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Category Archives: Books
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 … Continue reading
Saving the Internet—and all the commons it makes possible
This is the Ostrom Memorial Lecture I gave on 9 October of last year for the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. Here is the video. (The intro starts at 8 minutes in, and my part starts just after 11 minutes … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Future, Geology, Ideas, infrastructure, Internet, Journalism, Ostrom Workshop
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The Giant Zero
The world of distance Fort Lee is the New Jersey town where my father grew up. It’s at the west end of the George Washington Bridge, which he also helped build. At the other end is Manhattan. Even though Fort … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Broadcasting, Ideas, infrastructure, Places, Politics, privacy, problems, Technology
Tagged Books, Giant Zero, internet, telephony
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The greatest western I’ve ever read
— is John McPhee‘s Rising From the Plains. It’s one book among five collected in Annals of the Former World, which won a Pulitzer in 1999. In all five, McPhee follows a geologist around; and all five of the geologists … Continue reading
Posted in Books, history, Journalism
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On @Cluetrain, @advertising @social and #NewClues
In There Is No More Social Media — Just Advertising, Mike Proulx (@McProulx) begins, Fifteen years ago, the provocative musings of Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger set the stage for a grand era of social media marketing with the publication … Continue reading
On marketing’s terminal addiction to personal data fracking and bad guesswork
Quit fracking our lives to extract data that’s none of your business and that your machines misinterpret. — New Clues, #58 That’s the blunt advice David Weinberger and I give to marketers who still make it hard to talk, sixteen … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Business, Cluetrain, Internet, problems, Technology
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#10books that changed my life
There’s a challenge going around Facebook: to name ten books that have changed your life. So I’ve thought about my own, and kept a running list here in draft form. Now that it’s close enough to publish, methinks, here they … Continue reading
Hart Island: a movie we need, about zombies as heroes
As Halloween approaches (and death itself, for all of us, eventually), I find myself thinking, Do zombies always have to be bad? And, What if zombies were good? And, Hey, maybe good zombies are what we call ‘angels’. Then I find myself wondering … Continue reading
Posted in Art, Books, Culture, Life, News, Photography, Places
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Thoughts on privacy
In Here Is New York, E.B. White opens with this sentence: “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” Sixty-four years have passed since White wrote that, and … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Business, Cluetrain, Future, history, Internet, Links, News, Past, Personal, Personal clouds, problems, Technology, VRM
Tagged Fourth Amendment, internet, privacy, privacy by design, VRM
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Terror as a second or third order effect of personal communication surveillance by governments
Several years ago, during a session at Harvard Law School led by a small group of Google executives, I asked one of those executives about his company’s strategy behind starting services in categories where there was no obvious direct business … Continue reading
Posted in Berkman, Books, Business, Ideas, Internet, News, problems, Technology
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