Doc Searls
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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
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We Need Whole News
Third in the News Commons series. Journalism is in trouble because journals are going away. So are broadcasters that do journalism rather than opinionism.* Basically, they are either drowning in digital muck or adapting to it—and many have. Also in that muck are a zillion new journalists, born native to digital life. Those zillions include… Continue reading
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We Need Wide News
Second in the News Commons series. How do people get news where you live? How do they remember it? For most of the industrial age, which is still with us, newspapers answered both those questions—and did so better than any other medium or civic institution. Newspapers were required reading, delivered daily to doorsteps, and sold… Continue reading
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We Need Deep News
First in the News Commons series. Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter. — Thomas Jefferson News is the first rough draft of history. — Countless journalists “Breaking the News” is the title of… Continue reading
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All home now
From 2007 until about a month ago, I wrote on three blogs that lived at blogs.harvard.edu. There was my personal blog (this one here, which I started after retiring my original blog), ProjectVRM‘s blog (also its home page), and Trunkline, a blog about infrastructure that was started by Christian Sandvig when he and I were… Continue reading
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Microsoft Bing Chat 0, Perplexity.ai 1.
So I thought I’d give Bing a try at using ChatGPT to answer a question for which I knew the answer. The question was, “What group sings the theme song to the podcast ‘A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs’?” Bing search took me to a page of search results about the podcast itself,… Continue reading
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An exercise in perspective
I wrote this today for a list that’s mostly populated by folks in overlapping music, broadcasting, legal, tech, and other businesses who share a common interest in what’s happening to the arts and artists they care about in a world now turning almost completely digital.—Doc Here is a question I hope can get us out… Continue reading
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A look at broadcast history happening
When I was a kid in the 1950s and early 1960s, AM was the ruling form of radio, and its transmitters were beyond obvious, taking the form of towers hundreds of feet high, sometimes in collections arranged to produce signals favoring some directions over others. These were landmarks out on the edges of town, or… Continue reading
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Toward customer boats fishing on a sea of goods and services
I’ll be talking shortly to some readers of The Intention Economy who are looking for ways to connect that economy with advertising. (Or so I gather. I’ll know more soon.) What follows is the gist of what I wrote to them in prep for the call. First, take a look at People vs. Adtech, and/or… Continue reading
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Truckin’ forward
Welcome to my new old blog. My old-old (but not oldest) blog—the one I’ve written since 2007—is still there, in complete archival form, at blogs.harvard.edu/doc, where it has always been. It is now also here with a different URL: doc.searls.com, which had pointed at blogs.harvard.edu/doc for many years. Now it points here, to its native… Continue reading
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Moving on
I started this blog in August 2007 after the host for my original blog went away. (That blog has been preserved, however. Find it at http://weblog.searls.com.) At the time I was told something like “Hey, Harvard has been around since 1636, so your blog will last a long time here.” Well, the duration will be… Continue reading
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The Long View
This blog has been looking like my personal obituary section, and I suppose it is. While I promise to change that, for this post I’ll stick with the theme, and surface some correspondence with an old friend who recommended that I read The Five People You’ll Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom. In the correspondence… Continue reading
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Remembering Heather Armstrong
My email archive contains dozens of postings in which Heather Armstrong* and I are among those writing, receiving, mentioning, mentioned, cc’d or otherwise included. Most postings are from the ’00s and between bloggers in the brief age before media got social and blogging was still hot shit. Heather, with her Dooce blog, was the alpha among us,… Continue reading
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A Santa Barbara itinerary from ChatGPT
I asked ChatGPT for a three-day itinerary to give visitors to Santa Barbara. Here ya go: Day 1: Start the day with breakfast at the Shoreline Beach Cafe, which has a beautiful view of the ocean. After breakfast, head to Knapp’s Castle for a scenic hike and exploration of the ruins of a 20th century… Continue reading
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Unstill life
Her name is Mary Johnson. Born in 1917, the year the U.S. entered WWI, two years before women in the same country got the right to vote, she died in 1944, not long before the end of WWII. She was buried, unembalmed, in the cemetery of a Chicago church that was later abandoned. Her grave… Continue reading
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From sea to rhyming sea
While discussing ChatGPT with my teenage grandkids, I put it to a number of tests. In one I asked it to write a poem that includes all the capital cities in the U.S. Here is its reply: From sea to shining sea, Across this land so grand, The capitals of every state, Await us to… Continue reading
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A workflow challenge
I shoot a lot of pictures. Most are from altitude (such as the above). But lots are of people and places; for example, here are a few I shot at DWebCamp last summer with my new Sony A7 IV camera (to which I migrated last year after many years shooting Canon): Importing and curating photos… Continue reading
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Is Mastodon a commons?
Glenn Fleishman has a lucid and helpful introduction to Mastodon in TidBITS that opens with this: Cast your mind back to the first time you experienced joy and wonder on the Internet. Do you worry you’ll never be able to capture that sense again? If so, it’s worth wading gently into the world of Mastodon… Continue reading