media
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Everwhen
Same cancer, different tumor Show of hands: Who wants surveillance pricing? Sez Wikipedia, at that link, “Surveillance pricing is a form of dynamic pricing where a consumer’s personal data and behavior is used to determine their willingness to pay.[1] This form of price discrimination assesses price sensitivity for a products or services based on an 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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It’s still now
And that’s the way it is, Friday, December 6, 2025 I try to come up with unique headlines for my daily bloggings through Wordland. I can’t call the day’s blog the date, because the blog already puts the date above the headline. So today it would stack like this December 5, 2025 December 5, 2025 Continue reading
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Else wares
Not enough water Hotels on the south rim of the Grand Canyon are closed indefinitely. Naturally The most downloaded country song is by an AI. Or Not Says here the AI bubble will burst. Geoffrey Hinton, Big AI’s Cassandra, says otherwise. Continue reading
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The Continuing End of OTA TV, Part 1
I’ve split this post into two parts, because it’s important to unpack how legacy TV works, and why the whole thing is falling apart, with OTA—over-the-air—TV dying first and fastest. Here is Part 2. I haven’t watched Jimmy Kimmel Live, or any late-night talk shows since Carson, and I didn’t watch much of him either. Continue reading
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Speaking as a Great Lakes Megacitizen
In Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, Alec MacGillis notes that the city at the center of a circle containing the largest population within a one-day drive is Dayton, Ohio. You can kinda see that in the map above, which I discovered through Brilliant Maps. They got it from the highly precient Defining US Continue reading
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Wednesday , 9 July 2025
Not that you'll listen. Thank this guy for keeping AM radios in new Ford cars. Another small step away from the open Web. On a radio show sponsored by a podcast of another show, the announcement said the sponsoring show was available on "your favorite podcast app," rather than the usual "wherever you get your Continue reading
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Friday
Kwaaiday the 13th. If you're curious about personal AI (and you should be, especially of the open source kind), you might like to sit in on a meeting of folks volunteering toward making it happen, Kwaai has its weekly meeting going on right now at the Zoom link atop its home page. See some of Continue reading
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Findings
Here's how to save what's left. Newsweek: CVS is closing 277 stores. Wipe House. Nieman Lab: No more transcripts of Trump remarks on the White House website (and the old ones are gone, too). In case you weren't wondering. Jeffrey Epstein really did kill himself. For the reading list. Olaf Stapleton: Last And First Men. It's 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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Huge
What could go right? Charter and Cox are merging. Our home in Santa Barbara is served by Cox. They’re not bad, which is a compliment toward a cable company. But we only use them for Internet. Our “cable” is Dish, and comes off a satellite. Our old apartment in New York was (and presumably still is) Continue reading
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Today’s Tabs
Overheard: "AI is bullshit's superpower." Big topic at IIW last week: What MCP’s Rise Really Shows: A Tale of Two Ecosystems. This may also relate: AI Agents x Law Initiative—A New Stanford and Industry Initiative Launched Yesterday. The best take on Adolescence I've seen so far. HT Dave Winer. My photos from Day One and Day Two Continue reading
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Media Matters
Missing Mike. My favorite songwriter and performer is Mike Cross. He was headed to a career in law as an undergrad at UNC-Chapel Hill when a music bug bit him, he learned to play fiddle and guitar, and then to perform in local bars and clubs. I couldn’t count how many times I went to Continue reading
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What Are Stories?
Twenty-first in the New Commons series Fifth on the #LAfires Several generations ago, my pal Jerry and I were cutting a hole between the ceiling joists of a rented house in Durham, North Carolina. This was our first step toward installing a drop-down stairway to an attic space that had been closed since the house, 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
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The Empire Strikes On
Twelve years ago, I posted The Data Bubble. It began, The tide turned today. Mark it: 31 July 2010. That’s when The Wall Street Journal published The Web’s Gold Mine: Your Secrets, subtitled A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. It has ten Continue reading
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Subscriptification
via Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free.org Let’s start with what happened to TV. For decades, all TV signals were “over the air,” and free to be watched by anyone with a TV and an antenna. Then these things happened: Community Antenna TeleVision, aka CATV, gave us most or all of our free over-the-air channels, plus many Continue reading