Future
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How Radio Can Defend the Dashboard
Dash — “the connected car audiotainment™ conference” — is happening next week in Detroit. It’s a big deal, because cars are morphing into digital things as well as automotive ones. This means lots of new stuff is crowding onto dashboard spaces where radios alone used to live. This is a big deal for radio, since most listening… Continue reading
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A visit to the old ‘hood
A couple weeks ago I took a walk around the historic neighborhood in Fort Lee where my extended family had a home — 2063 Hoyt Avenue — from the turn of the last century into the 1950s. It’s where my parents lived when I was born, and where my aunt and grandmother sat for my sister and… Continue reading
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Snow on the Water
I’ve been intrigued by Fotopedia since it showed up in ’09, especially since I do a shitload of travel photography. But I never posted anything there, because I was afraid it would die. And now, says here, it will. In seven days. The reason: As of August 10, 2014, Fotopedia.com will close and our iOS… Continue reading
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The long run
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And… Continue reading
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It’s Indie Time
Aral Balkan is doing a bang-up job getting Indie rolling as an adjectival meme. He’s doing it with his Indie Phone, Indie Tech Manifesto and a talk titled Free is a Lie. To put the Indie movement in context, it helps to realize that it’s been on the tech road at least since 1964, when Paul Baran, one of the Internet’s… Continue reading
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Earth to Mozilla: Come back home
In her blog post explaining the Brendan Eich resignation, Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, writes, “We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves.” In Mozilla is Human, Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Foundation, adds, “What we also need to do is start a process… Continue reading
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Cars as crucibles for personal autonomy
From Merriam-Webster: cru·ci·ble noun\ˈkrü-sə-bəl\ : a pot in which metals or other substances are heated to a very high temperature or melted : a difficult test or challenge : a place or situation that forces people to change or make difficult decisions This is what cars will become. The difficult decision is where to draw… Continue reading
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Automated Assumption Fail (#AAF)
So I just got this email from Pandora: This is an #AAF: an Automated Assumption Fail. I love music, and Pandora; but what Pandora’s telling me here doesn’t square with my experience of using it. I mean, what is “that Lorde song”? Who are are the Royals? Maybe I do like them, but I don’t… 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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Revisiting the last great comet
With Comet Ison on the horizon (but out of sight until it finishes looping around the Sun), I thought it might be fun to re-run what I wrote here in 1997 (in my blog-before-there-were-blogs), about the last great comet to grace Earth’s skies. — Doc Ordinary Miracles: Start Your Day With Comet Hale-Bopp Graphic by Dr. Dale… Continue reading
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The most important Kickstarter ever
Fuse is more than a device and a smartphone app to go with it. The world is full of those already. Fuse is the first product in the digital age that can blow up every one of the silos built to trap personal data and limit personal independence. Fuse does that by putting you — literally… Continue reading
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Re-birthing Radio
Radio’s 1.x era is coming to an end. Signs and portents abound. The rise and decline of AM radio just ran in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, hometown paper for KDKA, the granddaddy of AM radio in the U.S. In AM/FM Radio Is Already Over, And No One Will Miss It, Adam Singer writes, Radio advertisements are… Continue reading
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The American Way of Privacy
My sister Jan — student of history, Navy vet and a Wise One — sent me an email a couple days ago that I thought would make a good guest post. She said yes to that suggestion and here it is… Is the new born-in-connectivity generation going to re-define privacy? They may try —… 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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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
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Al Jazeera isn’t covering some big news about itself
Right now if you want live streaming of TV news, 24/7, on the Net, here in the U.S., from a major global news organization, you have just two choices: Al Jazeera and France24. Soon you’ll have just one, because Al Jazeera’s stream is going away. That’s because the company will turn its stream off when… Continue reading
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Some perspectives in time and space
First, time. Earth became habitable for primitive life forms some 3.X billion years ago. It will cease to be habitable in another 1 billion years or less, given the rate at which the Sun continues to get hotter, which it has been doing for the duration. Species last, on average, a couple million years. Depending… Continue reading
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People will do more with Big Data than big companies can
The history of computing over the last 30 years is one of lurches forward every time individuals got the power to do what only big enterprises could do previously — and to do a much better job of it. It happened when computing got personal in the ’80s. It happened when networking got personal in… Continue reading
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Outlining vs. Formatting
Dave makes a profound distinction in his post this morning titled Outliners and Word Processors. For the first time I not only grok what I already knew about outlining, but why it’s so much better as a way to write than word processing ever was. The distinction is a bit hard to see because Word… Continue reading