Near the end of this Pivot podcast, starting at about the 55 minute mark, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway give a great summary of why podcasting is “the fastest-growing ad-supported medium.” Among other things, they say “People actually listen to the ads,” and that host read-over … | Continue reading
Same goes for Customer Commons and MyTerms, btw "Creative Commons is one of the most amazing feats of stunt-lawyering ever attempted, and it has been an unmitigated success, with tens of billions of works licensed CC, including all of Wikipedia. Like EFF, CC is a charitable nonpr … | Continue reading
It's just bad In order to make anything (search, for example) work in Apple's Mail.app, I have to turn it off and on again. I won't run down all its issues. I'm too tired of it, and… | Continue reading
Fresh new nightmare 404 Media: This AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright. It begins, "For a small price, Malus.sh will use AI to ingest any piece of software you give and spit out a new version of it that 'liberates' it from any existing copyright lic … | Continue reading
See you there A couple nights ago, a friend and reader of mine said he didn't understand what today's talk by Judith Donath would be about. "Signaling theory?" he said. "What's that?" To him, signals were information transmitted by wires or waves. I told him signaling theory was … | Continue reading
em… As a lifelong over-user of em dashes and F bombs—hey, I'm from New Jersey—it's fun for me to learn that AI slop generators follow my style and F bombs are a way around detection. I'd say more, but would rather point to Tom Fishburne's typically excellent cartoon and post abou … | Continue reading
Eric Nuzum says public radio isn’t interested in saving itself. He’s actually quoting somebody else, but saying there’s a case. Specifically, When I hear public media leaders talk about the state of audience, ratings, and legacy platforms, I hear a very strong decline-centered na … | Continue reading
Did he die in his sleep? "The Gambler" may be the best country song ever written. Or performed (Kenny Rogers' version is the definitive one). Alas, its author, the great Don Schlitz, has passed on. Not many details on that: Nashville hospital, sudden illness. He was from Durham, … | Continue reading
In his latest blog, Dave says, “If I were running WordPress, my first priority would be to get something exciting out that even non-WordPress users would talk about. Then do it again.” He follows with a good suggestion. I have one too. I’ve told Matt about it, and he was receptiv … | Continue reading
Close your invisible robot eyes This is good news, but not yet enough. Spying on people going about their ordinary lives is wrong, whether it's the government, your car, or your TV doing it. April showers Even as a little kid I thought "March winds and April showers bring May flo … | Continue reading
Which it is, here in Southern Indiana. Was yesterday too. Getting strait A visual of marine traffic piling up on the two sides of the Strait of Hormuz. Also this story on transponder spoofing in Wired. Transponders are how one can see what ships are where, their routes, and other … | Continue reading
As always Jamie Smith nails it with No one is listening to Steve Jobs’s advice about the EU Digital ID Wallet. Still the only way Interesting how old posts get new traffic. The biggest this morning on the ProjectVRM blog is to Health Care Relationship Management, which ran almos … | Continue reading
Next Wednesday, 21 April, at 4 pm Eastern, Judith Donath will speak here at Indiana University and online on The Alchemy of Confidence, addressing the most pressing question in our still-new digital age: Why do we trust some signals—and fall for others? She explains, In a time wh … | Continue reading
A hopeful sign My News Commons site and series are getting action lately. | Continue reading
Has Atlas shrugged? The post in my archive that has had the most visits lately is this one about ChatGPT Atlas. I haven't heard Atlas talked about much lately. According to Google Trends, interest has trailed off. Meanwhile, Google Search remains a skin on Gemini, so maybe that's … | Continue reading
So help us with that Finally Fixing Health Care is a post I started here and finished on the ProjectVRM blog, where it belonged in the first place. It's about how Google and Microsoft wasted $billions not fixing a problem they could only make worse. And how healthcare needs a VRM … | Continue reading
The world runs on boats. Yes, also on trains and trucks. But boats are at issue, as the Strait of Hormuz is being blockaded. Here is how it looks at the moment (12:35 PM Eastern) on MarineTraffic.com: The red arrowhead shapes are tankers in motion. The green ones are container sh … | Continue reading
This story appeared in the April 2019 issue of Linux Journal. It’s still there, but with no photos (which seem to have vanished from much of the magazine’s archives).* I think both the story and the photos are too important (and now timely) to leave in a state of neglect, so I’m … | Continue reading
So today I went all the way with it I just realized I've been naming each day's Wordland posts (such as this one) kind of the way the military names campaigns. | Continue reading
Customer Commons has taken on the job of opening a true blue ocean: a vast, uncontested market space where customers are free and respected for what they bring to business as independent participants working at full agency. Specifically, free customers— A Free Customer Award woul … | Continue reading
Bad news OMFG, news is such a shitshow. Start with Do links hurt news publishers on Twitter? Our analysis suggests yes, by NiemanLab. Then, Social Media has Become a Freak Show, by Nate Silver. Thing is, more and more people in the U.S. now get their news (if that's what it is) f … | Continue reading
How to prevent the all-knowing and all-doing from doing wrong. Very wrong. Just one approach. Wired: Anthropic Teams Up With Its Rivals to Keep AI From Hacking Everything When you whack a hornet's nest with a baseball bat while standing naked, what are the hornets going to do? Al … | Continue reading
Even more dead now The AP is abandoning its surname. | Continue reading
None of which you asked for, and few of which you can thrwart GadgetReview: 13 Evil Tech Scandals & Failures That Took Advantage of Millions of People. Now dig a PageXray of that story. The high points: Adserver Requests: 543Tracking Requests: 447Other Requests: 132 Among other … | Continue reading
Hope it helps My old pal Dean Landsman pointed me to this post about Fake Fans, and much else, by Eliza McLamb, a musician, and much else. She's great. And she's from Chapel Hill. Go Heels! Anyway, like many musicians, Eliza has problems with how f'd up music/recording/streaming … | Continue reading
How music listeners can fill the industry’s “value gap.” This piece was my column for the November 2018 issue of Linux Journal. I’m running it again here for three reasons: 1) It’s still timely and worth resurfacing, 2) Linux Journal’s archives are now absent of images (and I’m a … | Continue reading
Where it's Sunday all week Pew Research: A quarter of all radio stations in America is "faith based." | Continue reading
I was invited by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, to contribute my thoughts to their latest study, titled Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the Age of AI: Experts Call for Radical Change Across Institutions … | Continue reading
Big fact YouTube has 2.7 billion monthly users. Here's almost looking at you Imagine scattered bits of coffee grounds, floating in space in front of your face, a few inches to a few feet away. Among them, blurred filaments float around, like zero-gravity worms. These are bits of … | Continue reading
You're welcome I don't hate April Fools Day. I'm just too busy to participate. So this is a fooling-free blog post. Much to munch on Getting great hang time with Jon Udell (who also manifests here) lately. Here are two of his recent publishings ya'll might dig:• Introducing XMLUI … | Continue reading
David Weinberger once said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people.” It’s the future now, and he was right, or close enough. Because today we live in a world where the power to publish and distribute no longer belongs just to institutions, but to everybody. Me … | Continue reading
It's not too late Come join us for this at 4 pm Eastern today. Also on the privacy front One thinks of Thomson Reuters as a source of good information on issues (Thomson) and news (Reuters). That's the brand. Alas, it's also a source of information about you and me to ICE, Palant … | Continue reading
Before the Fall Pop was a Republican in the same way he was a fisherman, a carpenter, a Brooklyn Dodgers (and later a Mets) fan, and a Ford man. As a kid, I thought of myself the same way. Republicans stood for fiscal prudence, limited government, personal freedom and responsibil … | Continue reading
I’m kinda proud of the stars we’ve been bringing to our salon series here at Indiana University since 2021. And there are none I’m more excited to welcome than Helen Nissenbaum, who will be here on Tuesday to speak both in person and on Zoom. The title of her talk is “Why Obfusca … | Continue reading
Getting a jump on Friday here. Algorhythms is going on here at Indiana University. If you're here, be there. A Reddit thread on the Canada Air flight crash at LaGuardia is frozen but interesting as it stands. It starts with a passenger who was on the plane. Music streaming is a b … | Continue reading
New frontiers for reality In case you’re wondering how MyTerms will change everything (for example, by getting you real privacy online and obsolescing cookie notice)s, the first proofs-of-concept will be coming from JLINC. Here’s the open protocol. Here’s the blog. And here’s Iai … | Continue reading
Hope he doesn't block my double-shot I took Luke Kornet's coffee test, scored high, and wrote a comment. Getting ahead of my selves I'm up in a few hours to fly from LAX to ORD to IND tomorrow. So I'm getting a few tabs out of the way here before I finish packing. Speaking of […] | Continue reading
Time for her own Wikipedia page I just ran across Aiyana Lee. She's good. More. Bonus link. Rutilance The FCC has green-lit Nexstar's purchase of Tenga. This will move much of local TV into the red, politically. Wrote about that here and here back in September. Pull-quote: Trump … | Continue reading
Bad News LA Times: CBS News shuts down radio unit amid division-wide cuts, leaving 700 stations without their CBS news feed. Axios has a mostly budgetary angle. Neither says that radio is largely dependent on "barter," which is free programming paid for on the providers' side by … | Continue reading
I’m fascinated by Hawaiian Green Sea Turtles (Chelonia mydas), which bask on the sands of Poʻipū Beach, here on the south shore of Kauaʻi. Known locally as honu, they typically range from 200 to 400 pounds, but some have weighed in north of 800 pounds. They can also live more tha … | Continue reading
But I still miss the damn thing My spleen was removed on this day in 1961. The doctors did it because they thought without a spleen my low hematocrit (~32%: anemic, technically) would go up. All they knew at the time was that the spleen's job was filtering out old red blood cells … | Continue reading
Your next Aurora From Spaceweather.com (slightly edited to explain stuff): A NASA model predicts a CME (Coronal Mass Ejection from the Sun) will arrive on March 19th, mere hours before the northern vernal equinox (~10 AM EDST) This is perfect timing because auroras love equinoxe … | Continue reading
How to enjoy bad but not worse weather Dig the webcam at Poipu beach, on the south side of Kauai, near where I'll be for a week, starting tomorrow. Also, the turtles, in calmer weather. I love me a water matrix printer This fountain in Moravian Square (Moravské náměstí), in the C … | Continue reading
No complaints. Back at the ranch for the next two days in California's most beautiful town. Man, I do love it here. Alas, I mostly live elsewhere, and I love those places too. | Continue reading
Why keep beauty when ugly will do? The iconic Hughes Memorial Tower in Washington DC will be demolished. Life in the vast lane The thunderstorms have passed by, and we're finishing packing for Santa Barbara and Hawaii. In a related matter, people often ask me why I endure the has … | Continue reading
Verily What's happening today is today. All day. Also, it's absurd that Indiana is mostly in the Eastern time zone. This time of year, the sun rises at four hours before noon and sets eight hours after noon. Apparently, yes Ted Gioia: Is Spotify Enabling Massive Impersonation of … | Continue reading
Here's not looking at you, kid Three and a half weeks after cataract surgery on my left eye, vision improvement seems to have plateaued. I'd say it's 20/80. The new lens is fine, but the corneal edema persists, so it feels like it's smeared with vaseline. My right eye, which had … | Continue reading