December 2007
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Losing our best
Bruce Steinberg was my best reader, one of my best email correspondents, and one of the best friends I’ve never met in the flesh. We always talked about getting together, but never made it work. This morning I received an email with news that Bruce passed away yesterday after a brief illness. He was 64.… Continue reading
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Less T, more V
As a photographer with nearly 18,000 shots on Flickr (and hundreds of thousands on hard drives), Dave Winer’s FlickrFan looks like a killer thing. I’m especially interested in turning our idle flatscreen “TV”s into useful ways to display the work photographers and services (such as the AP) that I like. When I get home to… Continue reading
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Y Hoosgot
A couple nights ago David Sifry floated an interesting idea past me: a LazyWeb facilitation service that would flow tweet or blog requests for answers through a bloglike site to which readers could subscribe. Something like that, anyway. I liked it because it looked to me like a Live Web service with VRM aspects as… Continue reading
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And the BSword Bingo Award winner is…
Cliff Baldridge. The self-described “Multi-Award Winning Super-Producer and Director” has just put out a press release that begins, SANTA BARBARA, Calif. & LOS ANGELES–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Santa Barbara Arts TV today announced that they have formed a content and advertising partnership with YouTube, now allowing the YouTube community to engage, interact and monetize the Exclusive, A-List… Continue reading
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Toward a VRM system for paying artists
In The RIAA is Right, Robert Scoble offers a tongue-in-cheek take on the RIAA’s insane idea that ripping one’s own CDs is illegal.* Among other things he says, 5. This behavior will make sure people buy (or steal) music directly from bands. See how Radiohead did it. By doing that the price for music… Continue reading
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In her view
Nice to see this interview with Lisa Gates, one of our good friends back in Santa Barbara. Continue reading
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A fist for Palm
Tristan Louis is done with Palm. While his tale of tech support woe (ask for support, fail to get it, vow not to continue supporting the company), it does contain an interesting veer from the typical to the surreal: a tech support supervisor who claimed to be the company CEO. The basic problem, as often… Continue reading
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The Twitter pulse of the Living Web
This story by Dennis Howlett, on how Twitter spread and processed news of the Bhutto assasination, casts light on the continuing birth of The Live Web. We also saw it a couple months back with coverage of the California fires near San Diego. And it’s still early. It’s important to remember that. Everything on the… Continue reading
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Toward more and better ways to relate
Here’s a Techcrunch story on a patent application by Tony Fadell, Senior Vice President of Apple’s iPod division. Under “Summary of the Invention”, it begins, A processing system is described that includes a wireless communication interface that wirelessly communicates with one or more wireless client devices in the vicinity of an establishment. The wireless… Continue reading
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It’s the Relationship, smarty
Think of markets as three overlapping circles: Transaction, Conversation and Relationship. Our financial system is Transaction run amok. Metasticized. Optimized at all costs. Impoverished in the Conversation department, and dismissive of Relationship entirely. We’ve been systematically eliminating Relationship for decades, excluding, devaluing and controlling human interaction wherever possible, to maximize efficiency and mechanization. Even the… Continue reading
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Best Breakfast in Boise. Or anywhere.
We kind of lucked into finding Goldy’s Breakfast Bistro in Boise. I just looked up best breakfast boise and there it was. The top result includes a review that says “Not only is Goldy’s the best breakfast place in Boise, it is one of the best I have experienced anywhere”. So we hopped in the… Continue reading
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Flying long
My sister Jan put up a nice photo series of our Aunt Grace Apgar, flying with our cousin Mark Crissman. Grace is 95 and doesn’t look or act a day over… hell, pick a number. Make it a low one. Her mom lived to 107, and Grace is in better shape at 95 than Grandma… Continue reading
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A white christmas after all
So we’re sitting at the airport in Denver, waiting for our delayed flight to Boise. Tomorrow we drive to Sun Valley. The delay is caused by snow, which is all over the ground here, and occassionally falling from the sky. There is snow in Boise too. And plenty at Sun Valley, to which I have… Continue reading
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Best or whatever
Geoff Livingston and Joseph Thornley agree on at least one thing. Krishna Kumar doesn’t. Continue reading
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Prophesies
This is the first slide from Turning the Tables: What happens when the users are really in charge — the talk I gave at LeWeb3 in Paris a couple weeks ago. The predictions are somewhat long-term. I’ll have some just for 2008 up soon at Linux Journal. All the LeWeb3 videos are up now, by… Continue reading
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It’s getting late
Actual dialog: Father: Want to track Santa? Son: Let’s look at The Onion. Continue reading
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Drifter snow
Best Christmas music video. Drifters. Circa 1955, as I recall. That’s Clyde McPhatter behind the white reindeer’s lip-sync. And Bill Pinkney as Santa. Or vice versa. Bonus Elvis link. Continue reading
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What’s wrong with this picture?
Nice, huh? It’s now minutes away from Dec 24. So it almost certainly won’t get there by Christmas. And I bought it early morning Dec 18, and paid extra for Second Day Air, to get it there by then. The site even encouraged buying because there was still plenty of time. But no email came.… Continue reading
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A challenge to telcos and cablecos everywhere
Over in Linux Journal: Why Big Compute and Big Storage will meet Big Pipe at the Last Mile. A sample: What you’re seeing here, at least partially (and ever more completely), is the new phone company business being re-invented from the back end forward. What makes AWS a phone company business is DevPay. Billing.… Continue reading