May 2009
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WSJ vs. Subscribers
I’ve been a Wall Street Journal subscriber since the 1970s. I still am. The paper shows up at my doorstep every day. I’ve also been a subscriber to the Journal online. It costs extra. I’ve gladly paid it, even though I think the paper makes a mistake by locking its archives behind a paywall. (Sell… Continue reading
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The best thing on radio, right now
— is All A Capella, on WERS/88.9 in Boston. Listen here. Or on the Public Radio Tuner. Or on WERS own iPhone app. Or iTunes (it’s in the list called “Public”). They just started tweeting too: @allacappella889. The performances are just freaking astonishing. You’d think they were playing instruments. And harmonies tight enough to make… Continue reading
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We all have our crosses to climb
Yesterday I reported hearing that the New York Times was thinking about putting its editorial behind a paywall again. Today James Warren gives substance to the rumors: Here’s a story the newspaper industry’s upper echelon apparently kept from its anxious newsrooms: A discreet Thursday meeting in Chicago about their future. “Models to Monetize Content” is… Continue reading
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We’re gonna need a bigger boat
WebTV was way ahead of its time and exactly backwards. The idea was to put the Web on TV. In the prevailing media framework of the time, this made complete sense. TV had been around since the Forties, and nearly everybody devoted many hours of their daily lives to it. The Web was brand new… Continue reading
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Badger spotting from altitude
On the same flight that started with The Cities in darkness and ended with Chicago at sunrise, my flight glided over Madison, Wisconsin, which I shot in the dawn’s early light. The shot above leads to the whole series. I need to go back and correct the botched tags on many of them. Meanwhile, locals… Continue reading
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Journalism and Net Nativity
I don’t go to TV for Journalism any more, even though I’m sure there’s plenty left: needles scattered thorugh a haystack of channels and program schedules that have become so hard to navigate on satellite and cable systems that it’s just not worth the bother. So, while I wait calmly for TV to die (and… Continue reading
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City and Lake at Dawn
Just posted this series of shots taken while flying into Chicago at dawn in early April Continue reading
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The Death and Rebirth of Responsibility
As a kid I screwed up in many ways, but none of those ways excluded a central lesson good parents start teaching as soon as kids are capable of conversation: responsibility. The word always sounds reproachful and corrective to a kid, but it matters. It says you can be depended upon to do what is… Continue reading
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One among any
On the ProjectVRM blog: A Declaration of Customer Independence. Continue reading
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Kind of like nuclear power
TwitSeeker lets you search for a subject on Twitter, find who tweets on that subject, and then selectively or gang-follow everybody you find. Look at the stats — especially the search tem collection at the bottom. Or search for a subject to see what comes up. What you’ll see is a picture that equally interesting… Continue reading
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See ya on the Coast
Heading to the first VRM West Coast Workshop. Runs the next two days in Palo Alto. Should be fun. Free too. If you’re up for putting your shoulder to some of the wheels we’ve got rolling, come on down. Instructions for signing up are there at that link. Getting into the plane. (Man, the connectivity… Continue reading
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Is tweeting still silo’d?
It’s good that Twitter is learning a lot from its experience in the last day. It’s not good that tweeting, which most of us treat as something inherently public and non-proprietary, such as blogging and emailing, seems to be privately controlled, with one company in the sole responsible position. Sez Biz at that last link,… Continue reading
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Pano Rama Mania
We are severely into Pano. It’s an amazing free (woops, $2.99) app for the iPhone that lets you take panoramic shots — first by helping you line up one shot after another, and second by stitching them together remarkably well. The above is the first of two shot at Harvard’s Old Yard. I made small… Continue reading
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From a holler up in Silicon Valley
Jan Lewis gave me my first solo work in Silicon Valley: writing stuff for her monthly newsletter. This was in the fall of 1985. Jan was an industry analyst at the time, with a solo practice. I met her at Comdex, where she was offering free foot massages to weary conventioneers in a suite on… Continue reading
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Public gooding with private leverage
Jonathan Zittrain: “I don’t think .gov and .com never work. We too easily underestimate the possibilities of .org — the roles we can play as netizens rather than merely as voters or consumers.” Yesss. Putting a “vs.” between government and business tends to narrow conversation to arguments that miss important points. Such as what .orgs… Continue reading
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But where?
@Jesusitafire, of the Los Padres National Forest, is tweeting. So far following ø, followed by 12. Hey, it’s a start. Continue reading