Doc Searls Weblog

History

• John Philip Sousa, “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” 1906, at ExplorePAhistory.com. Pull-quote: “The host of mechanical reproducing machines, in their mad desire to supply music for all occasions, are offering to supplant the illustrator in the class room, the dance orchestra, the home and public singers and players, and so on. Evidently they believe no field too large for their incursions, no claim too extravagant. But the further they can justify those claims, the more noxious the whole system becomes.” He was arguing against the player piano, the phonograph, everything. The original was published in the (very) late Appleton’s Magazine, Vol. 8 (1906).

Culture & Photography

• Bubkes
  • Neo-Mayan Facades of the West Bronx: One Full View and One Detail
  • A West Bronx Courtyard: Fire Escapes, Razor Wire, and the Substance of Life
  • Retailing At The Urban Edge: “Gino Flea Market, New & Used”
  • Urban Sounds, Urban Portaiture: “La Reina” – The Queen – Celia Cruz
  • Dancing At The Urban Edge: Coney Island Weekend Afternoons
  • Faces At The Urban Edge: Ginger and Fred, Bewigged Ticket Taker and Solitary Sequined Dancer
  • Elegance At The Urban Edge: A Saturday Afternoon Dance Partner
  • Sabbath At The Urban Edge: Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Volley Ball, the Sea and the Horizon
• Ephemeral New York
  • Broken remnants of a Norfolk Street Synagogue
  • 99 years at 7th Avenue and 23rd Street
  • East Village’s lovliest 19th Century bell
  • The low-rise city that surrounded Grand Central
  • Saving murals from the Hotel McAlpin at Herald Square
• Speaking of the last item above, here is a stamp for WMCA at Antique Radio. The stamp was issued when the station was born in the mid-’20s, atop the Hotel McAlpin, for which its call letters stood. The stamp says “341 meters,” which is roughly 880 on the AM dial, the position now held by WCBS. When the FRC (predecessor of the FCC) assigned stations to actual channels, WMCA moved to 570, where it remains. It also shared time there with WNYC, and had an involvement with WPCH (which stood for Park Central Hotel, which only took down the long-abandoned towers on the hotel a few years ago). Today WMCA and WNYC are back together, sharing a three-tower transmitting rig in New Jersey, to which WMCA moved in 1947 from its prior location, which it yielded to make room for LaGuardia Airport expansion. Here is an amazing history of New York City radio, followed by a series of charts showing which channels different stations used at different times, and their call letter changes.

Tech

• Bob Frankston on the Internet of Things.
• Why your API is your strategy. By Steven Wilmott of 3Scale. It answers Why you probably don’t need an API Strategy, by Daniel Jacobson at TNW.
• The API Economy is Coming Fast. By Byron Deeter in VentureBeat.
• The Apple Era begins as Microsoft, Google shift to a hardware centric model. By Daniel Eran Dilger in Apple Insider

Surveillance

• Why IBM Throws Another Billion at Linux (With NSA-Designed Backdoor). By Wolf Richter in Naked Capitalism and Testosterone Pit.
• Loophole in iBeacon could let iPhones guard your likes instead of bombard you with coupons. By Stacey Higginbotham in Gigaom.

Hellbound handbasketry

• Nuclear weapons: an accident waiting to happen. By Eric Schlosser in The Guardian.

Marketing

• IBM’s Watson Set to Revolutionize Marketing.
• KBS+ Simplifies Language Of Internet Marketing: Drops ‘R’ And ‘E,’ Focuses On Intent. By Joe Mandese in MediaPost.