Doc Searls
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The New News Business
Eigth in the News Commons series. Back when I was on the board of my regional Red Cross chapter (this one), I learned four lessons about fund raising: People are glad to pay value for value. People are most willing to pay when they perceive and appreciate the value they get from a product or… Continue reading
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The News Business
Seventh in the News Commons series. How does the news business see itself? Easy: ask an AI. Or a lot of them.* That’s what I’ve been doing. Unless otherwise noted, all the following respond to the same three-word prompt: the news business. Here goes… Microsoft Bing (Full name: Microsoft Bing Image Creator from Designer), which… Continue reading
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A Supply Problem
A while back, my gastroenterologist insisted that I get accustomed to eating high-fiber cereal in the morning. And so I have. It does work. He recommended Fiber One. I didn’t like it, but I put up with it until I found Trader Joe’s version, which tasted much better. Since Bloomington is more than an hour… Continue reading
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Getting Us Wrong
Several thousand years ago, when I was on leave from journalism and working as a marketing dweeb, my small North Carolina firm learned about PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets), a techy new service that told me that my rural zip code was “Hardscrabble,” while the next one over was a suburb PRIZM called… Continue reading
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A Moment of Applied Holiday Robotics
I asked ChatGPT and Bard to “List all Christmas holiday tunes in chronological order, by the year they were written, running from oldest at the top to the newest at the bottom.” ChatGPT gave me a lame list. Bard gave me a much better one, improved by my follow-ups. Here ya go: While creating a… Continue reading
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Feeling is Human
“Honesty is the best policy,” George Burns said. “If you can fake that you’ve got it made.” The same applies to feeling in composition and musical expression. Long ago I went with a friend who was a pianist and composer, to a concert by a somewhat famous pianist. While I was enjoying the concert, she… Continue reading
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Start of an Era
After 17 years and 761 episodes, FLOSS Weekly ended its run on the TWiT network yesterday. I hosted the last 179 of those shows. My career as a professional (meaning paid) advocate of open source also ended with that show. The full span ran from 1996, when I first appeared on the Linux Journal masthead, until… Continue reading
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Please, United: Don’t Do It.
I’ve flown 1,500,242 miles with United Airlines. My wife has flown at least a million more. Both of us currently enjoy Premier status, though we’ve spent much of our time with United at the fancier 1K level. We are also both lifetime United Club members and have been so for thirty-three years. Unlike many passengers… Continue reading
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How is the world’s biggest boycott doing?
Eight years ago, I called ad blocking The Biggest Boycott in World History, because hundreds of millions of people were blocking ads online. (The headline came from my wife, by the way.) Then, a few days ago, Cory Doctorow kindly pointed to that post in one of his typically trenchant Pluralistic newsletters. So I thought… Continue reading
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DatePress
Sixth in the News Commons series. The Big Calendar here in Bloomington is one fed by other calendars kind enough to syndicate themselves through publishing feeds. It is put together by my friend Dave Askins, who writes and publishes the B Square Bulletin. Technically speaking, it runs on WordPress, and uses a plug-in called ICS.… Continue reading
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Some possible verities
Just sharing some stuff I said on social media recently.: It’s easy to make an ad hominem argument against anything humans do. If we had to avoid every enterprise with owners we don’t like, we might as well graze on berries or something. Capitalism is way too broad a brush with which to paint all… Continue reading
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What symbolizes infrastructure best?
I love studying infrastructure. I read about it (hi, Brett), shoot pictures of it, and write about it. Though not enough of the latter. That’s why I’ve started to post again at Trunk Line, my infrastructure blog. A post there earlier today was about “dig safe” markings (aka digsafe and dig-safe). I ran it in… Continue reading
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Hah?
Even though I have tracking turned off every way I can, I still see ads for hearing aids all over the place online. I suppose that’s because it’s hard to hide when one occupies a demographic bulls-eye. They’re wasted anyway because I’ve done my deal with Costco. Consumer Reports top-rates Costco’s best offering, and that’s… Continue reading
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Some remodeling work
As Dave says here, we’re remodeling this blog a bit, starting with the title image, which for the last few years has been a portrait of me at work, drawn by the fashion illustrator Gregory Wier-Quitton. My likeness online is not in short supply. Here’s a sampling from a DuckDuckGo image search for my name:… Continue reading
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Whither Medium?
I subscribe to Medium. It’s not expensive: $5.00 per month. I also pay about that much to many newsletters (mostly because Substack makes it so easy). And that’s 0n top of what I also pay The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Reason, The Sun, Wired, and others that… Continue reading
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What is a “stake” and who holds one?
I once said this: That’s Peter Cushing (familiar to younger folk as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars) pounding a stake through the heart of Dracula in the 1958 movie that modeled every remake after it. Other variants of that caption and image followed, some posted on Twitter before it was bitten by Musk and… Continue reading
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Building Better AI
What shall we make of AI? Marina Zannoli has something to say about that, and she’ll say it this coming Tuesday, October 17, at Indiana University—and online too, at 12pm Eastern time. The title of her talk is Mastering AI: What I Learned as the Chief of Staff of Fundamental AI Research at Meta. Though… Continue reading
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Stories vs. Facts
Fourth in the News Commons series. Stories and facts have always been frenemies. Stories can get along fine without facts, though facts are good to have for framing up stories.* Facts by themselves are blah, and need stories to become interesting. So: different beasts, often in conflict. That conflict itself makes a good story. Such… Continue reading