VRM
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The Biggest Thing
In his latest blog, Dave says, “If I were running WordPress, my first priority would be to get something exciting out that even non-WordPress users would talk about. Then do it again.” He follows with a good suggestion. I have one too. I’ve told Matt about it, and he was receptive. But it’s not the Continue reading
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What Companies Deserve a Free Customer award?
Customer Commons has taken on the job of opening a true blue ocean: a vast, uncontested market space where customers are free and respected for what they bring to business as independent participants working at full agency. Specifically, free customers— A Free Customer Award would be fun for Customer Commons to give to businesses that Continue reading
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Twos Day
One small test I wanted to know when the transmitter site for Denver radio station KHOW/630 (above), which I shot from an airplane in 2018, was built. So I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. Three had the answer, sourcing this report by Scott Fybush from January 2018. (Answer:1979.) The AI that found nothing was Continue reading
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Back in the Straddle Again
New frontiers for reality In case you’re wondering how MyTerms will change everything (for example, by getting you real privacy online and obsolescing cookie notices), the first proofs-of-concept will be coming from JLINC. Here’s the open protocol. Here’s the blog. And here’s Iain Henderson’s blog, which does a great job of explaining how MyTerms opens paths Continue reading
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Early Day
Hope he doesn't block my double-shot I took Luke Kornet's coffee test, scored high, and wrote a comment. Go there I spent most of today writing Making a New News Business over at the ProjectVRM blog. It begins, In the dawning decades of our new Digital Age, the news business has shrunk from a galaxy Continue reading
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Paths
We’re in the phone book! We’re real now! MyTerms now has a YouTube channel. The one item there, so far, is a short and remarkably good NotebookLM summary of my hour-long talk, The Case for MyTerms, at Indiana University. Also, Gemini failed. I still don’t know who she was. I think we could have powered two Continue reading
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Toward a Proof of Concept for MyTerms
I’m thinking out loud here about how to get development rolling for MyTerms. Right now I see three pieces required for a proof of concept: When we first thought about this at ProjectVRM in the late ’00s, we saw a browser header that looked like this: The ⊂ and the ⊃ are for the personal Continue reading
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On Customer Captivity
Think about all the things that give you global scale online: Now think about what traps you: And now think about how much business the latter system prevents rather than enables. Such as having your own VRM tools for working with all the world’s CRM systems. Among other graces, VRM+CRM would give both customers and Continue reading
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Everwhen
Same cancer, different tumor Show of hands: Who wants surveillance pricing? Sez Wikipedia, at that link, “Surveillance pricing is a form of dynamic pricing where a consumer’s personal data and behavior is used to determine their willingness to pay.[1] This form of price discrimination assesses price sensitivity for a products or services based on an Continue reading
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How to Civilize Digital Life
The Right to Privacy is a brief written by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren and published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890. It has not been improved upon since, because what it says is so damn obvious and simple: that the right to privacy is “the right to be let alone.” Those six words Continue reading
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A Small Request to the Goodwill Folks
Please find pricing labels that stick well enough to do their job, and the customer can get off without too much work. Thanks! P.S. In an unrelated matter, Grammarly suggested rewriting that second sentence this way: Please find pricing labels that adhere well enough to perform their intended function, yet can be easily removed by Continue reading
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The Case for MyTerms
We know more than we can tell. That was how Michael Polanyi distinguished between tacit and explicit knowing. We may know tacitly how we form speech, ride a bike, or sense when to shake hands with someone, or hug them. But we can’t explain all the signals and mechanisms involved. Not explicitly. In the natural Continue reading
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If you like public broadcasting, be customers, not just consumers
Public broadcasting has three markets: Listeners and viewers. Philanthropies (wealthy individuals and foundations). Government agencies (primarily the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB). I saw the writing on the wall for #3 in 2010. (Actually much earlier, but that’s the oldest link I could find.) It has been clear for decades that Republicans have no Continue reading
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Wednesday
Advertising corrupts and digital advertising corrupts absolutely. When my wife bought her new iPhone 16, the salesperson showed off Apple Intelligence by demonstrating how it would help her shop by pointing the camera at something… or whatever, I don’t remember. What I do remember was that the salesperson, and presumably Apple, assumed that most of Continue reading
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Friday
Asking for a cohort. How many different sellers, or one seller with different names, are (or is) pushing a coffee cup with the design above? But the problem is a U.S. one. Traffic to this blog jumped 313% today, thanks to Hacker News pointing to Online Sports Betting is for Losers, which was posted two Continue reading
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How to Make Customers Hate You
Exhibit A: Welcome to negative option billing at work. Other labels include “sludge,” “dark patterns,” “gotcha pricing,” “subscription trapping,” and “bait-and-default.” Works like this: offer a service at a discount that jumps up to a high “regular” price after the discount runs out, and count on the customer forgetting when the jump happens. It’s a Continue reading
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Re-reading Material
On our new digital age:Some New Ways to Look at Infrastructure was the first draft ofWhat does the Internet make of us?, but is worth reading because the stuff about infrastructure mattered and was dropped in the second piece. (2017)Will Our Digital Lives Leave a Fossil Record? (2020)How early is Digital Life? (2020) On the decline Continue reading
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TGI-Fi
Whole Lotta Badshit Going On. The latest 404 has a weekend worth of it. Surprised this one didn't come sooner. Want the feds to stop funding public broadcasting? Fine. There's an argument for that. (I made one, way back in 2008.) But bias, which is everywhere (because the voice from nowhere is insincere and boring), Continue reading
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Real Agency
I nominate agency as Word of the Year for 2025. I don’t nominate agentic, which is suddenly hot shit: See, agency is a noun, and agentic is an adjective. And, as Strunk and White taught us, Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs… it is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that Continue reading
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The Real Intention Economy
As a noun phrase, “The intention economy” first appeared in a Linux Journal column by that title, written by me in March 2006. A few months later, when I became a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, I started ProjectVRM for the purpose of making that economy happen. Six years after that, I wrote this book, Continue reading