Quote
-
The Long View
This blog has been looking like my personal obituary section, and I suppose it is. While I promise to change that, for this post I’ll stick with the theme, and surface some correspondence with an old friend who recommended that I read The Five People You’ll Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom. In the correspondence… Continue reading
-
What’s wrong with bots is they’re not ours
In Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened?, Justin Lee (@justinleejw) nicely unpacks how chatbots were overhyped to begin with and continue to fail their Turing tests, especially since humans in nearly all cases would rather talk to humans than to mechanical substitutes. There’s also a bigger and more fundamental reason why bots still aren’t… Continue reading
-
An Archimedian Approach to Personal Power in the Land of Giants
On a mailing list that obsesses about All Things Networking, another member cited what he called “the Doc Searls approach” to something. Since it was a little off (though kind and well-intended), I responded with this (lightly edited): The Doc Searls approach is to put as much agency as possible in the hands of individuals… Continue reading
-
Close to home
Fort Lee has been in the news lately. Seems traffic access to the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee was sphinctered for political purposes, at the spot marked “B” on this map here: (This was later the place where “bridgegate” took place.) The spot marked “A” is the site of my first home: 2063 Hoyt… Continue reading
-
Daily Outline
Cool Britt Blaser’s flying stories. The dude is a terrific writer who has lived to tell, and tell well. He should do that more often. Speaking of which, I interviewed him for this podcast. How 24 Tiny Satellites Could Change Business Forever. By Nate Hindman and Joe Epstein. Subhead: “Skybox doesn’t want to see pictures of Earth from… Continue reading
-
How advertising can regulate itself
When you see an ad for Budweiser on TV, you know who paid for it and why it’s there. You also know it isn’t personal, because it’s brand advertising. But when you see an ad on a website, do you know what it’s doing there? Do you know if its there just for you, or… Continue reading
-
Why we have Silicon Valley
My son remembers what I say better than I do. One example is this: I uttered it in some context while wheezing my way up a slope somewhere in the Great Blue Hill Reservation. Except it wasn’t there. Also I didn’t say that. Exactly. Or alone. He tells me it came up while we were… Continue reading
-
The journey was the reward
I was in the midst of late edits on The Intention Economy this afternoon, wondering if I should refer to Steve Jobs in the past tense. I didn’t want to, but I knew he’d be gone by the time the book comes out next April, if he wasn’t gone already. So I decided to make the changes,… Continue reading
-
Dorothy Parker quote question
So I’d like to find authoritative sources for two Dorothy Parker quotes. Here’s the first: “I prefer the company of younger men. Their stories are shorter.” No idea where I got that one. It’s too right not to be real, but I can’t a source yet. (That’s a job I’m giving ya’ll.) The second quote… Continue reading
-
World wide puddle
Nicholas Carr is ahead of his time again. The Big Switch nailed computing as a utility, long before “the cloud” came to mean pretty much the same thing. His latest book, The Shallows, explored the changes in our lives and minds caused by moving too much of both online — again before others began noticing how… Continue reading
-
Learnings from the Browser Wars
The question on Quora goes, What lessons can be learned from the first browser war between Microsoft and Netscape? I covered that war when it broke out, more than fifteen years ago. No magazine was interested in my writing then. Blogging was several years off in the future. All we had were websites, and that… Continue reading
-
Geography forever
When I was walking to school in the second grade, I found myself behind a group of older kids, arguing about what subjects they hated most. The consensus was geography. At the time I didn’t know what geography was, but I became determined to find out. When I did, two things happened. First, I realized… Continue reading
-
Solved Science Theater 2010
This morning, while freezing my way down 8th Avenue to Piccolo on 40th to pick up a couple of cappuccinos, I paused outside the New York Times building to admire its stark modern lobby as KNX radio delivered the latest storm news from Los Angeles through my phone’s earbuds. In the midst of reports of… Continue reading
-
Public radio still rocks
Lately, thanks to the inexcusably inept firing of Juan Williams by NPR brass, and the acceptance of a $1.8 million grant from George Soros, NPR has tarred its credentials as a genuinely fair and balanced news organization. Which it mostly still is, by the way, no matter how much the right tries to trash it.… Continue reading
-
IQ and Caste
Smart people SLEEP LATE yells the headline of this opinion piece in the Winnipeg Free Press. It begins, Sleep is a fundamental component of animal biology. New evidence confirms that, in humans, its timing reflects intelligence. People with higher IQs (intelligence quotients) tend to be more active nocturnally, going to bed later, whereas those with… Continue reading
-
Montana in terms of North Dakota
Back in the 1920s my grandparents, Erick and Caroline Oman, took their four kids on the family’s one and only trip west from their home in Napoleon, North Dakota, which is about as far out in the prairrie as you can get. When the Rockies came in sight, Grandpa turned to Grandma and said, “See,… Continue reading
-
Sighs of the times
Several pieces worth noting. From back in February, The Smarter You Are, the Less You Click, in ReadWriteWeb. It begins, If the latest numbers from online ad network Chitika are anything to go by, then we may well be on our way to the world of Idiocracy. According to the study, which compared click through rates to… Continue reading
-
Where did “Chinese Wall” come from?
The meaning of the term “Chinese wall” is clear. It’s a virtual partition meant to keep potentially conflicted interests apart: a private partition meant to keep interests apart, even if what’s happening on both sides is obvious to the other. What’s not clear, at least to me, is where the term came from. Wikipedia’s Chinese wall… Continue reading
-
Talking social way too soon
Just ran across my first regular column for Linux Journal. It was published in in June, 1999, and written three months earlier, about when The Cluetrain Manifesto went up. Here’s a passage that stands out: We’re still less than halfway through the shift from personal to social computing. Most households do not have PCs, and… Continue reading
-
Beyond caveat emptor
First, three posts by JP Rangaswami: Does the Web make experts dumb? Does the Web make esperts dumb, Part 2: who is the teacher? Does the Web make experts dumb, Part 3: the issues His bottom line in the last of those: “… people are saying the web dumbs us down. This is wrong. The… Continue reading