February 2010
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Radio gets personal
The great Larry Josephson — to me the best radio host ever (he was real and honest and funny and groundbreaking and smart long before Howard Stern was the same, and I am a serious Howard fan too) — once explained his radio philosophy to me in two words: It’s personal. From the beginning we Continue reading
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New England on Spin Cycle
That’s what the radar shows right now. Outside the winds range from strong to scary. The rain is steady and horizontal. The storm rotates counterclockwise. If it had an eye, it would be on Boston. New York, as you see, is getting snow. This illustrates this winter’s weird weather pattern. Mid-Atlantic states get buried in Continue reading
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What you see is what they buy
Brilliant of the Sunlight Foundation to show who pays each elected speaker, in text next to them as they’re speaking at the Heath Care Summit. Dig it here, live. Via @mathowie. [Later…] In the interest of fairness, here’s a Democrat, and his major backers: (I’ve cropped and moved the video image a bit so browsers Continue reading
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Matterings of Perspective
CRM & VRM, Figure & Ground is a long piece I put up today over at the ProjectVRM blog. It expands on Antagonyms, Social Circles and Chattering about VRM, an excellent post by Cliff Gerrish on his Echovar blog. Both frame in hopeful terms the prospects for CRM and VRM finding common ground. Continue reading
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Futures of the Internet
Pew Internet‘s latest report, Future of the Internet IV (that’s the Roman numeral IV — four — not the abbreviation for intravenous, which is how my bleary eyes read it at half past midnight, after a long day of travel), is out. Sez the Overview, A survey of nearly 900 Internet stakeholders reveals fascinating new Continue reading
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A modest revenue proposal to the BBC
I love BBC domestic programming (such as Radio 4, which I have to dig to find on the BBC website if I’m coming in from a non-UK IP address, as I am now), and would like to pay as much for it as any UK citizen does through taxes. Let’s say we come up with Continue reading
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Where in the World?
Years ago, before Flickr came into my life and provided incentives for hyper-identifying everything about every photograph, I had a brief-lived series of photographic teases called Where in the World? — or something like that. (Can’t find the links right now. Maybe later.) So I thought I’d fire it up again for the shot above, Continue reading
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Not a medal, but still an Olympic win
Anything look familiar about the ice crystals on NBC’s Vancouver Olympics bumper screens (some of which float behind Bob Costas’ head when he sits talking at his desk)? You can see the originals here. They were shot at our apartment near Boston one year ago, on a morning when it was way below freezing outside, Continue reading
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Because trees don’t grow to the sky
Advertising is a bubble. If that’s a true statement, Google is a bubble too. And if that’s true, many of the goods we take for granted on the Web are at risk. Let’s run down some evidence. Thus begins The Google Exposure, my column in the February issue of Linux Journal. Read the rest there. Continue reading
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Bubkes’ next stand
Bubkes, Stephen Lewis explains, is “Yiddish for beans; early-20th-century Bronx-, Brooklyn-, and Lower-East-Side-ese for very inconsequential matters.” It’s also the name of his blog at Bubkes.org — which, perhaps miraculously, is back up again. Though not for long. Bubkes is hosted by Userland, a company that has been bobbing belly-up for the past few months. Continue reading
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What’s Old is Nude Again
In Social Media Crisis Management By This Fluid World, Jonathan MacDonald reviews his own reporting of a real-life incident in the London Underground — and what happened next, as the ripples spread. Good stuff. In the midst of his talk (slides are presented in the post) he cites my own small contribution. Interesting how normative Continue reading
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Dats love
Sez Dave (now back in Metsland), “As the 1969 Mets undid the betrayal of NY fans by the Dodgers, the Saints give hope to a city that was betrayed in so many ways.” Exactly. And let’s not forget the betrayal of NY fans by the Giants too. Losing both was a double-whammy for me as Continue reading
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Heavy Whether
Chris Daly posts a 1995 essay he wrote for the Atlantic, recalling almost exactly the experience I had as a kid growing up and skating on ponds in the winter. An excerpt: When I was a boy skating on Brooks Pond, there were almost no grown-ups around. Once or twice a year, on a weekend Continue reading
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Ice stories
For most of Winter in the Northeast, skating is possible only during the somewhat rare times when the ice is thick and not covered with snow or other unwelcome surface conditions. And bad skating has been the story, typically, for most of this Winter around Boston. After an earlier snow, there were some ad hoc Continue reading