Personal
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The Adblock War Series
Here is a list of pieces I’ve written on what has come to be known as the “adblock wars.” That term applies most to #22 (written August of ’15) those that follow. But the whole series works as a coherent whole that might make a good book if a publisher is interested. Why online advertising sucks,… Continue reading
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How old aren’t you?
Bing’s image search now has a #HowOldRobot that appears when you mouse over an image in the results. Click on it, and you get an age. Here’s one of Catherine Deneuve: Interesting that most of the guesses for her are on the low side. (One, for Catherine as a mature adult, guesses she’s 14.) Here’s… Continue reading
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Valley Fire losses
Here is the current perimeter of the Valley Fire, according to the USGS’ GEOMAC viewer: As you see, no places are identified there. One in particular, however, is of extremely special interest to me: Harbin Hot Springs. That’s where I met my wife and made more friends than I can count. It is, or was, … Continue reading
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Content as Icebergs
In Snow on the Water I wrote about the ‘low threshold of death” for what media folks call “content” — which always seemed to me like another word for packing material. But its common parlance now. For example, a couple days ago I heard a guy on WEEI, my fave sports station in Boston, yell… Continue reading
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A history lesson in how to automate journalism with war and sports metaphors
What I’ve always loved most about the Web† is how it allows each of us to publish on our own, as individuals, for the whole world. I started doing that as soon as I could get a dial-up account with a nearby ISP (the late Batnet of Palo Alto) in 1995. Here is one of… Continue reading
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What’s the best way customer love can help a brand?
In “Cool Influencers With Big Followings Get Picky About Their Endorsements,” Sydney Ember of the NY Times writes, The more brands that use influencers for marketing campaigns on social platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, the less impact each influencer has. At the same time, many influencers, who once jumped at the opportunity to endorse… Continue reading
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Why the strange uploads to @Flickr?
I’ve got 58,765 photos on Flickr, so far. These have 8,618,102 views at the moment, running at about 5,000 a day. The top count this last week was 11,766. Not that I’m into stats. I just want to make clear that I’m deeply invested in Flickr, as a photographer. I’m also a “Pro” customer, meaning I pay for the service.… Continue reading
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Blogging all over the place
People are asking me why I blog so little these days. Fact is, I blog as much as ever. Just not all here. For example, there’s Linux Journal. My latest there is Privacy is Personal. A good one, I think. Then there’s the ProjectVRM blog. The best recent post there is If your voice comes… Continue reading
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Dear Magazines: please quit screwing loyal subscribers
When my main credit card got yanked for some kind of fraud activity earlier this month (as it seems all of them do, sooner or later) I had the unpleasant task of going back over my bills to see what companies I’d need to give a new credit card number. Among those many (Amazon, Apple,… Continue reading
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Mercy for the bereaved
I didn’t know Dave Goldberg, but I can’t count all the friends and relatives who were close to him. By all their accounts, he was a brilliant and wonderful guy, much loved and respected by everybody who knew and worked with him. Along with the rest of the world, I await word on what happened. So far that… Continue reading
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Captivity rules
In one corner sit me, Don Marti, Phil Windley, Dave Winer, Eben Moglen, John Perry Barlow, Cory Doctorow, Aral Balkan, Adriana Lukas, Keith Hopper, Walt Whitman, William Ernest Henley, the Indie Web people, the VRM development community, authors of the Declaration of Independence, and the freedom-loving world in general. We hold as self-evident that personal agency and… Continue reading
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Because freedom matters
After one of my reluctant visits to Facebook yesterday, I posted this there: If I were actually the person Facebook advertised to, I would be an impotent, elderly, diabetic, hairy (or hairless) philandering cancer patient, heart attack risk, snoring victim, wannabe business person, gambling and cruise boat addict, and possible IBM Cloud customer in need… Continue reading
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Sports as a propaganda laboratory
The other day a friend shared this quote from Michael Choukas‘ Propaganda Comes of Age (Public Affairs Press, 1965): This is not the propagandist’s aim. For him the validity of an image must be measured not by the degree of its fidelity, but by the response it may evoke. If it will induce the action he wishes,… Continue reading
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Finally, maybe, getting a podcast rolling
Hi, Liveblog fans. This post continues (or plays jazz with) this liveblog post, following my podcast learnings, live. As an old radio guy and an inveterate talker, I think I should be good at podcasting. Or at least that it’s worth trying. Which I have, many times. The results, so far, appear at here, at… Continue reading
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Blogging the #BlizzardOf2015 in #NYC that wasn’t
The blizzard hit coastal New England, not New York City. In fact, it’s still hitting. Wish I was there, because I love snow. Here in New York City we got pffft: about eight inches in Central Park: an average winter snowstorm. No big deal. I was set up with my GoPro to time-lapse accumulations on… Continue reading
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Let’s bring the cortado / piccolo to America
There are ideal ratios of coffee and milk, if you don’t want the flavor of either to fully prevail. To me the closest to the ideal ratio is what in Spain and Peets they call a cortado, some elsewhere call a gibraltar, and Australians and Kiwis call a piccolo (short for piccolo latte). This is a… Continue reading
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We’re all going to need clothes
In the physical world we know what privacy is and how it works. We know because we have worked out privacy technologies and norms over thousands of years. Without them we wouldn’t have civilization. Doors and windows are privacy technologies. So are clothes. So are manners respecting the intentions behind our own and others’ use of those things. Those manners… Continue reading
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Listening to Serial? Remember the Edgar Smith case.
I’m now four episodes into Serial, the hugely popular reality podcast from WBEZ and This American Life. In it reporter Sarah Koenig episodically tugs together many loose ends around the murder of Hae Min Lee, a Baltimore teenager, in 1999. The perp, said the cops and the proscecutor at the time, was former boyfriend Adnan… Continue reading
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Some thoughts on App Based Car Services (ABCS)
I started using Uber in April. According to my Uber page on the Web, I’ve had fifteen rides so far. But, given all the bad news that’s going down, my patronage of the company is at least suspended. As an overdue hedge, I just signed up with Lyft. I’m also looking at BlaBlaCar here in the U.K. (where I… Continue reading
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Summer vs. School
This was me in the summer of ’53, between Kindergarten and 1st Grade, probably in July, the month I turned six years old: I’m the one with the beer. And this was me in 1st Grade, Mrs. Heath’s class: I’m in the last row by the aisle with my back against the wall, looking lost, which… Continue reading