Uncategorized
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Killer “journalism”
Yesterday on the drive 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 this one… Continue reading
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Not just talk
Was just pointed to The Age of Conversation. Not sure I’m in it (don’t think I am, anyway). But hey, I’m glad to see others roll a snowball I helped start. Next up: The Age of Relationship. Continue reading
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Silver and linings
My main disappointment with living in Boston this winter is the crappy snow. I think we’ve had only one or two snows this winter that were not what they ephemistically call “wintry mix”: snow mixed with or changing to rain. This morning we had another nice little snow, about half an inch, that has since… Continue reading
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Live and kicking
Nice to read by Phil Windley that Kathy Sierra is back in the game. Continue reading
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Buzz on buzz
Buzz Bruggeman, to Kevin O’Keefe: It’s very difficult for me to imagine today that a successful lawyer would not have an active blog. It’s sort of like imagining that they wouldn’t have business cards, or imagining that they wouldn’t have their number in a phone book — it’s a way to discover them, a… Continue reading
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Abandoning a stinking ship
We should have known the gig was going to be up when Hillary’s handlers made “conversation” a buzztheme of her campaign early on. Wrote Todd Ziegler (at that last link), The tagline “Let the Conversation Begin” is plastered all over her site and she begins her annoucement video with this quote: “I’m not just… Continue reading
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Conversation convocation
I’ll be at There’s a New Conversation, in New York, on the evening afternoon of Feb 13. Subtitled, Cluetrain Manifesto – 10 years later. Numbers aren’t really ages, of course. While Cluetrain hit the webwaves in early ’99 and the book was written that summer (to come out in January of ’00, just in time… Continue reading
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Remembering the Good Old Day
Tony wishes Moxie a Happy Birthday, recalling the July 12, 2002 party at which many L.A. bloggers, including yours truly, met. Here’s my own rundown on the event. Here are PatioPundit (Martin Devon)’s pix and commentary. Nice to see both his blog and his archives are still up. Perhaps not so nice to see he… Continue reading