I just learned here that Dave Täht died today, at just 59. I don’t know how or where. I do know he was one of the world’s great human beings, as well as a brilliant and generous producer of tech and wisdom about it. Example: if you know about (and no longer have a network […] | Continue reading
Still miss him. Just found a photo of Aaron Swartz from the time I recruited him for a panel at Comdex in 2002. He was a kid, but rocked it. I suppose it's one of these. The photo at the top of this story is of the Linden Cogeneration Plant in New Jersey, which I […] | Continue reading
iLoveFood says the best pizza in Indiana is Mother Bear's here in Bloomington. Problem: it isn't. Osteria Rago's is better. Not that MB's is bad. It's good. Just not better than Osteria's. I'm also betting there must be a better pizza than both somewhere in Indianapolis. iLoveFoo … | Continue reading
And what will we call it? What becomes of democracy when it seems everybody has been herded into separate and opposed algorithmically assembled and maintained tribes, and when most of tech is run by oligarchs (for a few years while tech oligarchy stays a thing), and every status … | Continue reading
What is your DNA worth? 23andMe is filing for bankruptcy. I'm a customer, so it concerns me that they have a heap of data about my DNA. While I'd like the world to benefit from that DNA, should it be useful (and, given some of my odd genetics, e.g. this, it might be), I also […] | Continue reading
I nominate agency as Word of the Year for 2025. I don’t nominate agentic, which is suddenly hot shit: See, agency is a noun, and agentic is an adjective. And, as Strunk and White taught us, Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs… it is nouns and verbs, not th … | Continue reading
We'll know soon. Whether or not you're watching St. John's playing Arkansas, right now, in the NCAA's March Madness tournament, take out a minute and a half to take in Jimmy Fallon and the boys singing the Red Storm Shanty. Lou Carnaseca must be glowing in his grave. | Continue reading
What if it helps everyone do a better job? "I take my dog for walks outside my apartment… on the ledge. Some people are afraid of heights. I'm afraid of widths."—Steven Wright. Somehow that joke (as best I recall it) comes to mind when I consider OpenAI's Deep Research. Everybody … | Continue reading
The Voice of America is silent. To Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Kari Lake (who now runs its corpse), the VOA was corrupt, biased, unnecessary, and needed to go. To nearly everyone else who cares, it was America’s voice on radio, and mattered enormously to an audience in the hundr … | Continue reading
IIW, the Internet Identity Workshop, is the UN of identity. While located in the U.S., it has always represented and welcomed the whole world to work on global problems best addressed in person. As it happens, IIW was born exactly twenty years ago tomorrow—20 March 2005—at Esther … | Continue reading
Sounding Good Everywhere. If you like old album rock and Americana rooted in North Carolina, the best thing on radio in Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill is That Station, on 95.7 FM. Technically, the station translates (rebroadcasts) WRAL-FM/101.5's HD2 stream, and rarely mentions its t … | Continue reading
Here is what a Google News search for Voice of America looks like right now: ‘Bloody Saturday’ at Voice of America and other U.S.-funded networks, by David Folkenflik at NPR, begins with this: Journalists showed up at the Voice of America today to broadcast their programs only to … | Continue reading
What you see above is a line of storms that is moving northeastward from southern Louisiana across all of Mississippi, western Tennessee, all of Kentucky, southern Indiana (where I am), and western Ohio. It is provided by Weatherbug. If you go there and slide the Weather Overlay … | Continue reading
So there must be something to it. Watch how often people interrupt each other by saying the word "So," and then launching into whatever they think is more essential than what somebody else is saying. And watch for people giving a speech start with "So—" The first speaker I heard … | Continue reading
Right now, for those on Earth who see it when they look up, the Moon is as full as it can get without moving into the shadow of the Earth . Which it will. Shortly. Here is where Earth’s shadow is right now, as I write this, at around 10 PM Eastern Time: The outer […] | Continue reading
Hockey vs. Football. Suddenly this looks more likely. | Continue reading
I need to learn French. This is lovely. Who is this girl? Here's one clue. Another. Look for more. Never heard of her before today. Hello, I still love you. The Doors are 60 this year. Or would have been. Good and legendary as they were, I think they are woefully underrated. Manz … | Continue reading
What follows is a conversation I’m having with ChatGPT about personal AI. I guarantee it’s unlike any conversation about AI you’ll find anywhere else. It’s copied and pasted. I may be adding to it, though its probably long enough. Enjoy! You said: I am thinking about what persona … | Continue reading
Just learned about this, here. Thank you, Andy Sylvester! | Continue reading
My most-visited blog post of the last couple of weeks is Radio's Death Knells. I have a feeling those visits are more from people in the business than from people who listen to radio. Sad but interesting to see how many listings on my old blogroll (frozen in Augst 2007) are from … | Continue reading
The final round of the 10th Indiana International Guitar Competition just happened, here, as well as in the natural world. We saw it in the latter. Amazing performances. Bloomington is a fabulous small city anyway, but the Jacobs School of Music—and the whole music scene here—put … | Continue reading
For eight years I blogged here in a style that was basically tweeting with titles. Now I'm doing it again here, with Wordland. David Weinberger explains why it's awesome. | Continue reading
The big and scary news about the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, is that she died first, and suddenly, of hantavirus, which kills up to half the people it infects. It's bad shit—specifically, from rodents. Hackman, who had advanced Alzheimer's, died later of h … | Continue reading
Great speech by David Brooks at a recent ARC conference in London. I read here that he was booed and heckled, but in the video one only sees smiles, warmth, and occasional laughs (e.g. to "At Chicago I had a double major in history and celibacy"). It's a short, deep, and caring t … | Continue reading
Even in a small city such as Bloomington, one can make fun discoveries all the time. Yesterday, for example, I discovered Redbud Books, which had a table set up to sell books from Cory Doctorow's increasingly vast oeuvre while the man himself spoke to a packed classroom in the Me … | Continue reading
This informative video by @lainaminute (L.A. in a Minute) on Instagram expands on something I anticipated when I shot this photo album of the KSPN/710 transmitter site in Burbank, almost four years ago: that the land under the transmitter—19 acres of fenced-in grass surrounded by … | Continue reading
Writing with Wordland is like Tweeting, but on my personal press (this blog) instead of Elon's. Or any other giant's. As a difference in kind, it's absolute. | Continue reading
The radio station known since 1935 as KSFO/560 was for most of its life a landmark on the Bay Area radio dial. Others were KGO/810, KCBS/740, KFRC/610, and KNBR/680. KFRC went away in 2005, as religious programming moved to AM from 106.9, and KCBS added that channel as the FM ser … | Continue reading
Naming today's tab dump after one of The Mamas and The Papas best songs. Here is a lipsync'd video on YouTube. Dig the old-skool stereo. Where I explained customer-to-company AI agent-to-AI agent interaction (you know, markets as conversations) in May of last year. | Continue reading
If I share the link to one of my open tabs and close it, the reader gets a new tab when they click on the link, no? So, in that case I'm giving away tabs, seems to me on a Sunday afternoon. I don't have Hulu, and I don't have cable, but I do have […] | Continue reading
27th in the News Commons series Nearly everything I’ve been writing in the News Commons series has come out of breakfasts Joyce and I have enjoyed with Dave Askins at the Uptown Cafe in Bloomington, Indiana. (A tech perspective: The Uptown is to Bloomington what Bucks of Woodside … | Continue reading
Testing Wordland, about which Dave says more here. The predecessor fo this blog, which started in 2007, is this one, which (courtesy of Dave) started in the last year of the prior millennium. I had hair then. And wore glasses. Is this true? I want more sources. Irony of wanting m … | Continue reading
On the left is Tom Evslin, former CTO for Vermont, among many other distinctions. On the right is the golden dome atop Vermont’s capitol building. Underneath that dome, and in countless spaces in government bodies everywhere are meetings recorded in video. Reviewing or reporting … | Continue reading
I’ve never had writer’s block. Give me a writing assignment and I’ll blab something out. It might even be good, or at least good enough. But I don’t write in final draft. Or talk that way. I know people who can do either or both. But I don’t know how they do it, much as […] | Continue reading
This morning Wired published This Ad-Tech Company Is Powering Surveillance of US Military Personnel. It’s a good piece, which is typical of Wired lately. But what caught my eye was “Ad-Tech” in the headline. Some writers say “ad tech.” Others say “adtech” or “AdTech.” I’m highly … | Continue reading
Every so often a product shows up that is so bad somebody needs to sound a warning. So I’m sounding one for the Ion Retro Glow. For the last month or so, it’s been on display and selling at the Sams Club here in Bloomington, Indiana. That’s where I shot the photo above. At first … | Continue reading
Somebody just gave the 31st upvote to my answer to the Quora question “What do you regret as you get older?” So I thought it might be worth repeating. Here’s a short list: Not learning at least one other language. Not learning a musical instrument (or to sing) well enough to play … | Continue reading
Twenty-fifth in the News Commons series Southern California has two seasons: Fire and Rain. Rain didn’t begin this year until a few days after Fire ended apocalyptically, incinerating much of Altadena and Pacific Palisades. Now Rain is here, with the occasional atmospheric river … | Continue reading
United Airlines details 6 big inflight entertainment updates, including all-new Control Tower map, by Zach Griff in The Points Guy, is thick with welcome news for frequent United fliers, of which my wife and I are two. (So far I have clocked 1,533,214 miles with United, and she h … | Continue reading
When Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina, the Swannanoa River rose three storys above its shores, all but erasing the town named after the river, and leaving hundreds homeless. But the challenge for Swannanoa was not just recovery. It was regeneration. For that, Swannanoa … | Continue reading
Twenty-fourth in the News Commons series. 3:45pm—Watching the Los Angeles TV stations (each with a tab in my browser) cover the Hughes Fire. I have them arranged by channel number, going up, left to right, top to bottom. (Note that NBC’s 4 and Telemundo 52 are in tandem. (The rep … | Continue reading
Twenty-third in the News Commons series Disaster coverage tends to go through four stages: Live reporting. TV stations stop all advertising and go into round-the-clock coverage. Radio stations drop the feeds from elsewhere and go wall-to-wall with live reports. Newspapers drop th … | Continue reading
Nineteenth in the News Commons series. Facts don’t matter, or they matter much less than people think—Daniel Kahnemann Facts don’t matter. What matters is how much we hate the person talking—Scott Adams But facts do matter when life and death are on the line. Or when one is recov … | Continue reading
Eighteenth in the New Commons series. Several generations ago, my pal Jerry and I were cutting a hole between the ceiling joists of a rented house in Durham, North Carolina. This was our first step toward installing a drop-down stairway to an attic space that had been closed sinc … | Continue reading
3:22pm—Hats off to Miles Archer for the links below, one of which goes here— —showing all the aircraft and their paths at once. You can start here at https://globe.adsbexchange.com/, which is kind of your slate that’s blank except for live aircraft over the Palisades Fire: Meanwh … | Continue reading
10:15pm—Here is a Google Earth Pro view of the Palisades fire crossing the wilderness north of Pacific Palisades and south of “Dry Mulholland”—the dirt road that serves as a firebreak along the ridge of the mountains south of the San Fernando Valley: The large squares are MODIS s … | Continue reading
Seventeenth in the News Commons series. That collection of tabs is my dashboard of major media that inform my writing about the #LAfires. There are tabs for five TV stations, one radio station, and one newspaper: KNBC/4 “4 Los Angeles” KTLA/5 “LA’s Very Own” KABC/7 “7 Eyewitness … | Continue reading