April 2017 – Doc Searls Weblog

April 26, 2017

Where the nickname came from

My given name is David. Family members still call me that. Or Dave. Everybody else calls me Doc. Since people often ask me where that nickname came from, and since apparently I haven’t answered it anywhere I can now find online*, here’s the story. Thousands of years ago, in the mid-1970s, I worked at a Continue reading

advertising, Art, Blogging, Broadcasting, Business, Friends, Fun, Geography, history, North Carolina, Past, Personal, radio

April 16, 2017

Open Word—The Podcasting Story

Nobody is going to own podcasting. By that I mean nobody is going to trap it in a silo. Apple tried, first with its podcasting feature in iTunes, and again with its Podcasts app. Others have tried as well. None of them have succeeded, or will ever succeed, for the same reason nobody has ever Continue reading

Blogging, Business, Events, infrastructure, Law, Life, Outlining, podcasting, publishing, Technology

April 11, 2017

Being human vs. rating people

I’ve hated rating people ever since I first encountered the practice. That was where everybody else does too: in school. After all, rating people is what schools do, with tests and teachers’ evaluations. They do it because they need to sort students into castes. What’s school without a bell curve? As John Taylor Gatto put it in Continue reading

Business, infrastructure, Personal, problems, Travel

ratings, ride sharing