Berkman
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All home now
From 2007 until about a month ago, I wrote on three blogs that lived at blogs.harvard.edu. There was my personal blog (this one here, which I started after retiring my original blog), ProjectVRM‘s blog (also its home page), and Trunkline, a blog about infrastructure that was started by Christian Sandvig when he and I were… Continue reading
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Moving on
I started this blog in August 2007 after the host for my original blog went away. (That blog has been preserved, however. Find it at http://weblog.searls.com.) At the time I was told something like “Hey, Harvard has been around since 1636, so your blog will last a long time here.” Well, the duration will be… Continue reading
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Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing
Let’s start with Facebook’s Surveillance Machine, by Zeynep Tufekci in last Monday’s New York Times. Among other things (all correct), Zeynep explains that “Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.” Irony… Continue reading
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Help: why don’t images load in https?
For some reason, many or most of the images in this blog don’t load in some browsers. Same goes for the ProjectVRM blog as well. This is new, and I don’t know exactly why it’s happening. So far, I gather it happens only when the URL is https and not http. Okay, here’s an experiment. I’ll… Continue reading
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Toward an ethics of influence
This event is now in the past and can be seen in its entirety here. Stop now and go to TimeWellSpent.io, where @TristanHarris, the guy on the left above, has produced and gathered much wisdom about a subject most of us think little about and all of us cannot value more: our time. Both of us… Continue reading
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Remembering Big Davy
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. — Mahatma Gandhi I’m not sure if Gandhi actually said that. Somebody did. My best human chance of finding who said it — or at least of gaining a learned enlargement on the lesson — would have been David… Continue reading
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What’s the best way customer love can help a brand?
In “Cool Influencers With Big Followings Get Picky About Their Endorsements,” Sydney Ember of the NY Times writes, The more brands that use influencers for marketing campaigns on social platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, the less impact each influencer has. At the same time, many influencers, who once jumped at the opportunity to endorse… Continue reading
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What am I doing here?
I was born sixty-eight years ago today, in Jersey City‘s Christ Hospital, at around eleven in the morning. I would have been born earlier, but the hospital staff tied Mom’s legs together so I wouldn’t come out before the doctor showed up. You know Poe’s story, The Premature Burial? Mine was like that, only going the other… Continue reading
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Thinking outside the pipes
For several years now I’ve been participating with Pew Internet in research on the Internet and its future — mostly by providing my thinking on various matters. The latest round is the Future of the Internet Survey VI, for which I answered many questions. The latest of those to make print is in The Gurus… Continue reading
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Terror as a second or third order effect of personal communication surveillance by governments
Several years ago, during a session at Harvard Law School led by a small group of Google executives, I asked one of those executives about his company’s strategy behind starting services in categories where there was no obvious direct business benefit. The answer that came back fascinated me. It was, “We look for second and… Continue reading
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How the Web is being body-snatched
Yesterday, when Anil Dash (@AnilDash) spoke about The Web We Lost at Harvard, I took notes in my little outliner, in a browser. They follow. The top outline level is slide titles, or main points. The next level down are points made under the top level. Some of the outline is what Anil said, and some of… Continue reading
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After Facebook fails
Making the rounds is The Facebook Fallacy, a killer essay by Michael Wolff in MIT Technology Review. The gist: At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium… Continue reading
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At last
Amazon is now shipping my new book, The Intention Economy. Yes, the Kindle version too. They even have the first chapter available for free. You can “look inside” as well. Thanks to Amazon’s search, you can even find stuff that’s not in the index, such as the acknowledgements. Those include a lot of people, including… Continue reading
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What could be more social than a real marketplace?
When we say “social” these days, we mostly mean the sites and services of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and other commercial entities. Not talking on the phone or in person. Not meeting at a café. Not blogging, or emailing or even texting. Those things are all retro and passé. Worse, they’re not what marketers get… Continue reading
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Bookmarking the past
I’ve been digging around for stuff I blogged (or wrote somewhere on the Web) way back when. After finding two items I thought might be lost, I decided to point to them here, which (if search engines still work the Old Way) might make them somewhat easier to find again later. One is Rebuilding the software… Continue reading
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Curing the commercial Web blues
Last week we spent a lot of time here, in Venice: The triangular marble plaza on the edge of the Grand Canal of Venice is known informally as Bancogiro, once one of Italy’s landmark banks, and now the name of an osteria there. The plaza is part of Rialto Mercado, the marketplace where Marco Polo… Continue reading
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Why not link to sources?
A few minutes ago I saw Stephen Hawking trending on Twitter, clicked on the link, and found myself on the Twitter Search page, where the two top tweets from news organizations were these: HuffPo’s link goes to a brief story with no links to any sources. I see there’s a tiny AP symbol next to the… Continue reading
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IIW: Investors Invitational Workshop
We’re doing something different at next week’s IIW: inviting investors. So here’s a pitch that should resonate with investors — especially in Silicon Valley, where IIW happens (appropriately, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View)… Here’s a chance to check in on development work on a huge new disruptive market play: empowering customers as… Continue reading