October 2013
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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
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What the ad biz needs is to exorcize direct marketing
In What the ad biz needs is writers, Michael Wolff bemoans the absence of good writers in advertising: …even creatives want to avoid writing — because they can’t… While technological disruption is most often blamed for the existential predicament of the media business, the more precise problem is that advertising doesn’t work as well as… Continue reading
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Today’s outline
The Net Why the NSA’s attacks on the internet must be made public. By Bruce Schneier in The Guardian. Subhead: By reporting on the agency’s actions, the vulnerabilities in our computer systems can be fixed. It’s the only way to force change. Lowering Your Standards: DRM and the Future of the W3C. By Danny O’Brien… Continue reading
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The holy grail of radio
[4:45pm EDST 2 October 2013 — Late breaking news: RadioINK reports that Darryl Parks’ blog post — the first item below — has been pulled off the 700wlw site. — Doc] In A SERIOUS Message To The Broadcast Industry About Revitalizing AM Radio, Darryl Parks of 700WLW made waves (e.g. here, here, here) by correctly… Continue reading