News
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On the Palisades and Eaton Fires
Seventeenth in the News Commons series First on the #LAfires We’re watching KABC/7 from Los Angeles, live on our Roku TV (which has it among hundreds of “Live TV” channels), and in a browser on this laptop. One screen grab: KABC/7 live coverage of the Palisades fire, and the new one a Eaton Canyon in Continue reading
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Think Globally, Eat Here
Fifteenth in the News Commons series. This semester’s Beyond the Web salon series for the Ostrom Workshop and Hamilton Lugar School at Indiana University is themed Think Globally, Eat Here—Small Solutions for Big Tech Problems. I will give the opening talk, about the News Commons (subject of fourteen prior posts here) at noon (Eastern) next Continue reading
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A Better Way to Do News
Twelfth in the News Commons series Last week at DWeb Camp, I gave a talk titled The Future, Present, and Past of News—and Why Archives Anchor It All. Here’s a frame from a phone video: DWeb Camp is a wonderful gathering, hosted by the Internet Archive at Camp Navarro in Northern California. In this post I’ll 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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Blog + Newsletter
Newsletters are all the rage now. In recognition of that, I blogged here two years ago about the idea of writing a solo newsletter. Since then I’ve been co-producing this one with Katherine Druckman at Reality 2.o. It’s a Substack one, so I know how that game works on the production as well as the Continue reading
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The News Business
Seventh in the News Commons series. How does the news business see itself? Easy: ask an AI. Or a lot of them.* That’s what I’ve been doing. Unless otherwise noted, all the following respond to the same three-word prompt: the news business. Here goes… Microsoft Bing (Full name: Microsoft Bing Image Creator from Designer), which Continue reading
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When Clouds Crash
Rackspace is in a crater right now, on fire. So are many of its customers. I’m one of them. What happened, Rackspace says, was “the result of a ransomware incident.” Damaged, lost or destroyed is its Hosted Exchange business. On that cloud platform, companies and individuals around the world run their email and much else. It’s quite Continue reading
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On solving the worldwide shipping crisis
The worldwide shipping crisis is bad. Here are some reasons: “Just in time” manufacturing, shipping, delivery, and logistics. For several decades, the whole supply system has been optimized for “lean” everything. On the whole, no part of it fully comprehends breakdowns outside the scope of immediate upstream or downstream dependencies. The pandemic, which has been Continue reading
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A side view of the Ranch 2 Fire
What you see there is a flammagenitus cloud rising to the north above Ranch 2, a wildfire about fifteen miles east of here in the San Gabriel Mountains, just north of Asuza (one of too many towns to remember, in greater Los Angeles). If the video works, you’ll see how how the clouds give shape Continue reading
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Bad $20
I once tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. Actually, twice. The first was when I paid for a lunch at Barney Greengrass in New York, about two years ago. After exposing the $20 to a gizmo at the cash register, the cashier handed it back to me, saying it was counterfeit. Surprised—I had no Continue reading
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The Great Trivializer
Last night I watched The Great Hack a second time. It’s a fine documentary, maybe even a classic. (A classic in literature, I learned on this Radio Open Source podcast, is a work that “can only be re-read.” If that’s so, then perhaps a classic movie is one that can only be re-watched.*) The movie’s Continue reading
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Where Journalism Fails
“What’s the story?” No question is asked more often by editors in newsrooms than that one. And for good reason: that’s what news is about: The Story. Or, in the parlance of the moment, The Narrative. (Trend. More about that below.) I was just 22 when I wrote my first stories as a journalist, reporting Continue reading
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Venus, Moon, Jupiter and Mercury in the dawn’s early light
Walked out on the front deck this morning and grabbed a photo set of the Moon between conjunctions with Venus (that was yesterday), Jupiter (tonight and tomorrow) and then Mercury (Saturday), before passing next to the Sun as a new moon on Sunday. More about the show at EarthSky. Get up early and check it Continue reading
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New York lights
I had a bunch of errands to run today, but also a lot of calls. And, when I finally got up from my desk around 4pm with plans to head out in the car, I found five inches of snow already on the apartment deck. Another five would come after that. So driving was clearly Continue reading
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Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing
Let’s start with Facebook’s Surveillance Machine, by Zeynep Tufekci in last Monday’s New York Times. Among other things (all correct), Zeynep explains that “Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.” Irony Continue reading
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Enough Alreadies
I just unsubscribed from Quora notifications. Reasons: With my new full-time gig as editor-in-chief of Linux Journal, I have close to no time for anything else, even though many other obligations do take time. Some of those also pay, and so require that I cut out as many distractions as I can. The filter bubble thing works Continue reading
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Geology questions for Montecito and Santa Barbara
This post continues the inquiry I started with Making sense of what happened to Montecito. That post got a record number of reads for this blog, and 57 comments as well. I expect to learn more at the community meeting this evening with UCSB geologist Ed Keller in the Faulkner Room in the main library Continue reading
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Still no serious coverage of pirate radio
Here’s what I wrote about pirate radio in New York, back in 2013 . I hoped to bait major media attention with that. Got zip. Then I wrote this in 2015 (when I also took the screen shot, above, of a local pirate’s ID on my kitchen radio). I got a couple people interested, including one college student, Continue reading
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Some new ways to look at infrastructure
Nothing challenges our understanding of infrastructure better than a crisis, and we have a big one now in Houston. We do with every giant storm, of course. New York is still recovering from Sandy and New Orleans from Katrina. Reforms and adaptations always follow, as civilization learns from experience. Look at aviation, for example. Houston is the Continue reading