Doc Searls
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Active Devotion
Being old, I get lots of ads for Chair Tai Chi, Chair Yoga, and other positional challenges toward staying alive, limber, and not much closer to dead than you are without them. So this one occurred to me yesterday. And, since I can no longer draw (arthritis, talent), I handed illustration over to ChatGPT. Apologies… Continue reading
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Thusday
Lessons to be learned A Blue Origin rocket blew up at Cape Canaveral today. Continue reading
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From Losing the Web to Saving Us All
Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy—Thesis #7, The Cluetrain Manifesto Big AI subverts everything, including hyperlinks, which are what make the Web a web. With Big AI, you no longer surf from searches to sources across an ocean of links. You ask questions and get answers from the world’s largest Magic 8-Balls. They top the new hierarchy, which… Continue reading
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Tweezeday
Not cheap, but appealing Is my future portable drive one or more 8 TB strips (such as one of these) that I carry with me and plug into one of these? I laid out the problem in more detail here. Nothing has changed yet. On the continuing death of TV (and everything else) as we… Continue reading
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Memday
Remembering the future What matters most about Memorial Day is that we stop killing each other, especially over problems that could have been solved without anyone dying. Word Pope Leo on AI. The whole thing. More evidence that advertising corrupts and digital advertising corrupts absolutely Wired: ‘Creepy’ Listening Tool for Targeted Ads Didn’t Actually Work, FTC Says. I added… Continue reading
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Sunlight Day
Whether report The Sun is behind clouds here in Santa Barbara, but I still have faith that it’ll be clear by late afternoon, which is how things go here. Meanwhile, Bloomington has had lots of rain while I’ve been gone. Monroe Lake is moving toward flood stage, with 1,605 cfs (cubic feet per second) flowing… Continue reading
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Wochenende
That's weekend, auf Deutsch. As happened yesterday, something I wrote here in Wordland got too long, so I made it a separate post, titled So maybe it’s not too late to teach it to myself. German, that is. I still have the book I failed to versteh in 1962, so why not? And all of them need… Continue reading
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Getting Real
In my Oofday post, I shared a post in Hackernoon titled We Treated Potholes Like Software Bugs and Accidentally Built a Civic Hacking Playbook. The story is about a civic hack in Sofia. Everything in the piece is excellent. The writing is vivid and clear. Its case is well-made. My only problem with it was… Continue reading
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Oofday
This one is too good at them I just wasted an hour of writing and research by hitting the wrong chord on my keyboard here, after neglecting to save my work in progress. You can't teach an old dog old mistakes. Uh oh Some bad shit is going down in Garden Grove. The other two don't… Continue reading
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Midday
Following fires In normal times, Santa Rosa Island is easy to watch from our deck in Santa Barbara. But right now it’s burning up, and smoke from that fire and the Sandy Fire in Simi Valley have added layers of brown to the gray marine haze that comes and goes. So here are some sources… Continue reading
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#MyTerms at #CPDP2026
CPDP stands for Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection. The theme of this year’s CPDP is “Competing Visions Shared Futures.” The MyTerms future is replacing consent with contract in our online dealings with websites and digital services. Consent is what cookie notices speciously obtain from your clicks on the forced choices that interrupt your first experience… Continue reading
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Oneday
Flaming excess Big fire on Santa Rosa Island. Largest fire ever there. Success story Susie James: Three chords, the truth, and a woman behind the signal is a nice piece about good local radio in Lebanon, Tennessee. It's in the Lebanon edition of Good News Exchange, which explains itself here. Continue reading
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Hoopings
I love basketball. I love watching it, and in my youth (columns A and B above, row 2), I loved playing it. I wasn’t good. My only skill was shooting the ball, which I did flat-footed from the nether regions of the court called “outside” or “downtown.” I hit about half of those shots if… Continue reading
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SB Day
Coasting I'm in Santa Barbara now, and it is typically perfect outside. Love living here, even though I mostly don't. Still strange Digging Blackhawk Slide is getting action lately. I wrote it 13 years ago. Talk about dumb Last Thursday's post, titled Person Networks, was occasioned by outreach by a friend who urged me by… Continue reading
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Flinks
The first version of this post became Snucked and sucked, but never mind that. I'm also packing to fly early tomorrow, so for now I'm just blabbing an annoted link pile during what's left of today. In other words, sort of like the usual but without subheads. I didn't know we were in an Axial Age… Continue reading
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Snucked and sucked, but never mind that
When you read a gruesome story on a polite service, and it sources a story on another polite service that still doesn’t give you the information you want—the gory stuff—you continue digging. The story in question here is a FlightAware one titled Frontier plane kills fence-jumping pedestrian during Denver takeoff. Its source is a story on… Continue reading
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Person Networks
I’ve been invited by a friend to join Intelligence.com, which “helps you reach the right people, through those who know you best. It’s simple, thoughtful, and built on trust, just like the best introductions.” The inveterate among us will recall that this is what LinkedIn tried to do in the first place, before it turned into 1.2 billion… Continue reading
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Thirstday
The inhuman touch For the first time ever, a call to AppleCare got me an AI agent rather than a human being. The agent solved my problem, but made me feel sad, because AppleCare’s people provided a human connection, just like we get from the people at the Apple Stores’ Genius Bars. Are they the… Continue reading
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Leftunders
And it will probably be very bad A super El Niño is coming this year. Let’s get it in the OED I’ve been throwing away leftunders, a word I just made up and then found in the Urban Dictionary. Speaking of worse Axios says we’re scaling sin. They are correct, at least in the sense… Continue reading
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Toothday
Death to #2 Dentistry numbers your teeth. Number one is the top right back tooth. If you’ve got one, that’s a wisdom tooth, one of the four that erupted last through your gums. Your other top wisdom tooth is number sixteen. Below it, your bottom left wisdom tooth is number seventeen. The numbers continue around… Continue reading