Artificial Intelligence

  • Sat Enough Day

    Questions Are Company Contacts as useful as I hope they are?  HT: Recommendo, which I recommend. Is Conditional Consent compatible with MyTerms? This—_Instead of "accept all" or "reject all" per site, users define rules across three dimensions: cookie purpose, website category, and third-party processor. Allow analytics on shopping sites but deny tracking on news sites Continue reading

  • Fried Day

    It’s all about making The Inention Economy happen. Dave Lockie: We Get to Decide What the A in AI Stands For. This follows The Intent Stack: A New Design Space for Human-AI Collaboration. Also dig Intent-Driven Commerce: What E-commerce Can Learn from AI Agents and DeFi. Dialing out Cumulus Media, one of the three big owners of commercial radio Continue reading

  • Toes Day

    Toes Day

    Let the Games Continue I didn’t know what Figma was until I heard that Danila Poyarkov created an alternative called OpenPencil, explained here. This news came in a thread where I gave my wish list for old-app resurrection by Muggles using AI. Here it is: Raise MORE from the dead. MORE was the best writing tool Continue reading

  • Weekstart

    Jeremiah Johnson is correct: We are ruled by underpants gnomes. Here’s the logic: Luke Kornet has a blog on Medium. And he’s strong with it. An on-point Marketoonist cartoon. Eve Maler has a book on identity coming out. It’ll be great. Eve is an IIW veteran who has earned many battle ribbons in the Identity Continue reading

  • Keeping Up

    Apple’s Mail.app sucks. I could give reasons, but it would only make me more tired than I already am from dealing with my storage issues. I just downloaded and set up Thunderbird for my Searls.com address to see if that works better. I’ve stayed away from Thunderbird since 2013, when it did real damage somehow. Continue reading

  • Webless Day

    Perspective 10 Largest Things in Nature That Will Make You Feel Incredibly Small. The only one I didn’t know about was Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat. It covers 4,086 square miles. News Thunderstorm hits Santa Barbara. (Very rare.) Delays at Newark after smoke in the cockpit forces a JetBlue plane to return. Here’s the Continue reading

  • Where Are We?

    Where Are We?

    While the Web isn’t a place, we know it as one. The language we use to describe it is concrete and structural: domains at locations, with sites that are built and have pages that are authored, and contents that are uploaded and downloaded. For a generation or more, we have searched through the Web’s vast Continue reading

  • Duesday

    Somebody please base a movie or a TV series on this ranch I just updated The Greatest Western I’ve Ever Read: a post that often gets visited, eleven years after I posted it. What a national leader should sound like. And mean it. “Principled and pragmatic: Canada’s path” Prime Minister Carney addresses the World Economic Forum Continue reading

  • Friday Afternoon Lights

    Let there be a FHS bulb Osram Sylvania MR13 300w 82v 3300k GX5.3 Bought a used Kodak 4200 Carousel projector for pocket change at a garage sale a few months back, so I could go through my large cache of slide photos shot between 1950 and 1972. Turns out the bulb was dead, so I bought a Continue reading

  • Toward giving future thanks

    The puppet is not human and doesn't work for you Just a question: Can Big Ai make more money selling your brain to advertisers than the surveillance-based adtech fecosystem does now? I suspect both OpenAI and Google believe the answer is yes. Along those same lines, Ted Gioia reminds us that Big AI is already our Continue reading

  • Tuesday, 15 July 2025

    When companies take delivery, the results will be huge. The Cluetrain Will Run from Customers to Companies is about making The Cluetrain Manifesto come true 26 years after it was posted. Redraw your own conclusions. Just one air travel adventure. Cable is toast. And free TV from an antenna is crumbs. Nearly half of all TV watching Continue reading

  • Monday

    Just some facts. No interpretations. This blog post got nine reads by the end of the day. This photo got about the same. The photo above has had 22,122 views, 421 faves, and 21 comments. And lots more views every day. It may also be the best photo I’ve ever taken from the window of Continue reading

  • Friday

    Asking for a cohort. How many different sellers, or one seller with different names, are (or is) pushing a coffee cup with the design above? But the problem is a U.S. one. Traffic to this blog jumped 313% today, thanks to Hacker News pointing to Online Sports Betting is for Losers, which was posted two Continue reading

  • Thursday

    Knicks fans know how OKC feels right now. The state of Indiana would like to thank the NBA players who called Tyrese Haliburton the "most overrated" player in the league. Halliburton just won the opening game of the NBA finals for the Pacers with less than a second left against the highly favored Thunder, in Oklahoma Continue reading

  • Wednesday

    Wednesday

    Cause for pessimism. There is a stat in basketball called VORP, for Value Over Replacement Player. I’d like one for coaches: VORC, for Value Over Replacement Coach. If such a stat existed, Tom Thibodeau’s VORC would be pretty high. Minnesota and Chicago both fell after he left. Bonus link: Nate Silver, Knicks fan, Thibs non-fan. Not Continue reading

  • Gnaws

    And, not to be outdone, Bloomington. Here in Indiana, not far west of Columbus, is a stretch of highway 46 called Gnaw Bone. Says at that link that the origin of the name is “obscure.” By the way, Columbus isn’t the only Indiana location sharing its name with a bigger place elsewhere. • U.S. Cities: Continue reading

  • Today’s Tabs

    Overheard: "AI is bullshit's superpower." Big topic at IIW last week: What MCP’s Rise Really Shows: A Tale of Two Ecosystems. This may also relate:  AI Agents x Law Initiative—A New Stanford and Industry Initiative Launched Yesterday. The best take on Adolescence I've seen so far. HT Dave Winer. My photos from Day One and Day Two Continue reading

  • Fry Day

    Subscription economy suckage. Just made my annual call to The New Yorker, to get a better subscription deal than what they offer with automatic renewal. So, instead of paying $169.99, I'm getting a new subscriber promotional rate of $99.99. I've been a new subscriber every year since the 1960s. Bonus link from 10 years ago. Continue reading

  • A Conversation with ChatGPT About Personal AI

    A Conversation with ChatGPT About Personal AI

    What follows is a conversation I’m having with ChatGPT about personal AI. I guarantee it’s unlike any conversation about AI you’ll find anywhere else. If we want truly personal AI—the kind that is yours and not just a corporate service, this starts to point the way. Me: I am thinking about what personal data could—or Continue reading

  • The Real Intention Economy

    The Real Intention Economy

    As a noun phrase, “The intention economy” first appeared in a Linux Journal column by that title, written by me in March 2006. A few months later, when I became a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, I started ProjectVRM for the purpose of making that economy happen. Six years after that, I wrote this book, Continue reading