Books
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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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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 in.) I usually speak off the cuff, but this time I wrote it out, originally… Continue reading
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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 Lee and Manhattan are only a mile apart, it has always been a toll call… Continue reading
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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 are interesting characters. None, however, is more interesting than J. David Love, who grew up… Continue reading
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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 years after many of them started failing to get what we meant by Markets are… Continue reading
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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 are, in no order, and not limited to ten (or to Facebook) — War and… Continue reading
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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 where one would recruit armies of zombie angels (let’s call them “zangels”), besides your basic… Continue reading
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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 it still makes perfect sense to me, hunched behind a desk in a back room… Continue reading
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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 benefit. The answer that came back fascinated me. It was, “We look for second and… Continue reading
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Intention Economy meets Subscription Economy
I’ll be speaking tomorrow (Thursday, 4 October at Subscribed 2012 London, at the Kensington Roof Garden, near the Kensington tube stop on High Street. Seats are still available, and it’s free. The intention economy and the subscription economy are both about relationships. I’ll be exploring markets, challenges and opportunities where the two meet. Looking forward… Continue reading
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Table for two
The Web as we know it today was two years old in June 1997, when the page below went up. It lasted, according to Archive.org, until October 2010. When I ran across it back then, it blew my mind — especially the passage I have boldfaced in the long paragraph near the end. The Internet… Continue reading
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After Facebook fails
Making the rounds is The Facebook Fallacy, a killer essay by Michael Wolff in MIT Technology Review. The gist: At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium… Continue reading
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Off to a good start
Today is the official release date for The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, my new book from Harvard Business Review Press. It’s been available from Amazon for the last couple of weeks, and is already doing well. There are two reviews there so far (both 5 stars), and yesterday Oliver Marks gave the book… Continue reading
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Lives and times
Music was a huge part of my life when I was growing up. It’s still big, but not the same. My life today does not have a soundtrack. As a kid my life was accompanied by music from start to finish. At that finish was another start, as a grown-up. From that point forward, music… Continue reading
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At last
Amazon is now shipping my new book, The Intention Economy. Yes, the Kindle version too. They even have the first chapter available for free. You can “look inside” as well. Thanks to Amazon’s search, you can even find stuff that’s not in the index, such as the acknowledgements. Those include a lot of people, including… Continue reading
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Ancient present
Reality 2.0 was my original blog: a pile of stuff I wrote before there were blogs. All of it is old now, but some of it still rings new. Since Reality 2.0 is deep in the Searls.com basement, I’ve decided to surface some old pieces that might be interesting, for whatever reason. The one below… Continue reading
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Happy to have been there
That’s what many thought when they first saw the poster for Hassle House, in Durham, North Carolina, back in ’76 or so. As soon as any of the posters went up, they disappeared, becoming instant collectors’ items. At the time, all I wanted was to hire the cartoonist who did it, so he could… Continue reading
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Bruce Elving, professor of FM radio
I just learned from Dan Kelly that Bruce Elving passed away last month. Details are thin, but here’s a short list of links: Scott Fybush’s Northeast Radio Watch Augut 8 issue A facebook “public figure” page Bruce’s own Facebook page An obituary in Media Confidential Notice in the Worldwide TV-DX Association site Bruce and I were frequent… Continue reading
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World wide puddle
Nicholas Carr is ahead of his time again. The Big Switch nailed computing as a utility, long before “the cloud” came to mean pretty much the same thing. His latest book, The Shallows, explored the changes in our lives and minds caused by moving too much of both online — again before others began noticing how… Continue reading