2013
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A toast to strong women
Grandma Searls‘ footstone says “1882 – ” and is hardly and overstatement. She died pushing 108 in 1990, and was lucid, loving and strong in all the ways that matter. She was one of four sisters in her family. That’s them, with their dad, on the left. Grandma is the one on the bottom right.… Continue reading
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News with a Fuse
Culture Bubkes.org: Waterside Commerce, Istanbul: Cotton Candy Vendor At Day’s End and Waterside Commerce, Istanbul: Flower Vendor with Coat to Match. (Which get my votes for a perfect posts.) Prose in prison. By Andrew Sullivan. Source: Letters from Incarcerated Writers, by Andrea Jones in The American Reader. Perspectives Life on the Forked Road. By yours… Continue reading
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Wanted: Just-the-Facts Maps
In Google sets out future for Maps — Lays down gauntlet to Nokia with plans for personalized, context-aware and ’emotional’ maps in future, in Rethink Wireless, Caroline Gabriel begins this way: Google may be feeling the heat from an unlikely source, Nokia, at least in its critical Maps business. The search giant has put location awareness… Continue reading
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Is it too late to save the Net from the carriers?
In Big Cable’s Sauron-Like Plan for One Infrastructure to Rule Us All, Susan Crawford (@SCrawford) paints a bleak picture of what awaits us after television (aka cable) finishes eating the Internet. But that’s just in our homes. Out in the mobile sphere, telcos have been eating the Net as well — in collusion with cable.… Continue reading
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News to Use
Privacy vs. Surveillance On the privacy side: Surf safely with Web Pal. From Emmett Global and Customer Commons. Surveillance and Internet Identity. Francisco Correla in Pomcor. How to erase yourself from the Internet. By Andrew Tarantola in Gizmodo. Naked Capitalism: NSA Whistleblower: Government Failed to Stop Boston Bombing Because It Was Overwhelmed with Data from Mass Surveillance… Continue reading
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Shooting sundown showdown
I shot the sunset above a couple days ago in New Hampshire. Here’s another from the same set: And another: And another: And another: And another: Which are best? Are any really good? Or all of them? Or none? Some are obviously enhanced with digital tools: adjusted in brightness, contrast, exposure, color balance, vibrance, detail,… Continue reading
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Wheat vs. Chaff
John Havens has an excellent piece in Mashable titled “It’s Your Data — But Others Are Making Billions Off It.” In a Web overflowing with chaff, it’s a fine grain of wheat. But it’s also camouflaged by chaff posing as wheat. I can tell, because I was interviewed for the piece, which links back to… Continue reading
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Loving the Alps of Los Angeles
I orient by landmarks. When I was growing up in New Jersey, the skyline of New York raked the eastern sky. To the west were the Watchung “Mountains“: hills roughly half the height of Manhattan’s ranking skyscrapers. But they gave me practice for my favorite indulgence here in Los Angeles: multi-angulating my ass in respect to… Continue reading
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Come to VRM and Personal Cloud Day
Today is VRM and Personal Cloud Day at the Computer History Museum. Register at that first link. Or just show up. It’s free. (Registering gives us a better idea of head count.) It’s the time and place to brainstorm about both topics, plus what we’ll be discussing and moving forward the following three days at IIW, also… Continue reading
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Let’s destroy the panopticons
Here is what Chris Locke wrote about panopticons in Chapter One of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Read closely: The New Marketplace: Word Gets Around In the late eighteenth century, the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham imagined a little nightmare he called a “panopticon” — a prison in which the inmates could be seen at all times, but couldn’t… Continue reading
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Re-birthing Radio
Radio’s 1.x era is coming to an end. Signs and portents abound. The rise and decline of AM radio just ran in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, hometown paper for KDKA, the granddaddy of AM radio in the U.S. In AM/FM Radio Is Already Over, And No One Will Miss It, Adam Singer writes, Radio advertisements are… Continue reading
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Plug your car into the rest of your life
Your late-model car knows a lot more than its dashboard tells you. It knows how fast you’ve been going on every trip, your fuel mileage, your tire pressures and much more. It even knows what your engine light really means — before it comes on. In fact your car has hundreds of sensors with interesting… Continue reading
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The only way publishing can escape the forest of silos
The Forrest of Silos problem I describe in the last post is exactly what Josh Marshall of TPM is dealing with when he says (correctly) “there’s no single digital news publishing model” — and what Dave Winer also correctly talks about here.) Every publisher requiring a login/password, or using ‘social logins’ such as those provided by Facebook and Twitter, is living in an administrative… Continue reading
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Hart Island: a movie we need, about zombies as heroes
As Halloween approaches (and death itself, for all of us, eventually), I find myself thinking, Do zombies always have to be bad? And, What if zombies were good? And, Hey, maybe good zombies are what we call ‘angels’. Then I find myself wondering where one would recruit armies of zombie angels (let’s call them “zangels”), besides your basic… Continue reading
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IIW Challenge #1: Sovereign Identity in the Great Silo Forest
Who are you? What are you? If the answers come from you, they speak of your sovereign identity: that which is yours and you control. If the answers come from your employer, your doctor, the Department of Motor Vehicles, Apple, Facebook, Google or Twitter, they speak of your administrative identity: that which is theirs and… Continue reading
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So some day they don’t have to
Customer Commons‘ invites you to a screening of Terms and Conditions May Apply, @CullenHoback‘s award-winning documentary on the state of personal privacy online. NOTE: The venue is now at Stanford University, in conjunction with the United Nations Association Film Festival, and will be followed by a panel discussion on the “Future of Online Privacy.” Cullen will be there… Continue reading
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And one click to close the tab
— when I see this kind of stuff pop over what I came to read: Continue reading
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Plantings in pictures
It’s interesting to see where photos end up (or start out, or re-start out) when one puts them in position to be used and re-used with minimized friction. The one above, of a coal-fired power plant in Utah that supplies electricity to Los Angeles, and which I shot from a flight overhead in January 2009,… Continue reading
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Almost Daily Outline
Journalism The rise of the reader: journalism in the age of the open web is a long and excellent lecture by Katharine Viner, deputy editor of the Guardian and editor-in-chief of Guardian Australia. Sample: So being open has many advantages for journalists. But to do it, you need to be part of the web’s ecosystem, not… Continue reading