Doc Searls Weblog

Markets

• Why shouting about discounts won’t satisfy your customers, by Natalie Brandweiner in MyCustomer
• From Disney to dishwashers: Digital CRM to change customer experience, by Ashley Smith in SearchCRM.
• Venture Capital Funding At Its Lowest Since 2010 — A By The Numbers Look. By Meghan Casserly in Forbes.
• ArkOS: Your data, your rules. It explains, Securely self-hosting your websites, email, files and more has never been easier (or cheaper!). Decentralize your web and reclaim your privacy rights while keeping the conveniences you need.
• Thom Yorke, Nigel Godrich pull music from Spotify. By Gerrick D. Kennedy in The L.A. Times. “Make no mistake new artists you discover on #Spotify will no get paid,” Yorke tweeted. “Meanwhile shareholders will shortly being rolling in it. Simples.”
• Digital Commerce: Leading Apps and Strategies for Retailers, Online Players and Telcos in the $10Bn Loyalty Market, by Telco 2.0 Research.
• Terms and Conditions May Apply. A documentary featuring many people I know (spotted John Palfrey, Zeynep Tufekci, S.J. Klein, Eli Pariser). The filmmaker, Cullen Hoback, will follow up with a movie about tracking.
• Do Things That Don’t Scale. By Paul Graham.
• A hunk of my keynote to an IAB gathering the other day in New York.

Communications, the Net

• OECD’s Internet economics papers. Rich trove. Bonus link.
• State of the Net 2013 in Trieste
  • Dave Snowden on complexity
  • James Kretchmar on Akamai’s numbers
  • Gigi Tagliapietra on Bach
  • Luca de Biasi on lon term thinking
  • Carlo Petrini padre di slow food (in Italian)
  • Me (plus an interview) on personal clouds

Journalism, publishing

• 5 Ways to Fix Book Publishing. By Anis Shavani in The Daily Beast.

World going to hell

• Tom Engelhardt: Can Edward Snowden Be Deterred? In FiredogLake.
• A huge coalition of tech companies unites to petition the US government for more NSA transparency. By Ken Yeung in The Next Web.
• Wide range of industries plead for Congressional action on patent trolls. By Joe Mullin in ArsTechnica. Six bills are in play, and US businesses are united in wanting something to pass, the subhead says.
• NASA: Globally, June Was Second Warmest On Record. By Joe Romm in ThinkProgress.
• NSA-Affäre: Ex-Präsident Carter verdammt US-Schnüffelei. By Gregor Peter Schmitz in Der Spiegel. Pull-quote from Jimmy, via Google Chrome’s robo-translation: “America has no functioning democracy.”

Etc.

• Mammabisquit, whom we met in a local hardware store a few days ago.
• Tropes.
• Gas being drawn into the Milky Way’s black hole at 10 million km/hour. By John Timmer in ArsTechnica. Gas cloud now loops around the supermassive black hole, the subhead says. Images show it happening, live.
• Idiocy makes for some pretty amazing fireworks photos. In Wired.