Doc Searls
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Trust This Signal
Next Tuesday, 21 April, at 4 pm Eastern, Judith Donath will speak here at Indiana University and online on The Alchemy of Confidence, addressing the most pressing question in our still-new digital age: Why do we trust some signals—and fall for others? She explains, In a time when every AI passes Ye Olde Turing Test, Continue reading
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Thrustday
A hopeful sign My News Commons site and series are getting action lately. Continue reading
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Nowsday
Nobirds? Engadget: Shoe company Allbirds pivots to AI compute in sign of a totally normal and healthy economy. Say hello to “NewBird AI.” It’s April 15, not April 1. Just noting that. Reuters. Investopedia. Marketwatch. Apparently, you can still buy their shoes: allbirds.com. I love The Onion’s American Voices take. One more reason to hate advertising Continue reading
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Everwhen
Of course they do 404 Media: Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out, According to an Independent Audit. Here it is. Look at it this way: personal privacy is a vacuum in the digital world, and will remain so as long as we're naked there. Surveillance will fill that vacuum. Inevitably. Constantly. Continue reading
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Watching the Strait
The world runs on boats. Yes, also on trains and trucks. But boats are at issue, as the Strait of Hormuz is being blockaded. Here is how it looks on MarineTraffic.com (updated 14 April): The red arrowhead shapes are tankers in motion. The green ones are container ships in motion (or underway, as they say). Continue reading
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The Kids Take Over
This story appeared in the April 2019 issue of Linux Journal. It’s still there, but with no photos (which seem to have vanished from much of the magazine’s archives).* I think both the story and the photos are too important (and now timely) to leave in a state of neglect, so I’m running the story Continue reading
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Operation Desert Furry
So today I went all the way with it I just realized I’ve been naming each day’s Wordland posts (such as this one) kind of the way the US military names campaigns. I’d hardly change a word Escaping the Black Holes of Centralization is getting some visits lately. I wrote it in 2014. Here is how Continue reading
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What Companies Deserve a Free Customer award?
Customer Commons has taken on the job of opening a true blue ocean: a vast, uncontested market space where customers are free and respected for what they bring to business as independent participants working at full agency. Specifically, free customers— A Free Customer Award would be fun for Customer Commons to give to businesses that Continue reading
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Unday
Climbing while Rome burns FCC Chair Brendan Carr likes to climb towers. I did too, decades ago. That kind of thing runs in my family. I also salute the workers who do it. As does Carr. That’s the claimed reason why he climbed the KELO TV tower in South Dakota last summer, and WCTI TV* a few days Continue reading
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TGI Day
Bad news OMFG, news is such a shitshow. Start with Do links hurt news publishers on Twitter? Our analysis suggests yes, by NiemanLab. Then, Social Media has Become a Freak Show, by Nate Silver. Thing is, more and more people in the U.S. now get their news (if that’s what it is) from social media, which Continue reading
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Fendsday
How to prevent the all-knowing and all-doing from doing wrong. Very wrong. Just one approach. Wired: Anthropic Teams Up With Its Rivals to Keep AI From Hacking Everything And, of course, Gary Marcus is less worried. When you whack a hornet's nest with a baseball bat while standing naked, what are the hornets going to do? Continue reading
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Twos Day
One small test I wanted to know when the transmitter site for Denver radio station KHOW/630 (above), which I shot from an airplane in 2018, was built. So I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. Three had the answer, sourcing this report by Scott Fybush from January 2018. (Answer:1979.) The AI that found nothing was Continue reading
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Onday
None of which you asked for, and few of which you can thrwart GadgetReview: 13 Evil Tech Scandals & Failures That Took Advantage of Millions of People. Now dig a PageXray of that story. The high points: Adserver Requests: 543 Tracking Requests: 447 Other Requests: 132 Including all those other places in the PageXray above. Among Continue reading
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Someday
Bad Karma In August of 2024, Audacy killed off WCBS/880 in New York, handing its ratings over to sister station WINS/1010, which now identifies by its new FM signal on 92.3 (even though the AM signal is much bigger). In the process, Audacy also handed off the 880 channel to Good Karma Brands, which already Continue reading
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An Immodest Proposal for the Music Industry
How music listeners can fill the industry’s “value gap.” This piece was my column for the November 2018 issue of Linux Journal. I’m running it again here for three reasons: 1) It’s still timely and worth resurfacing, 2) Linux Journal’s archives are now absent of images (and I’m an image guy), and 3) I think Continue reading
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Tryday
MVP thoughts I nominate Tyrese Haliburton for MVP. He hasn't played at all this year, because he's out with a hamstring injury he suffered when the Pacers (our Indiana home team) were neck-and-neck with the OKC Thunder in the final championship game. This season, without Haliburton, the Pacers are among the league's worst. Why? No Continue reading
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Toward a Human Future for AI
I was invited by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, to contribute my thoughts to their latest study, titled Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the Age of AI: Experts Call for Radical Change Across Institutions, Social Structures, which just came out. Here is the full Continue reading
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Flursday
Might do the same for you In The Relentless Missionary Creating AGI: Demis Hassabis, the latest episode of the Founders podcast, David Senra compresses by Sebastian Mallaby's book, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, into 55 minutes of pure inspiration. Not just because Demis is a hugely inspired and driven dude, but Continue reading
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Wednesfool
1 You’re welcome I don’t hate April Fools Day. I’m just too busy to participate. So this is a fooling-free blog post. Much to munch on Getting great hang time with Jon Udell (who also manifests here) lately. Here are two of his recent publishings ya’ll might dig: • Introducing XMLUI • Beyond The Dip Is there also Continue reading
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From Mainstream to Allstream
David Weinberger once said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people.” It’s the future now, and he was right, or close enough. Because today we live in a world where the power to publish and distribute no longer belongs just to institutions, but to everybody. Me included. Here are some stats for Continue reading