfake brings up more than 23 billion results. On the bad side, today’s top result in a search on Twitter for the hashtag #deepfake says, “Technology is slowly killing reality.
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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Doc Searls
DECEMBER 3, 2019
A few days ago a Twitter exchange contained an “OK Boomer” response to one of my tweets. At the time I laughed it off, tweeting back a pointer to Report: Burying, Cremating Baby Boomers To Generate $200 Trillion In GDP , which ran five years ago in The Onion. But it got me thinking that “OK Boomer” might be more—and worse—than a mere meme. Still, I wasn’t moved to say anything, because I had better stuff to do.
Doc Searls
OCTOBER 31, 2019
We can know more than we can tell. That one-liner from Michael Polanyi has been waiting half a century for a proper controversy, which it now has with facial recognition.
Doc Searls
MAY 12, 2018
In The Big Short , investor Michael Burry says “One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud.” ” (Burry shorted the mania- and fraud-filled subprime mortgage market and made a mint in the process.).
Doc Searls
MARCH 23, 2018
Let’s start with Facebook’s Surveillance Machine , by Zeynep Tufekci in last Monday’s New York Times.
Doc Searls
NOVEMBER 17, 2019
A Route of Evanescence, With a revolving Wheel –. A Resonance of Emerald. A Rush of Cochineal –. And every Blossom on the Bush. Adjusts it’s tumbled Head –. The Mail from Tunis – probably, An easy Morning’s Ride –. Emily Dickinson. ( via The Poetry Foundation ).
Doc Searls
OCTOBER 12, 2018
We live in two worlds now: the natural one where we have bodies that obey the laws of gravity and space/time, and the virtual one where there is no gravity or distance (though there is time).
Doc Searls
JUNE 7, 2018
In Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened? Justin Lee ( @justinleejw ) nicely unpacks how chatbots were overhyped to begin with and continue to fail their Turing tests , especially since humans in nearly all cases would rather talk to humans than to mechanical substitutes.
Doc Searls
MAY 30, 2018
This is what greets me when I go to the Washington Post site from here in Germany: So you can see it too, wherever you are, here’s the URL I’m redirected to on Chrome , on Firefox , on Safari and on Brave. All look the same except for Brave, which shows a blank page.
Doc Searls
MARCH 23, 2019
GlobalWebIndex ‘s Global Ad-Blocking Behavior report says 47% of us are blocking ads now. It also says, “As a younger and more engaged audience, ad-blockers also are much more likely to be paying subscribers and consumers. Ad-free premium services are especially attractive.”
Doc Searls
FEBRUARY 27, 2019
The Spinner* (with the asterisk) is “a service that enables you to subconsciously influence a specific person, by controlling the content on the websites he or she usually visits.” ” Meaning you can hire The Spinner* to hack another person.
Doc Searls
SEPTEMBER 1, 2019
In a Columbia Journalism Review op-ed , Bernie Sanders presents a plan to save journalism that begins, WALTER CRONKITE ONCE SAID that “journalism is what we need to make democracy work.” He was absolutely right, which is why today’s assault on journalism by Wall Street, billionaire businessmen, Silicon Valley, and Donald Trump presents a crisis—and why we must take concrete action. Real journalism is different from the gossip, punditry, and clickbait that dominates today’s news.
Doc Searls
SEPTEMBER 27, 2017
Personal data, that is. Because it’s good to give away—but only if you mean it. And it’s bad to take it, even it seems to be there for the taking. I bring this up because a quarter million pages (so far) on the Web say it “data is the new oil.”
Doc Searls
DECEMBER 14, 2017
The term “ fake news ” was a casual phrase until it became clear to news media that a flood of it had been deployed during last year’s presidential election in the U.S.
Doc Searls
JULY 19, 2019
It’s time to move past the toxic and destructive business called adtech : surveillance-based advertising. Adtech is the Agent Smith of digital advertising: a rogue programmatic approach to digital advertising that rationalizes tracking people like marked animals.
Doc Searls
AUGUST 13, 2019
I’ve been involved with Linux Journal since before it started publishing in 1994, and have been on its masthead since 1996.
Doc Searls
JANUARY 15, 2018
Note the date on this map : That was more than a month before huge rains revised to red the colors in the mountains above Montecito. The LA Times also ran a story a week before last, warning about debris flows , which are like mud slides, but with lots of rocks.
Doc Searls
JULY 23, 2019
“What’s the story?” ” No question is asked more often by editors in newsrooms than that one. And for good reason: that’s what news is about: stories. I was just 22 when I got my first gig as a journalist, reporting for a daily newspaper in New Jersey.
Doc Searls
AUGUST 24, 2018
How would you feel if you had been told in the early days of the Web that in the year 2018 you would still need logins and passwords for damned near everything. Your faith in the tech world would be deeply shaken, no?
Doc Searls
NOVEMBER 11, 2017
That was the view to the south over center of Greenland a few hours ago: a late afternoon aurora over a blue dusk. I departed London about four hours before taking this shot, and am writing this in Santa Barbara.
Doc Searls
NOVEMBER 12, 2016
Nearly all the ads I see on Facebook are ones like these two, next to Mark Zuckerberg’s latest post : Besides being false and misleading clickbait, they are not from espn.com. They’re from [link] , and bait for a topic switch:to pitching a diet supplement called Alpha Fuel.
Doc Searls
SEPTEMBER 19, 2019
I’m at the ID2020 ( @ID2020 ) Summit in New York. The theme is “Rising to the Good ID Challenge.” ” My notes here are accumulating at the bottom, not the top.
Doc Searls
APRIL 4, 2019
Where does public radio rock—or even rule? And why? To start answering those questions, I looked through Nielsen ‘s radio station ratings , which are on the Radio Online site.
Doc Searls
SEPTEMBER 16, 2017
I’ve been wanting to fly on the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” ever since I missed a chance to go on an inaugural junket aboard one before Boeing began delivery to the airlines. But three days ago I finally got my chance, aboard United Flight 935 from London to Los Angeles.
Doc Searls
JANUARY 26, 2017
Journalism is in a world of hurt because it has been marginalized by a new business model that requires maximizing “content” instead. That model is calle d adtech. We can see adtech’s effects in The New York Times ’ In New Jersey, Only a Few Media Watchdogs Are Left , by David Chen.
Doc Searls
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
I had a bunch of errands to run today, but also a lot of calls. And, when I finally got up from my desk around 4pm with plans to head out in the car, I found five inches of snow already on the apartment deck. Another five would come after that. So driving was clearly a bad idea.
Doc Searls
JUNE 28, 2019
This is wrong: Because I’m not blocking ads. I’m blocking tracking. In fact I welcome ads—especially ones that sponsor The Washington Post and other fine publishers. I’ll also be glad to subscribe to the Post once it stops trying to track me off their site. Same goes for The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal and other papers I value and to which I no longer subscribe.
Doc Searls
SEPTEMBER 9, 2017
[Because it’s too @#$% hard to edit a long piece in WordPress (especially when one’s vision has not fully recovered from recent surgery), the latest edits of this are over here in Medium. Thanks.].
Doc Searls
AUGUST 12, 2019
This was to be my September column for the subscriber edition of Linux Journal, which was terminated last week after 25 years in business. The theme for that month’s issue was to be Cool Projects. The website is still up, however, so now the coolest project for its owner is to save it, so none of that long and valuable history gets 404’d.
Doc Searls
OCTOBER 21, 2016
In Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking , @JuliaAngwin and @ProPublica unpack what the subhead says well enough: “Google is the latest tech company to drop the longstanding wall between anonymous online ad tracking and user’s names.”
Doc Searls
AUGUST 12, 2015
Advertising used to be simple. You knew what it was, and where it came from. Whether it was an ad you heard on the radio, saw in a magazine or spotted on a billboard, you knew it came straight from the advertiser through that medium.
Doc Searls
NOVEMBER 29, 2017
Here’s what I wrote about pirate radio in New York , back in 2013. I hoped to bait major media attention with that. Got zip. Then I wrote this in 2015 (when I also took the screen shot, above, of a local pirate’s ID on my kitchen radio).
Doc Searls
MAY 11, 2019
I thought the Rockets were great in last night’s game—and say that as a Warriors fan. (I I even had season tickets back in the Run TMC era, when tickets were still affordable).
Doc Searls
AUGUST 26, 2017
Who Owns the Internet? What Big Tech’s Monopoly Powers Mean for our Culture is Elizabeth Kolbert ‘s review in The New Yorker of several books, one of which I’ve read: Jonathan Taplin ’s Move Fast and Break Things—How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.
Doc Searls
OCTOBER 16, 2019
I posted this Cluetrain retrospective at doc.blog last year. I’m putting it here now because it’s timely again. Dig: 1) The original site and book are online in full at [link] and [link]. 2) The 10th anniversary edition has new chapters by the four original authors, plus additional ones by JP Rangaswami , Dan Gillmor and Jake McKee. 3) David Weinberger and I posted an addendum to Cluetrain in 2015 called New Clues: [link].
Doc Searls
JUNE 21, 2017
Take a look at this chart : CryptoCurrency Market Capitalizations. As Neo said , Whoa. To help me get my head fully around all that’s going on behind that surge, or mania, or whatever it is, I’ve composed a lexicon-in-process that I’m publishing here so I can find it again.
Doc Searls
FEBRUARY 16, 2019
In a press release , Amazon explained why it backed out of its plan to open a new headquarters in New York City: For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term.
Doc Searls
JULY 30, 2015
When the Los Angeles Clippers open their first game at home this season, I want them to pause and celebrate their first franchise player: Bob Kauffman , the team’s all-star center for its first three seasons, when they were the Buffalo Braves. Bob died on July 27 at age 69.
Doc Searls
AUGUST 30, 2017
Nothing challenges our understanding of infrastructure better than a crisis, and we have a big one now in Houston. We do with every giant storm, of course. New York is still recovering from Sandy and New Orleans from Katrina.
Doc Searls
AUGUST 27, 2019
Last night I watched The Great Hack a second time. It’s a great documentary, maybe even a classic. (A A classic in literature, I learned on this Radio Open Source podcast , is a work that “can only be re-read.” ” If that’s so, then perhaps a classic movie is one that can only be re-watched.*).
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