Doc Searls Weblog

Just trying to make stuff happen

  • From Losing the Web to Saving Us All

    As Q&A with AI chatbots replaces search, the Web is starting to look run-down, and in some ways is being abandoned. If that continues, what happens to the Web’s architects, authors, and institutions? What we do to save the Web—and them? Read on for an answer.

    Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy
    —Thesis #7, The Cluetrain Manifesto

    Big AI subverts everything, including hyperlinks, which are what make the Web a web.

    With Big AI, you no longer surf from searches to sources across an ocean of links. You ask questions and get answers from the world’s largest Magic 8-Balls. They top the new hierarchy, which subverts and subordinates the Web.

    Go to any of the Big AI chatbots—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Meta, whatever—and ask a question. If it pauses for a moment, there’s a good chance it’ll say “Searching the Web.”

    But it’s not. It’s composing an answer synthesized from what it has harvested from the Web, plus a vast amount of other forms of ingested human expression. It may or may not point back to sources on the Web. And if it does, it’s only providing footnotes.

    Pew reports that people reading AI summaries of Google searches click on links only about 8% of the time. When search results come without an AI summary, that number is 15%. But both numbers are down from 100%, back when links were all that search engines produced. As a result of that change, publishers report losses of 20-90% in traffic and revenue in the past year alone. Many small publishers are now gone.

    And what about the services and institutions that kept the Web both ours and durable (such as those with logos in the windows of the abandoned house image above)? Keep that question in mind while I ask Google’s new AI Mode to compare itself, side-by-side, to Google Search:

    The stuff in the Google Search column is being steadily deprecated by what’s happening in the Google AI Mode column. Gemini explained that to me in January, when I interviewed it for Where Are We? That post begins,

    While the Web isn’t a place, we know it as one. The language we use to describe it is concrete and structural: domains at locations, with sites that are built and have pages that are authored, and contents that are uploaded and downloaded.

    For a generation or more, we have searched through the Web’s vast and structured library using Google, whose original mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” When we searched Google, we relied on its PageRank system to bring us lists of pages ranked by the number and quality of inbound link sources, and how likely a given site was to contain keywords, text strings, and other search terms.

    That’s now gone. Old pages are missing from many searches. AI guesswork is replacing formerly normal search results. The look of Web structure in search results is just emulation.

    This change matters a lot to me. I’ve been writing and publishing on the Web for thirty-one years, and almost all my work is still out there on solid static sites. And now Google fails to find many of those pages, despite having been on the Web for decades and having lots of inbound links. My friend Dave Askins tells me the same malady afflicts much of his own archival work: it’s present on the Web, but absent from Google searches. Why?

    I asked Google’s Gemini that question. Here’s what it said:

    The “disappearing” of the old web is a result of a massive shift in Google’s priorities over the last few years.

    While you might be looking for a specific historical document or an old forum thread, Google’s systems are now aggressively tuned to filter out what they consider “stale” or “unhelpful” content…

    In the race to be a ‘helpful assistant,’ Google has stopped being a ‘universal library.

    PageRank is still there, it tells me, but subordinated. To what?

    Of course: advertising.

    Taking my clues from Keyords are dead, by Shalom Gonzalez in Search Engine Land, I asked Gemini to tell me “how searches by the helpful assistant might constantly be looking for what the person might eventually want to buy, so they can be advertised at when the right time comes.”

    Gemini replied,

    This is the “secret sauce” of the 2026 search model. If the old search engine was a librarian, the new one is a personal shopper who is taking notes on everything you do to predict your next “need state. The transition you’re sensing is the move from Reactive Search (answering what you asked) to Predictive Search (answering what you’re going to ask).”

    This fucks the Web.

    And you too. You are no longer the reader, the researcher. Google thinks what you want from the Web’s library no longer matters. Nor does the library itself. Google search is now guesswork based on what its AI thinks really matters, plus what it thinks you might want to buy. These assumptions are based on what Eli Pariser, in The Filter Bubble, calls “a bad theory of you.” Only worse, because it’s now also a bad theory of the Web. Here’s Gemini again:

    While you might be looking for a specific historical document or an old forum thread, Google’s systems are now aggressively tuned to filter out what they consider “stale” or “unhelpful” content. Here is why those old archives are vanishing from your search results

    OMFG.

    Sixty-five years ago, The Twilight Zone aired an episode about what’s happening here. It was called “To Serve Man” and ended this way:

    Everybody in the surveillance-fed advertising fecosystem already regards personal privacy as a bug, not a feature. With Big AI, the plan is to modernize that fecosystem by moving human cattle onto corporate ranches, where they can be observed more closely than ever, and advertised at with far more accuracy. This, the thinking goes, should multiply the size of the $1 trillion advertising business.

    Here is how Meta tempts me to move onto its private AI ranch. Unlike my friends there, I’m not going. (Though I am on Facebook, for other—yes, morally compromised—reasons. That’s where this ad showed up, when I had just closed a creepy Meta-generated AI “reel.”)

    Screenshot

    For a look at how the new AI-expanded fecosystem works, see—

    Laurie’s main source is Tracking Conversations: Measuring Content and Identity Exposure on AI Chatbots, a report by four researchers at UC Davis. Among much else, they say,

    We find that 17 of 20 chatbots share information with at least one third party. Three chatbots share plaintext conversation text, including both prompt and response snippets, with Microsoft Clarity through session replay. Fifteen chatbots share conversation URLs or chat identifiers with third-party advertising, analytics, or social endpoints. Several chatbots expose user identity through support widgets, analytics, advertising, and session replay tags; in some cases, hashed emails are shared.

    Here is how those data flows look:

    Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.27438

    This is exactly how things already work for most websites (run a PageXray on any site or page to see a visualization of personal data flows that looks much like the one above). The difference is that websites at least throw a cookie notice in your path, either to force consent to being tracked or to prompt you to click on “choices” that might stop some tracking. (Which, mostly, they don’t. You get tracked anyway.) With Big AI, all this tracking is already permitted by oxymoronic “privacy” policies you’ve don’t read.

    We can only fight this by building an intention economy that’s bigger than the attention one, and to make personal privacy a feature rather than a bug. In 2012, Harvard Business Review Press published a book about making that economy happen, called The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge.

    It said there are two ways. One is by replacing empty corporate promises with privacy contracts that people proffer, and sites and services agree to. The other is by building on genuine trust with scalable ways for customers and companies to do business and communicate with each other. Many more of those ways can be imagined when customers have full agency rather than what little they get as human cattle on corporate ranches.

    We now have a standard on which an intention economy can be based: IEEE 7012-2025, nicknamed MyTerms.

    We also have a way for customers and companies to start working together toward making the intention economy happen, based on MyTerms. It’s the IEEE’s Industry Connections program and its Individual Defined Privacy Terms Roadmap:

    Our (Customer Commons, MyData Global, and the MyTerms Alliance) goal is to bridge the gap between the 7012-2025 standard and real-world adoption. The Industry Connections activity can help define and pilot practical training, develop strategic road maps, identify and implement certification programs, and document an industry white paper advancing standard awareness and understanding.

    The motivation is simple: the standard has major implications across industries and consumers. We need a robust, yet agile framework for a rapid market introduction, iterated with expert feedback, ensuring broad stakeholder buy-in.

    You can join by filling out this form, and by encouraging others to do the same, starting with the services and institutions in the top image above.

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  • Tweezeday

    Not cheap, but appealing

    Is my future portable drive one or more 8 TB strips (such as one of these) that I carry with me and plug into one of these?

    I laid out the problem in more detail here. Nothing has changed yet.

    On the continuing death of TV (and everything else) as we knew it

    MediaPost: Google, Netflix, Amazon To Dominate CTV By 2030s. CTV is Connected TV, meaning streamed over the Internet rather than over cable or airwaves.

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  • Memday

    From “Guns of August, Books of August: The Iconography of a Gravestone in Prague,” by Stephen Lewis

    Remembering the future

    What matters most about Memorial Day is that we stop killing each other, especially over problems that could have been solved without anyone dying.

    Word

    Pope Leo on AI. The whole thing.

    More evidence that advertising corrupts and digital advertising corrupts absolutely

    Wired: ‘Creepy’ Listening Tool for Targeted Ads Didn’t Actually Work, FTC Says. I added a comment (unpublished at this writing) that pointed to this PageXray of Wired.com and asked the writer, Maddy Varner, to respond. Maddy is a veteran of The Markup and Pro Publica. Should I reach out? I have a 100% failure rate in getting reporters to cover privacy abuses by their own publications. Here is what the non-visual part of the PageXray says Wired is up to:

    • Adserver Requests: 222
    • Tracking Requests: 160
    • Other Requests: 214

    Just in case you didn’t think Google Search was dead

    Denine Harper in LinkedIn: Google Is Now A Buyer’s Assistant.

    One is under your ass

    Ole Eichorn: Four planets viewed during an eclipse of the Sun

    $Trillion here, $trillion there. Pretty soon, you’re talking about real money

    SpaceX’s S1 Filing. On Page 11, it says,

    We believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market (“TAM”) in human history. We estimate that our quantifiable TAM is $28.5 trillion, consisting of $370 billion in Space from space-enabled solutions; $1.6 trillion in Connectivity across $870 billion in Starlink Broadband and $740 billion in Starlink Mobile as well as additional opportunities in enterprise and government; $26.5 trillion in AI across $2.4 trillion in AI infrastructure, $760 billion in consumer subscriptions, $600 billion in digital advertising, and $22.7 trillion in enterprise applications.

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  • Sunlight Day

    Shot this from the Wharf in Santa Barbara as the Sun was about to sink below 4,028-foot Broadcast Peak and the Santa Ynez Mountains. There wasn’t a cloud in he sky. Also, this shot is stopped way down. You can do that on an iPhone 16. Nice feature.

    Whether report

    The Sun is behind clouds here in Santa Barbara, but I still have faith that it’ll be clear by late afternoon, which is how things go here. Meanwhile, Bloomington has had lots of rain while I’ve been gone. Monroe Lake is moving toward flood stage, with 1,605 cfs (cubic feet per second) flowing in. (I just noticed that the photo of the lake in Wikipedia is one I shot from a plane in 2019. That kind of thing happens a lot, because I’ve permissively licensed dozens of thousands of published photos, and many of those have found their way into Wikimedia Commons, the staging site for photos Wikipedia might use.) Also, the nearby Santa Rosa Island Fire appears to be out.

    Yum

    Overheard: “Everything you eat turns to shit.”

    Part of a larger picture

    LA Times: Caltech might lose control of the JPL.

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  • Wochenende

    That's weekend, auf Deutsch.

    As happened yesterday, something I wrote here in Wordland got too long, so I made it a separate post, titled So maybe it’s not too late to teach it to myself. German, that is. I still have the book I failed to versteh in 1962, so why not?

    And all of them need all of our help from all of us

    Dentsu says the whole advertising business, for which the most personalized kind is the most ideal, and by design depends on surveillance, will pass $1 trillion this year. This is what ProjectVRM has been up against since 2006, Customer Commons since 2013, and MyTerms since January. 

    But it won't work on malaria

    Wired says you can stop a mosquito bite from itching by applying cold or heat.

    And there is—or could be: Emancipay

    I'm back to unsubscribing (or not subscribing in the first place) to newsletters that require subscriptions to read whole posts. Apologies if yours is one of them. I can't subscribe to everything. There has to be a better way to monetize newsletters.

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  • Getting Real

    This image is clipped from one in the story below, about how people in Sofia mark potholes so the city can debug them.

    In my Oofday post, I shared a post in Hackernoon titled We Treated Potholes Like Software Bugs and Accidentally Built a Civic Hacking Playbook. The story is about a civic hack in Sofia.

    Everything in the piece is excellent. The writing is vivid and clear. Its case is well-made. My only problem with it was suspecting it was written in some way by an AI. The tell:

    • short sentences
    • one-line paragraphs, often in lists
    • contrasty (“not this, but that”) phrasing
    • clever subheads (and/or clever everything)
    • outline-like logical organization

    So I had originality.ai examine it. The result: “We are 62% confident that the text scanned is AI-generated, NOT to be interpreted as 62% of the text produced is AI-generated.”

    However, even if a piece is AI-generated, does it matter if it’s exactly what the author is trying to say? 

    Back in March, Daniel Barkhuff, MD, one of the most valuable sources of wisdom on the Web, copped to writing with AI. Specifically, 

    Let’s stop pretending. Everyone on Substack is using AI. If you think they aren’t, you’re high. I know because I am (using AI, not high), and I’ve been doing it for a while.

    My process isn’t complicated. I sit down and write about a page, maybe 450 words. It’s not elegant. It’s not structured. It’s basically a brain dump. Half sentences, ideas that don’t quite connect yet, things I’d say out loud but that look ridiculous when you see them on the screen. It’s intellectual vomiting. A rough sketch of what I’m trying to say.

    Then I paste it into AI and say something like, “Hey, give me an essay.”

    And it does.

    Three things about that:

    • This makes me think less of Dr. Barkhuff. Sorry, can’t help it.
    • Knowing that he writes that way colors everything he’s written on his blog since I read that—and I read everything he writes, because his brain dump is the opposite of shit.*
    • Not everyone on Substack uses AI. (I’m on Substack a bit, and I don’t write with AI.)

    Also bear in mind that the author of the Hackernoon piece, Bogomil Shopov – Бого, aka @bogomil, is writing to be read in thirteen different languages. Does what he writes sound like AI in Bulgarian to begin with?

    Hell, why not use AI to write something in your native language when you also know it will be translated into another twelve?  (Is AI-style writing better for translation? Betcha it is.)

    It should be clear by now that there is a learning loop that runs out through all of us, then through all the AIs that harvest and process our utterings, and then fed back to us in an idealized style that makes us (or at least me) reflect on ourselves and our own styles, while knowing that we too are being hacked by AIs and not just by other humans: co-evolution at work.

    By the way, I just ran the blog post you’re through Originality.ai to see if it sounds like AI. It said,

    Likely Original
    99% Confidence.

    It also said I have only three scans left before I have to upgrade, which I probably won’t.

    *I asked ChatGPT what “the opposite of shit” might be. I got, of course, a long-winded answer that boiled down to one word: gold. I can see the case, but it’s wrong, and I wouldn’t use it, except here, as a case in point.

  • Oofday

    This one is too good at them

    I just wasted an hour of writing and research by hitting the wrong chord on my keyboard here, after neglecting to save my work in progress. You can't teach an old dog old mistakes.

    Uh oh

    Some bad shit is going down in Garden Grove.

    The other two don't

    There is no contrast between the US, China, and the EU more stark than AI regulation. Here in the US there is effectively none (especially after yesterday's news). In China there is the usual state control, but with a strong AI development imperative. The EU has the AI Act, which I was briefed on yesterday during an online session with the Berkman Klein Center (which is covering the AI thing well). What I see with the AI Act is very little drag on innovation and implementation of AI, but the simple fact that AI regulation exists in the EU has the AI giants (all based in the US) pumping the brakes there. To me the main difference between the three regions is that only one of them cares about personal (or any kind of) privacy, and backs that care with policy.

    Does that mean it's dead… or just a zombie?

    The Democratic party has conducted an autopsy on itself.

    Wisest words ever sung

    Uncle Josh is my favorite Mike Cross song, especially now that I have the life expectancy of a puppy. Alas, the lyrics are nowhere on the Web. Should I put them there? They matter. Mike will be 80 this year and hasn't been active for a long time. His agency still has a page for him, if you run a search. His old URL, mikecross.com, redirects to the agency, but you can find what it used to be at archive.org. Here's one snapshot, with a popover explaining his absence. But listen to the song. 

    More here if you care to dig

    Says here that Sports Illustrated deleted the entire archive of a writer accused of using AI as a co-author, or something like that. 

    A hole new approach

    Hackrnoon: We Treated Potholes Like Software Bugs and Accidentally Built a Civic Hacking Playbook 

    Since what followed from the above got too long, I made a separate post of it: Getting Real.

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  • Midday

    A MODIS satellite view of NASA FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System) view of the Santa Rosa Island and Simi Valley fires on California’s South Coast. Click on it for the full view.

    Following fires

    In normal times, Santa Rosa Island is easy to watch from our deck in Santa Barbara. But right now it’s burning up, and smoke from that fire and the Sandy Fire in Simi Valley have added layers of brown to the gray marine haze that comes and goes. So here are some sources of visuals in addition to those the links above:

    Most of those are interactive and good for following developments anywhere on Earth.

    Talk me out of it. Or into something else.

    I need a mic for doing podcasts and similar audio work here in my Santa Barbara office. Thing is, I’m here much less than I’m in Bloomington, which is kitted out. All I really need is a mic that’s not too expensive. Currently leaning toward the Shure M7VX.

    As to so many other doomed things

    At our New Jersey home in the 50s and 60s, my parents expressed a relatively cosmopolitan level of taste by drinking Savarin Coffee, brewed in a percolator. The brand is long gone now, but it’s interesting to see what happened to it.

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  • #MyTerms at #CPDP2026

    Iain Henderson, talking MyTerms at IIW last month. Look for him at #CPDP2026.

    CPDP stands for Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection. The theme of this year’s CPDP is “Competing Visions Shared Futures.” The MyTerms future is replacing consent with contract in our online dealings with websites and digital services.

    Consent is what cookie notices speciously obtain from your clicks on the forced choices that interrupt your first experience with nearly every website—and do nothing to protect your privacy or data. With MyTerms, sites and services agree to your privacy terms, rather than you to theirs. And your privacy agreements are backed by contract law, not by empty corporate promises, which always lack ways for you to monitor compliance. With MyTerms, you can do that.

    So (this is important) Eric Pol of MyData Global writes this on LinkedIn:

    Attending #CPDP2026?
    🤔 Looking forward to paradigm shifting at last towards the individual in personal privacy?
    👍 Let’s talk about MyTerms, the first machine readable standard for personal privacy, IEEE 7012

    3 options:

    1️⃣ Attend our CPDP workshop on Friday 22 May 14:15 – 15:30
    2️⃣ Reach out here to the MyData Global #MyTerms champion Iain Henderson, who will be on the conference all 3 days
    3️⃣ Reach out to me in DM giving me your contact details, and I’ll pass them on to Iain. I will myself be on site Friday.

    😄 Looking forward to building paradigm shifting solution with you!

    If you’re at CPDP, find and talk to Iain. This will be easiest on Friday, when he will be giving the workshop linked above and now here  in the Music Room on Friday from 14:15 – 15:30. Absent that, read what he’s been writing here, I’ve been writing here, and Nitin Badjatia has been writing here.

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  • Oneday

    Flaming excess

    Big fire on Santa Rosa Island. Largest fire ever there.

    Success story

    Susie James: Three chords, the truth, and a woman behind the signal is a nice piece about good local radio in Lebanon, Tennessee. It's in the Lebanon edition of Good News Exchange, which explains itself here.

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  • Hoopings

    I love basketball. I love watching it, and in my youth (columns A and B above, row 2), I loved playing it.

    I wasn’t good. My only skill was shooting the ball, which I did flat-footed from the nether regions of the court called “outside” or “downtown.” I hit about half of those shots if nobody guarded me, which was most of the time, because I was a slow white guy who stood 5′ 9 1/2 inches on a tall day, with “alligator arms” that were two inches less than that. But I did have that shot, so when sides were chosen for pickup games, I’d be in the middle of the pack, which was good enough for me.

    Playing at that low level still conditioned me to maintain a steady interest in how the game was played. This went through my years in North Carolina (’65 to ’85, with a break for New Jersey from ’69 to ’74), the Bay Area (’85 to ’01), Santa Barbara (’01 to now), Boston (’06 to ’13), New York (’13 to ’25) and Indiana (’21 to now). I went to countless Duke, Knicks, and Warriors games, plus the occasional Lakers, Harvard, Celtics, and Hoosiers games. I’ve watched a lot of games on TV, of course. (Caught the Pistons being creamed by the Cavs last night.) And I listen to half a dozen basketball podcasts in addition to the many hoops channels on SiriusXM.

    So I got to thinking this morning about how much the five positions in the game have changed, both in how they are played and what they are called. Guards, forwards and centers have turned into points, shooters, wings, bigs, and numbers, among other labels. So, with artistic help from ChatGPT, I created the chart above. It’s my own thinking at a moment in time, and subject to improvement and debate. So let’s have both. A pickup game. Fun exercise with no losers.

  • SB Day

    Coasting

    I'm in Santa Barbara now, and it is typically perfect outside. Love living here, even though I mostly don't.

    Still strange

    Digging Blackhawk Slide is getting action lately. I wrote it 13 years ago. 

    Talk about dumb

    Last Thursday's post, titled Person Networks, was occasioned by outreach by a friend who urged me by email to join Intelligence.com, a slick new-ish thing with LinkedIn-like ambitions on the surface and various nefarities underneath. Since then, others in my real-life circle of friends have received the same invitation.

    Turns out the invitations were not made with the permission of the putative source. Talk about dumb: the friend in question—the one who did not send the invite—is one of the world's top cybersecurity experts. He complained loudly to the company, which said it would stop. Meanwhile, their excuse to him for creating these fake emails was basically, "Even LinkedIn does it." The expert is wisely not on LinkedIn. Or on Intelligence.com, we presume.

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  • Flinks

    The first version of this post became Snucked and sucked, but never mind that. I'm also packing to fly early tomorrow, so for now I'm just blabbing an annoted link pile during what's left of today. In other words, sort of like the usual but without subheads.

    I didn't know we were in an Axial Age (it's a thing) until I read We May Be Entering A Second Axial Age, in Noēma. The subhead lays it out: "The transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age. Today, the planetary polycrisis of climate chaos, mass migration, increasing warfare and transformative AI represents a rupture of comparable magnitude." I agree with the headline, kinda, but not with much after that. But it's a good read. Makes ya think.

    Joshua Benton in NiemanLab explains how some for-profit local news sites are seriously kicking ass.

    CJ Shivers in SeO What?—"A new algo dropped from Google and it appears to have the world of SEO in a tizzy…There are a few notable new challenges that have arisen with this update, in combination with industry deals, that should have bloggers and newsletter publishers more concerned than usual." He has suggestions. I'm exploring some.

    If you want stories that aren't from the amen corners of the left and the right, Reason is useful. Examples:

    A U.S. Citizen Is Suing ICE for Arresting Him Twice. He Just Got Arrested a Third Time.

    The War Comes for Your Wallet: Inflation Hits 3.8%, Highest Level in 3 Years.

    Even Dictatorships Don't Fight Wars This Way.

    Pete Hegseth Can't Explain Why America Needs a $1.5 Trillion Military Budget.

    More at Latest.

    Gam Dias on his podcast about MyTerms with Iain Henderson.

    While I avoid politics, I am interested in why Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire are said to be tanking. So I listened to Taylor Lorenz's podcast interview with Will Sommer. It's a good unpacking of the whole right-wing talker scene; but I was amazed that Taylor said of George Will "I don't know who that is," when she and will had both been columnists at the same time for the Washington Post. (She for two years, Will since the Pleistocene.)

    Prayers, or whatever might work

    Scary bad news from Maine.

    RIP

    A good memorial take on Colbert's late Late Show.

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  • Snucked and sucked, but never mind that

    I shot this at DEN five days before a Frontier plane at the same airport ingested a trespasser during takeoff on Runway 17L, aborting the flight and causing news.

    When you read a gruesome story on a polite service, and it sources a story on another polite service that still doesn’t give you the information you want—the gory stuff—you continue digging. The story in question here is a FlightAware one titled Frontier plane kills fence-jumping pedestrian during Denver takeoff.  Its source is a story on AOL titled Frontier plane kills fence-jumping pedestrian during Denver takeoff. That one opens with pointage to a @DENAirport post on X that says,

    Emergency crews responded to the scene and bussed passengers to the terminal. 231 souls were on board. Emergency response and investigation are ongoing. The NTSB has been notified. Runway 17L will remain closed while the investigation is conducted. 2/2.

    The story continues with this:

    The Airbus A321 had begun accelerating down the runway for takeoff when the pilots reported to air traffic controllers that they’d hit someone, officials said. The pilots aborted takeoff as smoke began filling the cabin, and passengers evacuated the plane via slides, Frontier Airlines said in a statement to USA TODAY. The identity of the pedestrian was not immediately released.

    The hanging question then is “How?”

    Well, below the @DENAirport post is a comment by @SteveMRush pointing to a story on PYOK headlined, Horrific Accident at Denver Airport As Person is Sucked into Engine of Frontier Airlines Plane as its Speeding Down Runway For Takeoff. The author of that one is Mateusz Maszczynski. And therein lies another story: about the author.

    PYOK stands for Paddle Your Own Kangaroo, and is at paddleyourownkanoo.com.  Its About page is, like everything else at the domain, by Mateusz Masczcynski. (Took a few tries to write that correctly from memory. Need to keep stretching those neurons.) There is only one of him, but he occasionally writes in the plural:

    It all started back in 2017 when I managed to achieve my dream yet again. The same dream as yours; to become a flight attendant.
    We devote huge amounts of time, effort and money to achieve this dream. The world of cabin crew recruitment is tough and ultra-competitive. Getting through this ruthless process can sometimes seem like an impossible task.
    That’s certainly what I felt when I was knocked back time after time by airline recruiters. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong but I was determined to learn from my mistakes.
    paddleyourownkanoo.com was borne out the information and knowledge I gained in achieving my dream. This works – I’ve been invited to numerous cabin crew Assessment Days and I’ve been offered jobs from a number of major international airlines.
    Today, I continue to send applications and attend Assessment Day’s. My mission – to help you through the process. There’s no secret, checklist formula or 100% guaranteed promise. But I hope that what you read here will prepare you for your journey.
    Cabin crew recruitment is never going to be easy but I hope the PYOK website helps you on your journey!

    And that’s not his only thing. There’s also Crew Insider (“the airline industry explained”), Cabin Crew Forum (“Demystifying the ultra competitive world of cabin crew recruitment”), Points and Miles, Offers, accounts on Facebook and Xitter, and a newsletter. I just followed and subscribed to all of them.

    The only bummer, at least for me, is that even PYOK’s privacy page comes with a lot of tracking. Of course, that’s typical of most websites, and the focus of my most persistent  Quixoticism.

    Anyway, if you love flying as much as I do, check PYOK out.

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  • Person Networks

    This is the first of two Internet Identity Workshops last year. The First Person Network, below, was one of many projects in the works there.

    I’ve been invited by a friend to join Intelligence.com, which “helps you reach the right people, through those who know you best. It’s simple, thoughtful, and built on trust, just like the best introductions.” The inveterate among us will recall that this is what LinkedIn tried to do in the first place, before it turned into 1.2 billion business cards and 19 corporate acquisitions in a blender.

    So far, it has made no news. At all. Though it did show up in r/scams on Reddit. So who are they?

    Scroll to the bottom of the page, and you will find in small print, Company, above three links:

    The first two say nothing about who they are. The third goes to collectivei.com, where the heading (across most of the visible page) says “AI that studies how the world does business.” Click on the Company link in the menu on the left (in the computer screen view), and (below several pages of downward scrolls) you’ll find the Leadership Team’s six heavy-hitting members above a star chamber of advisors.

    Below that is a crawl of Webby Awards, and this:

    Build what’s next, with the team that’s already ahead.

    Whether you’re a sales leader looking for better outcomes, a partner wanting to deliver transformation, or a developer interested in embedded intelligence, there’s a place for you in the Collective[i] ecosystem.

    So clearly, Intelligence.com is less for you and me than for our large corporate employers. IMHO. Feel free to convince me otherwise. I’m open.

    Now contrast that with the First Person Network. Says the index page,

    The First Person Network is not another Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter/X. **It is not a social network; it is not centralized; and it does not belong to any company.
    **In the same way the Internet allows any device to connect with any other device, the First Person Network lets any member connect with any other member. Directly. Privately. Personally. With no intermediaries. No platform. No surveillance. No advertising.
    The First Person Network is about trust. It is a trust network that exists only in the individual ​​digital wallets of all the members—the way many of us keep our own address books on our own smartphones today.
    Building this trust network as a global digital utility is the goal of the First Person Project. We’ll have much more to share as the initiative grows.

    If you want to know more, they have a white paper. It mentions MyTerms four times, and not just because I’ve been close to the First Person Project (which begat the Network) since before the start. In fact, the name comes from Why we need first person technologies on the Net, which I wrote on the ProjectVRM blog in 2014. The post starts,

    We need first person technologies for the same reason we need first person voices: because there are some things only a person can say and do.

    Such as having a network of personal contacts.

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  • Thirstday

    The inhuman touch

    For the first time ever, a call to AppleCare got me an AI agent rather than a human being. The agent solved my problem, but made me feel sad, because AppleCare’s people provided a human connection, just we get from the people behind the Apple Stores’ Genius Bars. Are they the next to go?

    Works in progress

    The RSL (really simple licensing) standard is out there. In this section, it says,

    Really Simple Licensing (RSL) is an evolution of the early ideas behind the widely adopted RSS standard, which provided a machine-readable framework for publishers to syndicate content to third-party clients and crawlers in exchange for traffic.
    The RSL standard extends and generalizes these concepts to include explicit licensing terms, enabling publishers to define machine-readable compensation and usage conditions for crawling and processing their content. The RSL Technical Steering Committee leads the evolution of RSL in collaboration with internet publishers, technology companies, industry associations, and other stakeholders.

    One problem with the RSS comparison is that RSL is not simple. Here’s the 1.0 draft of the standard. Copied into Microsoft Word, it weighs in at 16,928 words. Compare that to the RSS 2.0 spec at Harvard Law (where it has lived as a finished thing, since 2003).

    It also creates yet another namespace: a consent ID.

    Clearly, it comes from the entertainment industry (see RSL Media), and works to solve a serious problem: massive unpermitted harvesting and repurposing of copyrighted works for AI training and commercial re-use purposes by parties other than the rightsholders. If RSL succeeds, it will join Creative Commons and MyTerms as tools in the private rights protection box.

    So why have the AI bigs shut down their ethics teams?

    IBM says and asks, Investing in AI ethics makes good business sense, but why? One excerpt:

    Building that trust pays off: companies investing in AI ethics reported 22% improvement in customer satisfaction and retention, 20% better incident prevention and 19% higher AI adoption rates. A majority (59%) of executives say their ethics efforts delivered results.

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  • Leftunders

    The NOAA’s estimate of the 2026 El Niño climate effects on North America

    And it will probably be very bad

    A super El Niño is coming this year.

    Let’s get it in the OED

    I’ve been throwing away leftunders, a word I just made up and then found in the Urban Dictionary.

    Speaking of worse

    Axios says we’re scaling sin. They are correct, at least in the sense that anything in excess can be bad for you, and doing costly and unnecessary things, en masse, is very bad.

    They talk about weed, gambling, and porn: weed because it has been widely legalized, gambling because anyone with a phone can do it, and porn because AI is exceptionally good at it, and there are boundless sources for it.

    I think gambling is the worst of those. For two reasons, beyond being costly and addictive.

    One is that college and pro team sports have become addicted to it. I’ll bet (without money) that half the money spent on flagship sports podcasts is spent by FanDuel, DraftKings, and other sportsbooks. The percentage on live games is less, but I’ll bet close to 25%.

    The other is that the sportsbooks fuck you in ways Las Vegas does not. As I wrote in Online Sports Betting is for Losers, Soon as you do well, they cut you off. Really. If you lose money, you’re golden—for them. If you win money (meaning you bet better than the house), you’re gone.

    That this is called “gaming,” and “fun” is just nuts. With real games, you can win. With online gambling, you have to lose.

    He likes it

    Most of this post by @kixelated (Luke Curley) is over my head, but I was sent to it by one of the Internet’s parents, to whose head I bow.

    Gives me ideas

    NiemanLab: “Affiliation, not just access”: Newsrooms try to move beyond membership to a focus on “belonging.” That’s how our local community radio station, WFHB, operates. Entirely.

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  • Toothday

    All that gold has lasted half a century. With one exception.

    Death to #2

    Dentistry numbers your teeth. Number one is the top right back tooth. If you’ve got one, that’s a wisdom tooth, one of the four that erupted last through your gums. Your other top wisdom tooth is number sixteen. Below it, your bottom left wisdom tooth is number seventeen. The numbers continue around your jaw to complete the count at your bottom right wisdom tooth, number thirty-two.

    I learned this stuff at the University of North Carolina Dental School, where I was a patient fifty years ago. And patience was required, because the students moved very slowly and under close observation. Amalgam fillings were free. Crowns and other restorations, gold or not, were $25 each.

    Both my student dentists, Dr. John Berry of Durham and Dr. Steve Herring of Fayetteville, had long careers and are now retired. Their supervising instructor was Dr. Clifford Sturdivant, an eminence in the field who died in 2008. Great guys.

    Steve took me as a passenger the first time he flew solo, in a rented Cessna out of RDU. He didn’t tell me this was his first solo until we were airborne. After practicing some figure-eights, he landed us in Chapel Hill, but not on the runway, missing it to the right by a few feet. We pushed the plane back onto the pavement manually, taxi’d to the terminal, said hi to Frank McGuire, who just happened to be standing there, got back in the plane and flew back to RDU without incident. It was fun.

    All but two of my natural teeth are still in my head. Number five cracked in two when I bit down on a hard seed at a restaurant in Palo Alto, and was replaced by a fake tooth screwed into my skull: an implant. Number seventeen was saved by a root canal in Boston, but fell apart later in New York, where it was yanked, leaving an empty space in the back. If you’ve had that same wisdom tooth yanked at some point, we’re even.

    Up for another root canal is number two. That one gets its nerve killed and replaced an hour from now, here in Bloomington, Indiana. I like to space this stuff out geographically as well as chronologically.

    I learned a lot in dental school, including the six districts of each tooth. Mesial is the side facing incoming food. Distal is the back side. Occlusal is the top side that occludes with teeth on the opposite side of your mouth. Facial is the side facing outward. Lingual is the side facing your tongue. The restoration that cracked in number five was an MOD, meaning mesial, occlusal, and distal. The natural ivory of your teeth holds together better than amalgam, so that one was vulnerable.

    The crown on number two covers all sides, and is called an MODFL (I don’t recall the correct order). Caries (decay) developed under the crown near the gum line on the distal side, and has almost reached the nerve. That’s why it hurts. After the root canal, my new dentist will either extend the crown or have the tooth extracted by a dental surgeon. I’ll get a new fake number two or live with a gap. I’ll opt for the fake. We’ll see. And feel. The total cost will likely exceed $5000. I have Medicare and a supplement, but no dental insurance.

    That photo, by the way, is by far the most visited of all my shots on Flickr: 84,116, so far. I don’t know why.

    Postscript: The endodontist says the rot in #2 goes all the way to bone, so the tooth has to go. That will happen after I’m back from some trips, in June. I will then live for four months with a gap between #1 and #3, so the hole heals. Then the oral surgeon (my extractor) determines if the gap, and my skull, will support an implant. If so, work on that will begin. The crown itself will be installed by the dentist who launched this journey. A circle of life.

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  • Mumday

    A moment at Day One of the 7th Internet Identity Workshop, in November 2008, almost eighteen years ago. The question on the wall is still unanswered, which is why the next IIW will be #43.

    Better late than later

    I just found that a number of IIWs that I photographed never made it online. I’m fixing that, starting with IIW #7, from November 2008, one sample of which is above.

    Circling drain

    Good Marketoon and write-up (titled Circling Back) by Tom Fishburne on why personalization in marketing typically fails.

    Boo

    School’s out. 50,000 students and their families are gone from Indiana University this morning, and Bloomington becomes, relatively speaking, a ghost town.

    Grabbing your ground

    Identity as Root is getting some action. In a time when maximizing personal agency is a critical requirement for civilizing life online, it’s more relevant than ever.

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  • Personal Agentry

    Google Trends of searches over time. The agentic thing is hot right now. It also needs to be personal and not just corporate.

    In Know your .agent, Esther Dyson suggests that we need a DNS-like registry of AI agents. She and her colleagues at the Agentic AI foundation (agentcommunity.org) have started one, and it has some good premises, such as accountability for AI agents and their operators.

    .agent is clearly designed—so far—to make Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAi, Perplexity, et. al. accountable for what their agents do. But what about personal agents: ones that are entirely ours? That’s what I would want respected if such a registry were required for all the world’s AI agents.

    So, if .agent has any chance of becoming a DNS for agents of all kinds, I would like to register searls.agent, just like I registered searls.com in 1995. I’m writing what follows while going through the registration process.

    <registration process>

    To register an agent at AgentCommunity.org, you commit to the AgentCommunity charter, which is at agentcommunity/governance, on GitHub. Here it is, with my responses to its points. What it says is in italics. My responses are in boldface—

    • You are actively developing, researching, deploying, or meaningfully using autonomous software agents or related tooling. (In other words, you consider yourself part of the autonomous agents community relevant to the .agent domain.) I wasn’t, but I am now.
    • You support the creation of the .agent top-level domain to foster a trustworthy, interoperable agent ecosystem. Yes, so long as personal agents have the same status and respect as corporate ones. You know, like they do with the DNS (Domain Name System).
    • You commit that any .agent domain you may register will (a) be used in connection with autonomous-agent technology and (b) expose a compliance endpoint affirming alignment to the technical “Human-Centric Agent Standard” once published. (This is essentially an agreement to follow the community’s future rules: any .agent domain you get will be put to appropriate use and will include a public mechanism to show compliance with agreed safety/interoperability standards.) Yes, but I hate “-centric” because it is a corporate perspective. I prefer “-driven” to centric, for reasons I explained here, way back in 2008.
    • You consent to be listed (by name/organisation) as a public community supporter of the .agent application. (Your support won’t be anonymous – it will be known and count towards the community’s credibility.) I’m cool with that, long as my advocacy for personal AI agents gets heard.
    • This is a non-binding expression of support. No fees or legal liabilities arise until a future, formal membership or registrar agreement is executed with the duly-formed operating entity. (In plain terms: this is a goodwill pledge, not a contract; you’re not paying anything and can’t be held liable if you change your mind later. Formal obligations will only come if and when the community’s operating organization is established and you choose to formally join or register a domain.) Cool with that too.

    </registration process>

    Okay, so now my thoughts—

    • While it is conceivable that we may each have a single master agent that works across our personal data (behind our own castle moats) and interacts with others on our behalf (across our own drawbridges), we are more likely to have many agents:
      • one (or more) or health
      • one (or more) for finances
      • one (or more) for retail
      • one (or more) for interacting with customer service agents
      • one (or more) for managing our many subscriptions and other recurring expenses
      • one (or more) for scheduling and archiving our many interactions
      • one (or more) for our contacts (directly and through social media)
      • one (or more) to keep records of MyTerms and other forms of agreements with websites, services, government agencies, and other entities
    • Does it make sense to register all of those? Probably not. But it does make sense to certify our personal need to finally express our full power, as independent and self-sovereign agents in the marketplace—as the Internet promised us in the first place. (And why we wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999 and New Clues in 2015—and related stuff in many other places.)
    • In tech parlance, we need to own root, and operate fully respected personal agents of our own.
    • The agentic Internet will need governance. I can see that. But is .agent the best (or only) way? Thanks to MyTerms, we will have one form of governance through contracts between people and the entities that serve them. And we will need others.
    • The agentic Internet won’t be worthy of its name unless it creates an intention economy to obsolesce the attention economy we got from surveillance-based advertising. Will .agent help with that? Not yet, which is one reason I’m joining the .agency community by registering searls.agent and writing this up.
    • .agent needs to look and behave more as an enabling system than an operational hurdle. I can see ways it might do that, but only if it starts caring about what it can do for people and not just for companies.
    • There are other approaches in the world. One is to hack ourselves, for example with KidOYO, created by Devon and Melora Loffreto. Devon authored the Root Declaration and all the thinking and writing behind it, going back to 2002. Another is Sovereign AI (the first name of which would probably not have happened without Devon’s leadership long ago). Sovereign AI is about enterprise AI development, but could also apply to personal AI agentics. There’s KwaaiNet. NeuroNest. Personal.ai. OpenClaw. Vellum.ai. Leon. Anything LLM. PyGPT. Jan.ai. Hmm: The Agentic Internet Foundation (AAIF) might be another, if it’s not just about corporate AI.

    I have more thoughts, but also other work to do. Meanwhile, I’m eager to hear what you think.

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