Uncategorized

  • SeeMail

    Who else reads your e-mail? is an op-ed by my colleague Harry Lewis, in the Christain Science Monitor. At its core is a loophole that’s sort of a peephole:   The Fourth Amendment states:   “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,… Continue reading

  • Roast maverick

    If just some of this is true, it’s bad news for McCain. Continue reading

  • Talking to lenses

    It’s been suggested that Sarah Palin hasn’t had much media training. On the contrary, she had plenty enough as a sports reporter. Check this out: In that video, from her days reporting for an Anchorage TV station, she’s clearly not Major Market. But you can see how her persona today is a combination of aw-shucks-doggone-it… Continue reading

  • Speaking of blogging and, um, stuff

    Here’s a Web Pro News interview of yours truly by Abby Johnson at Blogworld in Las Vegas a couple weeks back. I think I said “um” about a hundred times. Gotta work on that. Continue reading

  • Quote du jour

    Shel Israel: I think that www.whitehouse.gov should just show the Fail Whale from now through the next inauguration. Continue reading

  • Same you can believe in

    Just arrived at LAX, taking a few minutes before flying off to LAV (to which I would like to append oratory) to post a couple of pointers to what I read and heard on the plane. First is A Conservative for Obama, by Wick Allison, who actually gave the maximum sum to McCain earlier this… Continue reading

  • Putting the buyer in charge

    The Buyer’s Envelope, Please is a post over at the VRM blog in which I do some thinking out loud about a topic I’m still learning about. Continue reading

  • omfg

    I’m currently #2 on this list, behind Clay Shirky. (In spite of what may be the worst picture ever taken of me.) Context from Dan Thornton. Continue reading

  • Happy Birthday, Pop

    Today is the 100th birthday of my father, Allen H. Searls. He only lived about 71 of those years, but they were all good ones, and I miss him still. I’m writing this from Portland, Maine, on our way up to his sister Grace’s place near Booth Bay, where the family will gather to reminisce… Continue reading

  • Markets under reconstruction

    Here’s my report (with links to as much as I could gather in a short time) on the VRM Workshop, over at the ProjectVRM blog. It was an outstanding event. Lots of projects and subjects were not only vetted with the whole group, but moved forward very effectively. Thanks to everybody who came, or participated… Continue reading

  • July 4 workfire

    Here is a Fox News video* that tours the Gap Fire area from the air. It’s clearly submitted by an amateur using a helicopter, judging from the monolog, flavored with casual explitives. To those (like me) familiar with the landscape, the video does an excellent job of showing how “perimeter” is a mileading notion. The… Continue reading

  • Hospital food never tasted so good

    Got my first “thin” meal with my second breakfast this morning. The first breakfast was the usual broth and tea. Then for lunch I had my first real meal: baked scrod, a salad with strawberries and dried cranberries with a few almond slices and a lowfat dressing. Chicken noodle soup with a few crackers. Generic… Continue reading

  • Killer “journalism”

    Yesterday on the drive down 101 from SFO to Palo Alto, I hit SCAN on the rental car radio. Aside from the sports shows and the still-awesome KPIG (with a little signal on 1510 out of Oakland… check it out), most of what I heard was partisanship at all costs. Eventually you get slips like… Continue reading

  • Hope for old fat guys everywhere

    While the kid had his violin lesson this evening at his school, I went out and shot hoops for as long as it took. Hits vs. Misses, all shots from beyond the foul line in any direction. When the kid came out, I was up 42 to 37. After we started playing HORSE, a couple… Continue reading

  • More Motown

    It’s a warm breezy day in Cambridge, a perfect pre-summer day for the Motown Orgy that WHRB is holding right now. I caught it first this morning on my way back from dropping the kid off at school, and it’s been hard to tune away since. Great radio, even though it’s weird getting schooled by… Continue reading

  • Time to stop blowing

    In The connection between PR spam, global warming and magazines, Chris Anderson of Wired addresses something which, as both a magazine writer and reader, I truly hate:   …I must concede that this problem of negative externalities is one that my own industry overlooks, too. Take those “blow-in” subscription cards that we put in our… Continue reading

  • What comes after blogging

    Thinking it over, seems to me that blogging has for the most part become flogging, but that trying to rebadge the former as the latter is a job for Sysiphus (about whom Camus says some interesting stuff here). A while back Dave Winer said he would quit blogging one of these days. At the time… Continue reading

  • Quote du decade

    Net Neutrality? That horse left the barn, got on a boat and went to Europe long ago. — DeWayne Hendricks, speaking at F2C DeWayne is leaving the country. Going offshore. Because he’s giving up on geeks here in the U.S. We’re not fighting for the Net, he says. And we need to. A link: ipsphere.org.… Continue reading

  • Quote du jour

    Cable is not a monopoly. You can choose from any cable company you want in America, just by moving your house. — Brad Templeton, at F2C Continue reading

  • Journaling on journalism

    Taking notes on the Media Re:public gathering here in Los Angeles. “Its not clear to me that one unit of increase in media equals one unit of increase in democracy” — Ernest Wilson, of the USC Annenberg School of Communications. Arianna Huffington: “Bloggers suffer from compulsive disclosure disorder, and journalists suffer from attention deficit disorder.”… Continue reading