Business
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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
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The Kids Take Over
This story appeared in the April 2019 issue of Linux Journal. It’s still there, but with no photos (which seem to have vanished from much of the magazine’s archives).* I think both the story and the photos are too important (and now timely) to leave in a state of neglect, so I’m running the story Continue reading
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What Companies Deserve a Free Customer award?
Customer Commons has taken on the job of opening a true blue ocean: a vast, uncontested market space where customers are free and respected for what they bring to business as independent participants working at full agency. Specifically, free customers— A Free Customer Award would be fun for Customer Commons to give to businesses that Continue reading
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Unday
Climbing while Rome burns FCC Chair Brendan Carr likes to climb towers. I did too, decades ago. That kind of thing runs in my family. I also salute the workers who do it. As does Carr. That’s the claimed reason why he climbed the KELO TV tower in South Dakota last summer, and WCTI TV* a few days Continue reading
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Someday
Bad Karma In August of 2024, Audacy killed off WCBS/880 in New York, handing its ratings over to sister station WINS/1010, which now identifies by its new FM signal on 92.3 (even though the AM signal is much bigger). In the process, Audacy also handed off the 880 channel to Good Karma Brands, which already Continue reading
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An Immodest Proposal for the Music Industry
How music listeners can fill the industry’s “value gap.” This piece was my column for the November 2018 issue of Linux Journal. I’m running it again here for three reasons: 1) It’s still timely and worth resurfacing, 2) Linux Journal’s archives are now absent of images (and I’m an image guy), and 3) I think Continue reading
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Toward a Human Future for AI
I was invited by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, to contribute my thoughts to their latest study, titled Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the Age of AI: Experts Call for Radical Change Across Institutions, Social Structures, which just came out. Here is the full Continue reading
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From Mainstream to Allstream
David Weinberger once said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people.” It’s the future now, and he was right, or close enough. Because today we live in a world where the power to publish and distribute no longer belongs just to institutions, but to everybody. Me included. Here are some stats for Continue reading
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If privacy matters to you, this is a required assignment
I’m kinda proud of the stars we’ve been bringing to our salon series here at Indiana University since 2021. And there are none I’m more excited to welcome than Helen Nissenbaum, who will be here on Tuesday to speak both in person and on Zoom. The title of her talk is “Why Obfuscation is (still) Continue reading
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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
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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
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Status Go vs. Status Quo
MyTerms is Status Go toward markets based on full personal agency. Adtech is a $trillion Status Quo based on full agency for corporate entities alone and full subordination of the persons who depend on them: a one-sided power asymmetry manifest in every cookie notice. But, while it is easy to characterize MyTerms as a way Continue reading
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For Public Parks on the Internet
Eli Pariser is one of my heroes. There are many reasons, but the most operative one is for writing The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think in time for me to source it in The Intention Economy. The former came out in 2011 and the Continue reading
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Down and Running
I hit a storage crisis yesterday when I needed to copy a lot of fresh photos to my laptop’s hard drive, and it was clear that I would soon run out of room there. The laptop is a 16-inch 2023 M2 MacBook Pro with an 8TB hard drive—the most loaded and maxed-out computer I could Continue reading
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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
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Because Pricing is Getting Too Personal
Surveillance pricing already has its own page in Wikipedia. It also has its own authority: Abbey Stemler, Associate Professor of Business Law and Ethics and Weimer Faculty Fellow in Business Law & Ethics at Indiana University’s Kelly School of Business. And she’ll be speaking about her work a week from now: As you see, she’ll Continue reading
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Now We Begin
Yesterday, Customer Commons and MyData Global launched MyTerms at a London event correctly titled The Only Way to Get Real Privacy Online. (I explain only and real at that link.) MyTerms is the nickname for 7012-2025 – IEEE Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms. Links: The text of the standard has a lot of Continue reading
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Flying Fckery
Go now to FlightAware’s MiseryMap. Cick on the blue Play button and watch The Great Storm of January 25-26 move across the land and cause massive delays at airports in its path. I have a 1.59 GB movie (.mov) of what you just saw. What should I do with it? Bonus image: Continue reading
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The Room Where It Will Happen
MyTerms is done and ready to begin. The launch is next Wednesday, in the room above at Imperial College London. Back in ’22, I called MyTerms (IEEE 7012) The Most Important Standard in Development Today. Now it’s finished and more important than ever. Join the launch. Times: 4 PM GMT11 AM EST8 AM PST You Continue reading
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We did it
Our Indiana Hoosiers Football team has won the National Championship. You can read about it everywhere. Probably hard to escape, because it’s the best story in sports right now, or perhaps ever: how the team that had lost a record number of games went undefeated this season, going 16-0, a feat not achieved since Yale Continue reading