Uncategorized
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Clothing is a privacy system
Some clothing we need. That’s the kind that keeps us warm, or shielded from sunlight, or from getting our feet burned or cut up. Some clothing we wear because we like the way it makes us look, or how it gives us a way to conform with social conventions, or to flaut the same. But… Continue reading
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Surf’s up! Look north
According to this… … the Aurora is on. The Kp Index has hit 5, and a geomagnetic storm is on. Here’s today’s SpaceWeather on the matter. Follow the links there. Bear in mind that the aurora are curtains of light up to a thousand miles high. So if the auroral oval is pushed down over… Continue reading
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PR’s problems, 20 years later
I was near the end of my career as a PR guy when I wrote the essay below for the January 1992 issue of Upside. Since then Upside has been erased. Some bits of it still persist on the Internet Archive, but nothing before 1996. But I did save my own draft of the piece, and put it up… Continue reading
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A Mammoth Perspective
For the last three days I’ve been skiing at Mammoth Mountain, an 11,059-foot volcano built to its current shape between 110,000 and 57,000 years ago. It is still active. The mountain’s last eruption of rock and lava was about 1200 years ago, essentially in the geologic present. Lethal gasses burp out of fissures, and hot springs… Continue reading
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Comments vs. Likes, Tweets, Shares and +1s
At the bottom of How Luther went viral: Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation, an excellent essay in the latest Economist, I found this… … and decided to leave the first comment. You can read it here. Continue reading
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What’s popular vs. What’s used
In terms of sales, Android is tops in smarphones. According to this ComScore press release, Google had a 46.3% market share of U.S. smartphone platform sales (with Android) in October, up 4.4% from July. At 28.1%, Apple’s iOS share was up 1%. Apple’s share of total subscribers was 10.8%, up 1% from July. Yet when… Continue reading
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Fall for trees
Harvard Yard thinks it’s October. The Red, Sugar and Norway maples, the Scarlet and Pin oaks, the dogwoods and hawthorns, have all been at peak Fall color around Boston the last few days. The weather has been glorious too, hovering around 70° in the afternoons. Lots of people walking around in shorts, the sidewalk cafés… Continue reading
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Back to Blogging
Today is the first day in months when my first question wasn’t, “What can I do to finish (or improve) the book today?” That’s because I turned in the (hopefully) final draft yesterday morning. Details: The book is The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge and the publisher is Harvard Business Review Press. You can… Continue reading
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Ten years later
I’ve been listening to the repeat broadcast of the Howard Stern Show, recorded live in New York as the 9/11 events unfolded. It’s been a transporting experience. The anger, bewilderment, confusion and fear are all there. I was at our house in Montecito, California when it happened. My sister Jan called right after the first… Continue reading
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Restaurant redux
The best Romans we ever knew were former ex-pats there: Charles and Doris Muscatine. We didn’t know them well, having met only once, for dinner in the early ’90s, at their son Jeff’s house in the Bay Area. But it turned out we were going to be in Rome at the same time, not long after that… Continue reading
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Al Jazeera in Egypt is cable’s ‘Sputnik moment’
Cable companies: Add Al Jazeera English *now* Jeff Jarvis commands, correctly, on his blog — and also in Huffpo, under the headine We Want Our Al Jazeera English Now. For me now was a few minutes ago, when I read both items on the family iPad, which has been our main news portal since the… Continue reading
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Jay Rosen and the Watchdog Web
I have to say what nearly fifty thousand Twitter followers already know: nobody does a better job of following and writing about what’s going on in journalism than Jay Rosen. The dude just nails it, over and over and over again. His latest, From Judith Miller to Julian Assange: Our press somehow got itself on… Continue reading
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Rethinking network neutrality
For whatever reasons, network neutrality has become more of a political football than a technical principle. Lately, however, its advocates have come up with some original new approaches that may de-politicize the matter to some degree, and cause progress (or at least conversation) to occur. One is John Palfrey’s Citizen’s Choice Framework for Net Neutrality.… Continue reading
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Outlining fun
Hanging here with Dave, getting outlining going again here. This is our second test post. This is an update. Continue reading
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Testes testes 1-2
It’s nice to know Doc’s inner-four-year-old is alive and well. Please don’t worry his site wasn’t hacked. This is just a test. Your friends, Dave and Doc Continue reading
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Reliable old blogging
So here I am on a street in Saverne, France, getting on the Net over a rare open wi-fi hot spot. I was going to tweet something about it, but Twitter is down. So here we are. There’s one Net, one Web and one Twitter. Many paths through the formers and but one through the… Continue reading
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Earth to Hollywood
Please get rid of the @#$%^& region coding. See, our family meant to bring along some movies when we came to Switzerland for our holiday vacation. Forgetting them was my fault. But not being able to watch other movies, that we would be glad to pay for, on our laptop, is not our fault. It’s… Continue reading
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Vroom with a view
I’m not there, in that shot above. That was in Denver, en route from Santa Barbara to Boston last Monday. Now I’m at a different airport — O’Hare in Chicago — en route from Boston to Las Vegas. Still, I thought it as a nice shot in a pretty set. So there ya go. Continue reading