Linguistics
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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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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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Real Agency
I nominate agency as Word of the Year for 2025. I don’t nominate agentic, which is suddenly hot shit: See, agency is a noun, and agentic is an adjective. And, as Strunk and White taught us, Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs… it is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that Continue reading
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On digital distance
In July 2008, when I posted the photo above on this blog, some readers thought Santa Barbara Mission was on fire. It didn’t matter that I explained in that post how I got the shot, or that news reports made clear that the Gap Fire was miles away. The photo was a good one, but it Continue reading
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On Moral Politics
I spent 17 minutes while exercising the other day, thinking out loud about what @GeorgeLakoff says in his 1996 book Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t, (also in his expanded 2016 edition, re-subtitled How Liberals and Conservatives Think). I also tweeted about the book this morning here. In it I explain what pretty much nobody else is Continue reading