Social
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Fry Day
Not good The forecast for New Year's Day in Pasadena is rain. We will be there with lots of friends for the Rose Parade and Bowl (where our team, the #1 Indiana Hoosiers, is playing Alabama). Time fries when you're faving hum. Just a pause in the midst to say a year is too short Continue reading
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Just when you thought
—shit at Meta was stinky enough, Reuters says Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show. Don Marti explains some ways that Facebook ads are optimized for deceptive advertising. Also, Fake Meta Customers Driving Demand for Fake Products and Services. —it looked like Indiana was finally going to lose a football Continue reading
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Post flow
A watershed* is land that drains through a river to the sea or into an inland body of water. That’s what came to mind for me when I read this from Dave Winer: If you want to help the open web, when you write something you’re proud of on a social web site like Bluesky Continue reading
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Home is where one’s butt is
I don’t want to explain why we’re bivouac’d at a friend’s house in San Marino. What matters, for the purpose of this post, is that we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the Covid-19 pandemic. But hey, it’s a nice house in a nice town. My only complaint is that there’s nothing resembling an office Continue reading
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Choose One
A few days ago, in Figuring the Future, I sourced an Arnold Kling blog post that posed an interesting pair of angles toward outlook: a 2×2 with Fragile <—> Robust on one axis and Essential <—> Inessential on the other. In his sort, essential + fragile are hospitals and airlines. Inessential + fragile are cruise ships Continue reading
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More on Zoom and privacy
[This is the second of four posts. The last of those, Zoom’s new privacy policy., visits the company’s positive response to input such as mine here. So you might want to start with that post (because it’s current) and look at the other three, including this one, after that.] Zoom needs to clean up its Continue reading
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Here’s hoping our Age of Ageism is a brief one
A few days ago a Twitter exchange contained an “OK Boomer” response to one of my tweets. At the time I laughed it off, tweeting back a pointer to Report: Burying, Cremating Baby Boomers To Generate $200 Trillion In GDP, which ran five years ago in The Onion. But it got me thinking that “OK Continue reading
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What happened to nonviolence?
Two graphs tell some of the story. First is how often “nonviolence” and “non-violence” appeared in books until 2008, when Google quit keeping track: Second is search trends for “nonviolence” and “non-violence” since 2004, which is when Google started keeping track of trends: Clearly nonviolence wasn’t a thing at all until 1918, which is when Mohandas Gandhi started Continue reading
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How #adblocking matures from #NoAds to #SafeAds
Take a look at any ad, for anything, online. Do you know whether or not it’s meant for you personally — meaning that you’ve been tracked somehow, and that tracking has been used to aim the ad at you? Chances are you don’t, and that’s a problem. Sometimes the tracking is obvious, especially with retargeted Continue reading
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On @Cluetrain, @advertising @social and #NewClues
In There Is No More Social Media — Just Advertising, Mike Proulx (@McProulx) begins, Fifteen years ago, the provocative musings of Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger set the stage for a grand era of social media marketing with the publication of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” and their vigorous declaration of “the end of business as usual.” Continue reading
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Time for digital emancipation
Civilization is a draft. Provisional. Scaffolded. Under construction. For example: That’s Thomas Jefferson‘s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration hasn’t changed since July 4, 1776, but the Constitution built on it has been amended thirty-three times, so far. The thirteenth of those abolished slavery, at the close of the Civil War, seventy-seven years after the Constitution was ratified. Today we are Continue reading
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Digging a new River for the NYTimes
Dave says “The New York Times home page needs a re-think.” But he doesn’t stop there, because thinking isn’t enough and complaining is worse than useless. (As I’ve often found. For example, here.) We need to hack up something new, different, better and — most of all — simpler and easier to implement than anything Continue reading
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On manners, privacy and evolution
In this comment and this one under my last post, Ian Falconer brings up a bunch of interesting points, some of which are summarized by these paragraphs from his first comment… Here in the UK most people over 40 will remember placing calls via a human operator. A real life person who had a direct interaction with Continue reading
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Rebuilding the future
In Bubkes, Stephen Lewis has lately been blogging with depth and insight on many topics — music, architecture, culture, infrastructure and events historic and current — in two cities with which he is intimately familiar: Istanbul and Sofia. In Taksim Underpass: Ask Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Jane Jacobs, and Robert Moses, he writes, By itself, the Continue reading
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What’s right with QR codes
I first heard QR codes called “robot barf” yesterday, when JP said it. Got a good laugh out of it too, because: yeah, if a robot could barf, that’s what it would look like. Digging back, it looks like the first source of the joke is Andy Roberts here, or Jon Mitchell here, both of whom posted Continue reading
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Facebook’s shark-jump advertising moves
I just looked up facebook advertising on Google News, and got these results: More Facebook Ads Are Coming, Your Friends Will Finally Hit Delete Forbes-8 hours ago Now, Facebook is doing a pretty smart thing here rolling out the more prominent advertising along with an updated user experience, but will… Facebook’s New News Feed Is a Binder Full of Advertising The Atlantic Wire-4 hours Continue reading
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Following Nemo
6:42am — Flights are starting to land at JFK, I see by Flightaware. Not yet at LGA, EWR or the New England airports. More links: Airport delays Flight cancellations It’s getting light out, and the snow has stopped. 6:10am — Dig: New York snowplow maps Live New York snowplow map Instructions for the snowplow map, Continue reading
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A crowd for personal clouds
Tomorrow evening, Tuesday, will be a meetup I wish I could attend in San Francisco. The subject is personal clouds. We’re not talking about storage here, though that’s part of it, just like storage is part of your PC or your phone. We’re talking about your own personal space, which you control, on the Net, Continue reading
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Maybe we’re the only hope for Apple maps
Take a look at these screenshots of maps on my iPhone 4, running iOS 6: On the left, maps.google.com, made mobile. On the right, Apple’s new Maps app, which comes with iOS 6. The location in both cases is Harvard Square, not far from where I am right now. Note how the Apple app not Continue reading
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After Bitly’s fail
[This post was read by Bitly folks, who reached out appreciatively. The thread continues with a follow-up post here.] Last night huge thunderstorms moved across New Hampshire, and later across Boston. There was even a tornado watch (the red outline north of Keene, in the radar image on the left, from the NOAA.) So I Continue reading