Internet
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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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Discourse & Datcourse
The reverse centaur. That’s where Big AI is the human part, and you’re just the horse part. If you have a suspicion that the AI bubble will burst, or even if you don’t, it’s worthwhile to read Cory Doctorow’s AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage, in The Guardian. Some useful metaphors in Continue reading
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Where Has All the Interest Gone?
The answer to the headline is Almost Everywhere Else. The new wheres are uncountable, and their number and variety are growing. The transition is from Think about the word station. That’s where we got our audio and video before the Internet came along. Some of that audio and video was distributed by or though stations Continue reading
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How to Civilize Digital Life
The Right to Privacy is a brief written by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren and published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890. It has not been improved upon since, because what it says is so damn obvious and simple: that the right to privacy is “the right to be let alone.” Those six words Continue reading
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Workings
Photos from the 41st IIW. Also from the first Agentic Internet Workshop. Many pix among them are of our group working on MyTerms, which I believe will be the biggest advance for the Web since the Web* itself. Nitin Batjatia: The Coming Illumination: When AI Reveals How Work Really Happens. Related, from an Amazon earnings call, how Continue reading
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On the Continuing End of OTA TV, Part 2
This is Part 2 of a post that began with a Jimmy Kimmel monologue, but really wasn’t about that. It was about the grave situation in which over-the-air (OTA) TV finds itself. Here is Part 1. Even people who don’t like leftish comedy should admit that Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue after he returned to the air Continue reading
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The Hotel Model of AI
What I like best about Keith Teare‘s latest essay, Who Owns The Front Door to AI? If it isn’t you, its game over, is that it sounds like he’s setting up the case for personal AI. But he’s not. He’s describing how our AI-assisted lives will get sucked through better interfaces deep into one or more Continue reading
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Thursday, 3 July 2025
How about borrowing Subweb? I was about to share a Medium post, but just saw it's "Members only." So I won't share it. I'm doing more of that now. Even though I subscribe to Medium, the NYTimes, the LATimes, and the WSJ, I'm avoiding linking to them, unless there's an easy way to pull the piece Continue reading
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Did tracking-based advertising just get blown up in Europe?
As I read it (in an English translation here), an appeals court in Brussels ruled consent notifications on websites illegal (or close enough) in the EU. Your interpretation may vary. Here are some sources I’ve gathered to help with that: Jamie Smith: Targeting ads using Real Time Bidding is now illegal, and how will we know Continue reading
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Monday, 16 June 2025
Trying on times. I like shoes I can slip on, because bending over to use my crooked arthritic fingers as shoe horns is painful. So is tying laces. (Oddly, typing on a keyboard isn’t painful, so that’s a counted blessing.) The shoes I’m wearing now are beat-up Sketchers that I bought at Nordstrom for about Continue reading
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Tuesday
Whatever, it's complicated. The Narrow Path Needs a Floorplan: What Happens When You Feed Tristan Harris’s Vision Into the Meta-layer. The path is between the DYSTOPIA of centralized control and the CHAOS of "unchecked decentralized" whatever. The path is called COORDINATION, and involves "global clarity & coordinated action," which is about "co-governance—a path where humanity chooses structure, Continue reading
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Coming to Understandings, and Perhaps Actions
Looking for one reporter—just one—from Wired or any other major news organization, to dig into this. Michaela Neville's A Starter Guide to Protecting Your Data From Hackers and Corporations in Wired gives good advice, but neglects to visit the magazine's own participation in the vast personal data harvesting adtech fecosystem. Here's a PageXray of the river delta out Continue reading
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Remembranes
Is there a word for failing to fail? Here's a Hmm: What if Flickr Fails? is getting a sudden burst of readers fourteen years after Flickr didn't fail. Also, according to my blog's stats, this post has had eleven reads. Cool is forever. Dig: New Livestream Brings Microfiche Digitization to Life for Democracy’s Library. Watch it happen live. Particulars: Continue reading
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Re-reading Material
On our new digital age:Some New Ways to Look at Infrastructure was the first draft ofWhat does the Internet make of us?, but is worth reading because the stuff about infrastructure mattered and was dropped in the second piece. (2017)Will Our Digital Lives Leave a Fossil Record? (2020)How early is Digital Life? (2020) On the decline Continue reading
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A Hat Tip to United
United Airlines details 6 big inflight entertainment updates, including all-new Control Tower map, by Zach Griff in The Points Guy, is thick with welcome news for frequent United fliers, of which my wife and I are two. (So far I have clocked 1,533,214 miles with United, and she has about double that. We are also Continue reading
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The Interknit
I just looked for the word “weave” among my half-million photos, and found this: We’ve been trying to solve identity problems online since the Internet showed up, roughly in the middle of the curve in the image above. It wasn’t much of a problem before then. Consider what Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Continue reading
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What goes in these structured wiring cabinets?
I need to install gear in these two structured wiring cabinets in the garage of the new house we are finishing. I don’t know exactly what to put in them and seek advice. The installed cables are: Blue CAT-6a Ethernet cables go to outlets (RJ-45 jacks) in four rooms. Internet will come from the city’s Continue reading
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The Future, Present, and Past of News
Eleventh in the News Commons series. all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move. —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in Ulysses News flows. It starts with what’s coming up, goes through what’s happening, and ends up as what’s kept—if it’s lucky. Facts take the same route. Continue reading
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The Personal Internet
—is not this: By now we take it for granted. To live your digital life on the Internet, you need accounts. Lots of them. Everything on the Internet that requires an account has a lock on you—for their convenience. They don’t know any other way. That’s because all the services we use in the online Continue reading
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World Wide Whiteboard
Before there were search engines, there were directories. The biggest and best-known was Yahoo. On the first graphical browser (Mosaic), it looked like this: The directory idea made sense because the Web is laid out like the directory in your computer. There is a “domain” with a “location” or a “site,” containing something after the Continue reading