Photography

  • Furlsday

    See you there! Eli Pariser will address the question What Might “Public Parks of the Internet” Look Like? at 4 pm Eastern today. Register to attend here. And here is the Zoom. Brief observations of a perfect place Photos of Pink Sands Beach on Harbour Island: January 31st, February 2nd. Continue reading

  • States of Pay

    Say Aaaahg! I try to publish interesting and useful stuff every day. And yet. And yet. Of the 17+ million views my photos on Flickr have had since 2004, the most-viewed, by far, is the scary one above*. Second-most is this one. Less dental, but just in-your-face (and mine). *All those gold crowns and inlays Continue reading

  • Where Has All the Interest Gone?

    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

  • 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

  • This is a Test. Or a Taste. Or both.

    This is a Test. Or a Taste. Or both.

    What see ye? I shot the photo above last night on approach to SFO. My window seat was on the left side of the plane. Tell me where this is, what the two most standout features are, and what was happening in the brigher one at the time. Just for fun. No rewards. I’ll say Continue reading

  • Tuesday, 15 July 2025

    When companies take delivery, the results will be huge. The Cluetrain Will Run from Customers to Companies is about making The Cluetrain Manifesto come true 26 years after it was posted. Redraw your own conclusions. Just one air travel adventure. Cable is toast. And free TV from an antenna is crumbs. Nearly half of all TV watching Continue reading

  • Wednesday,  25 June 2025

    Toward new dances in the online marketplace. Dig CC Signals, from Creative Commons.  It's good stuff. Go read it. Also this, which calls it "A New Social Contract for the Age of AI." Here's a .pdf presenting current thinking and planning behind the project. The CC Signals Implementation page is where the work comes closest to Continue reading

  • 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

  • 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

  • Hear in Near L.A.

    Just loving the hang time we got yesterday with Tony after two long flights and one short drive from LAX. Continue reading

  • A Christmas Gift to My Families

    A few weeks ago, my sister Jan and I drove a cache of archival stuff from her garage in North Carolina to my office in Indiana. One plastic container was filled with boxes and carousels of slides nobody had seen for many decades. I also brought along my parents’ slide projector, and digitized each slide Continue reading

  • Some remodeling work

    As Dave says here, we’re remodeling this blog a bit, starting with the title image, which for the last few years has been a portrait of me at work, drawn by the fashion illustrator Gregory Wier-Quitton. My likeness online is not in short supply. Here’s a sampling from a DuckDuckGo image search for my name: Continue reading

  • A Santa Barbara itinerary from ChatGPT

    I asked ChatGPT for a three-day itinerary to give visitors to Santa Barbara. Here ya go: Day 1: Start the day with breakfast at the Shoreline Beach Cafe, which has a beautiful view of the ocean. After breakfast, head to Knapp’s Castle for a scenic hike and exploration of the ruins of a 20th century Continue reading

  • A workflow challenge

    I shoot a lot of pictures. Most are from altitude (such as the above). But lots are of people and places; for example, here are a few I shot at DWebCamp last summer with my new Sony A7 IV camera (to which I migrated last year after many years shooting Canon): Importing and curating photos Continue reading

  • Remembering Bill Swindaman

    That was Bill Swindaman on the last day I saw him: June 2nd of this year, at a gathering of friends from the best community I’ve ever known: a real one, of friends living in a place. The place was called Oxbow, and it was a collection of mismatched houses on a short dirt road Continue reading

  • Places

    Let’s say you want to improve the Wikipedia page for Clayton Indiana with an aerial photograph. Feel free to use the one above. That’s why I shot it, posted it, and licensed it permissively. It’s also why I put a helpful caption under it, and some call-outs in mouse-overs. It’s also why I did the Continue reading

  • From Hollywood Park Racetrack to SoFi Stadium

    Hollywood Park Racetrack is gone. In its place is SoFi Stadium, the 77,000-seat home of Los Angeles’ two pro football teams and much else, including the 6,000-seat YouTube Theater. There’s also more to come in the surrounding vastness of Hollywood Park, named after the racetrack. Wikipedia says the park— consists of over 8.5 million square feet (790,000 m2) Continue reading

  • On windowseat photography

    A visitor to aerial photos on my Flickr site asked me where one should sit on a passenger plane to shoot pictures like mine. This post expands on what I wrote back to him. Here’s the main thing: you want a window seat on the side of the plane shaded from the Sun, and away Continue reading

  • Lens vs. Camera

    I did a lot of shooting recently with a rented Sony FE 70-200mm F2.8 GM OSS II lens, mounted on my 2013-vintage Sony a7r camera. One result was the hummingbird above, which you’ll find among the collections here and here. Also, here’s a toddler… …and a grandma (right after she starred as the oldest alumnus at a Continue reading

  • Clearing things up

    Back in 2009 I shot the picture above from a plane flight on approach to SFO. On Flickr (at that link) the photo has had 16,524 views and has been faved 420 times as of now. Here’s the caption: These are salt evaporation ponds on the shores of San Francisco Bay, filled with slowly evaporating Continue reading