Blogging
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Because freedom matters
After one of my reluctant visits to Facebook yesterday, I posted this there: If I were actually the person Facebook advertised to, I would be an impotent, elderly, diabetic, hairy (or hairless) philandering cancer patient, heart attack risk, snoring victim, wannabe business person, gambling and cruise boat addict, and possible IBM Cloud customer in need… Continue reading
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A blast from the independent past
I just ran across a post (below) on my old blog from Tuesday, July 12, 2005: a few months less than ten years ago. It was at the tail end of what Tantek Çelik calls the Independent Web. He gives the time frame for that as roughly 2001-2005, peaking in 2003 or so. “We took it as… Continue reading
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Finally, maybe, getting a podcast rolling
Hi, Liveblog fans. This post continues (or plays jazz with) this liveblog post, following my podcast learnings, live. As an old radio guy and an inveterate talker, I think I should be good at podcasting. Or at least that it’s worth trying. Which I have, many times. The results, so far, appear at here, at… Continue reading
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Blogging #BlizzardOf2015 in #NYC 02
11:31pm — Nobody is saying it, but so far the #BlizzardOf2015 in #NYC is a dud. I mean, yeah there’s snow. But it’s not a real blizzard yet. At least not here, and not in Boston, where it’s supposed to be far worse. “A little bit more than a dusting” says the CNN reporter on… Continue reading
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Every thing has a face, and vice versa
That line came to me a few minutes ago, as I looked and read through the latest photographic blog posts by Stephen Lewis in his blog, Bubkes). This one… … titled Farmyard, Grandmother, Chicken, and Ovid in Exile, is accompanied by richly detailed text, including this: The courtyard in the photo no longer exists; it and and… Continue reading
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Giant Zero Journalism, cont’d
While doing research on another topic, I ran across this post by Amy Gahran (@agahran) in Poynter, riffing off a March 2007 post on my old blog titled Giant Zero Journalism. Reading it, I feel like I just opened a time capsule — especially when I also just finished reading Robinson Meyer‘s Atlantic piece, And Just Like That, Facebook… Continue reading
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Radio and the Web, 2001
Since my old blog (still running, amazingly, on an old server somewhere within Verisign) will some day be Snow on the Water, and conversation about radio has commenced below that post, I decided to re-post March 21, 2001. Here goes… Blast from the past Tune in here right now to catch Larry Lujack on KNEW,… Continue reading
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Urban originals
It would have been great to visit the Egyptian Spice Market in Istanbul with my old friend Stephen Lewis, whose knowledge that city runs deep and long. But I was just passing through the Old City by chance, waylaid en route from Sydney to Tel Aviv, and Stephen was still in Sofia, which he also… Continue reading
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Why to avoid advertising as a business model
I just ran across this item below, which ran almost fourteen years ago in my original blog, and think it’s worth re-running today. The characters have all changed, but the issues have not. In fact they are more present and worth debating than ever. — Doc An Open Letter to Meg Whitman Meg Whitman President… Continue reading
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Let’s pull news out of its hole
Most of what we call news is filler. The practice of filling space and time — stuffing “content” into a “news hole” — is a relic of an era when printing and broadcast space and time were limited, privately held, and paid for mostly by advertising, which requires ears and eyeballs showing up predictably and… Continue reading
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50,000 Photos as a Blog
Yesterday I posted some shots of the crater-shaped Kiglapait Mountains on the frozen coast of Labrador, including the one above. Here’s how views of those shots, and many others, looked in Flickr’s stats: It got 90 views. Not a lot. But a lot of other shots got a bunch of views too, and they add… Continue reading
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Short Attention Spasm Theater
This post is a hat tip toward Rusty Foster’s Today In Tabs, which I learned about from Clay Shirky during a digressive conversation about the subscription economy (the paid one, not the one Rusty and other free spirits operate in), and how lately I’m tending not to renew mine after they run out, thanks to my wife’s rational… Continue reading
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The hell of comments
So I wanted to add a comment under Jonathan D. Fitzgerald’s essay “Lena Dunham Is The New John Updike — But Not In A Good Way“, in WBUR‘s Cognoscenti ‘zine (which I just discovered, and I like). So I wrote a caution about throwing out both Dunham’s and Updike’s babies in the bathwaters of their… Continue reading
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Getting into my header
Since I’ve been maturing while my blog header has not, I’ve been thinking that soon is a good time to change it. The old headshot, or art-from-a-headshot, dates from the last Millennium, when I still wore granny glasses and had hair. And it never looked much like me in the first place. This was it:… Continue reading
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Seeing Deeply
Cities aren’t simple, especially mature ones. They are deep and complicated places that require equally deep attention to appreciate fully. That’s what I get from Stephen Lewis‘ insights about the particulars of present and past urban scenes and characters in Sofia, New York, Istanbul and other cities he knows well. His latest post, titled The Women’s… Continue reading
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Fred Wilson’s talk at LeWeb
I’m bummed that I missed LeWeb, but I’m glad I got to see and hear Fred Wilson’s talk there, given on Tuesday. I can’t recommend it more highly. Go listen. It might be the most leveraged prophesy you’re ever going to hear. I’m biased in that judgement, because the trends Fred visits are ones I’ve devoted my… Continue reading
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Wheat vs. Chaff
John Havens has an excellent piece in Mashable titled “It’s Your Data — But Others Are Making Billions Off It.” In a Web overflowing with chaff, it’s a fine grain of wheat. But it’s also camouflaged by chaff posing as wheat. I can tell, because I was interviewed for the piece, which links back to… Continue reading
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News isn’t about cable. Or newspapers. It’s about us.
Read Dave’s Cable News is Ripe for Disruption. Then Jay Rosen’s Edward Snowden, Meet Jeff Bezos. Then everything Jeff Jarvis has been writing about lately. Then listen to the August 9 edition of On The Media. Pay special attention to the history of New York’s newspapers, and the strike of 1962-3. Note how vitally important… Continue reading