Business
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Moosday
We'll see what happens Call for Tenders: Development, consultancy and support for a data altruism consent management system went out from the European Commission on 27 May of this year. It begins, "This call will fund a robust, legally compliant and user-friendly digital solution that enables individuals to give, withdraw and manage consent for data… Continue reading
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The George Carlin Model of AI
Forty-five years ago, George Carlin forecast the future of AI: Listen to what George says, if you haven’t already. You can stop about two and a half minutes in, after he talks about how all your shit is stuff and everyone else’s stuff is shit. Because that’s the reason Big AI will never be personal… Continue reading
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The Formerlies
This Knicks NBA championship run is the greatest of all time. Reasons: All this is debatable, of course. Just not right now. Continue reading
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Customer Service Sample of One
Our Samsung TV* and our Samsung soundbar/woofer no longer connect over bluetooth. Well, they do connect—both displays say they are connected—but the TV only plays through its own speakers. I called Samsung for help with this, but the phone maze robot said only texts would work at that time. Here’s the text monologue from Samsung:… Continue reading
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Knicks Rule
I expected the Knicks to win tonight. I also expect them to win the NBA championship. Two reasons. One is what I said about the Cavaliers ten years ago: they’re a better story. And something I said about the Warriors in that post applies to the Spurs now: they feel entitled. They just beat the… Continue reading
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How DuckDuckGo Can Be a Hero
In Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout said, “Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.” So consider what’s happening in the minds of everyone who has long depended on Google to be what it has always been—a search engine for the Web—when… 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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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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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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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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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 we get from the people behind the Apple Stores’ Genius Bars. Are they the next… Continue reading
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Personal Agentry
In Know your .agent, Esther Dyson suggests that we need a DNS-like registry of AI agents. She and her colleagues at the Agentic AI foundation (agentcommunity.org) have started one, and it has some good premises, such as accountability for AI agents and their operators. .agent is clearly designed—so far—to make Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAi, Perplexity, et.… Continue reading
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Trustday
Convention Naming I didn’t know until reading this that Oakland International Airport, better known as just OAK (with the slogan”I Fly OAK”) had named itself San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport, and earned in the process a lawsuit by San Francisco, objecting to usurpation of its name, even though the water body the two cities flank… Continue reading
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Sunlings
There is no liquid soap that can outperform good bar soap at cleaning a stinky, hairy armpit. Which is why I hate that hotels have replaced bars of soap with bottles of "body wash" or whatever. I'm at one of those hotels now. Corporatization is a form of enshittification While driving from SoCal to NorCal… Continue reading
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Your Future Starts Monday
Your private future, that is. Your present isn’t private. Not in the digital world. Not while you always agree to their terms, and not them to yours. With MyTerms, they agree to your privacy terms. Ones that, for example, disallow being tracked everywhere like a marked animal. There’s a standard for this now: IEEE 7012,… Continue reading
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The Other Reasons Why Podcasting is Hot
Near the end of this Pivot podcast, starting at about the 55 minute mark, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway give a great summary of why podcasting is “the fastest-growing ad-supported medium.” Among other things, they say “People actually listen to the ads,” and that host read-overs are very effective and remunerative (bringing much higher CPMs).… Continue reading
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For broadcasters, digital tech isn’t a lifesaver. It’s a new land for fish with legs and lungs.
Eric Nuzum says public radio isn’t interested in saving itself. He’s actually quoting somebody else, but saying there’s a case. Specifically, When I hear public media leaders talk about the state of audience, ratings, and legacy platforms, I hear a very strong decline-centered narrative, with one station CEO infamously saying that “radio is dead.” Really? When… Continue reading
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The Biggest Thing
In his latest blog, Dave says, “If I were running WordPress, my first priority would be to get something exciting out that even non-WordPress users would talk about. Then do it again.” He follows with a good suggestion. I have one too. I’ve told Matt about it, and he was receptive. But it’s not the… Continue reading
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Watching the Strait
The world runs on boats. Yes, also on trains and trucks. But boats are at issue, as the Strait of Hormuz is being blockaded. Here is how it looks on MarineTraffic.com (updated 14 April): The red arrowhead shapes are tankers in motion. The green ones are container ships in motion (or underway, as they say).… Continue reading