Doc Searls Weblog

For today’s entries, I’m noting which linked pieces require you to turn off tracking protection, meaning tracking is required by those publishers. I’m also annotating entries with hashtags and organizing sections into bulleted lists.

#AdBlocking and #Advertising

• Jack Trout died. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (co-written with Al Ries) did for advertising what The Elements of Style did for writing. And it’s as canonical as ever.
• The inventor of Adblock tells us he wrote the code as a ‘procrastination project’ at university — and he’s never made money from it (@larakiara in Business Insider) #adblocking
• A brief #history of adblocking shows it’s not a new problem
  (Lori Goldberg in eConsultuancy).
• Wikipedia’s article on #adblocking. Too thin. Needs #history added, citing at least the two items above.
• The State of Ad Blocking and Online Ads: An Interview with Doc Searls (Matthew Maier in AdBlock) Pull quote: “What’s working is what has always worked: brand advertising in legacy print and broadcast media, and search advertising in the online world. Ads targeted at populations (rather than individuals) online also work, to the degrees that people are not bothered or creeped out by them. Not working is tracking-based ‘direct’ adtech, which succeeds because it’s called advertising, looks like advertising, and benefits from corporate appetites for the biggest possible data, and lots of maths to rationalize the expense.”
• An Ad Network That Helps Fake News Sites Earn Money Is Now Asking Users To Report Fake News (Craig Silverman in BuzzFeed) Subhead: “In response to queries from BuzzFeed News, Revcontent removed four fake news publishers from its network.” BTW, via @PrivacyBadger I currently block seven of the eleven potential trackers on BuzzFeed.
• HomePod, death to autoplay, and a smarter #Apple News: These are the key Apple updates for #publishers (Joshua Benton @jbenton in NiemanLab) Subhead: “Apple, like Google, is using its position in the browser market to try to control elements of the advertising market.” This begins to show how Apple can help separate advertising #wheat from #adtech chaff. Because publishers need the wheat, and are getting cancer from the chaff. And it’s good to have publishers, no?

#Apple

• With the #iMac Pro, Apple Rediscovers the #Creative Class (Brian Barrett in Wired, tracking required). A first class computer with first class pricing. Alas. Yo #apple, just sell me the screen. Or somebody tell me who makes that screen and I’ll buy just that.
• The Coolest Features in iOS 11 (Chloe Albanesius in PC Mag) Only #4, #multitasking, fully matters. The list also missed a big one: easy scanning of QR codes (Buster Hein @bst3r in CultOfMac)
• Apple, podcasting’s dominant (and mostly benign) middleman, is rebooting how it delivers shows (Nicholas Quah in NiemanLab)
  Subhead: “Plus—#Gimlet makes a curious acquisition, a new run at fixing podcast discovery, and an under-the-hood technical shift.” On the whole, #podcast listening is still an ordeal, imho. I do like what RadioPublic is trying to do on the serendipity front, however. And what Dave Winer (to me, #podcasting’s primary inventor) offers in great simplicity with #Podcatch. He explains it here.
• #VR is in #Apple’s future, but #AR is the logical short term play (Brian Heater @bheater in TechCrunch) I don’t care about either, but I do appreciate TechCrunch putting Brian’s #@-handle in there. Same props go to @NiemanLab and @larakiara above and this next one too:
• Does the #HomePod offer #hifi #audio quality? Here are the early verdicts … (Ben Lovejoy @benlovejoy in 9to5 Mac) Here’s Apple;s HomePod page. The real distinction here is #privacy and the #price you pay for it. Privacy is a huge #Apple advantage over Amazon and Google (see https://www.apple.com/privacy/), but they don’t make that advantage fully clear in their promo poop about the product, two links back. But others do. See here—
• Apple reveals HomePod, a #privacy-focused smart #assistant (Zach Whittaker in ZDnet) Subhead: Throwing shade at its two data-hungry virtual assistant competitors, Amazon and Google, the iPhone maker said that nobody has “quite nailed it yet.” Pull-quote: “Apple’s logic is that, for the most part, it doesn’t want your data. Federighi reiterated that many of the advanced deep learning and artificial intelligence analysis — such as finding your location, facial recognition in photos, and setting calendar reminders — is done on the device, shutting Apple out of the loop — preventing anyone from asking Apple for data it doesn’t have. But for a company that doesn’t want your data — to make Siri better, it has increasingly been asking for it. Apple contends that it still doesn’t want to see your information.” Some #disambiguation is required there.
• Why Does Apple Think It Can Get Away With Selling #Overpriced Stuff? (Mark Wilson in Co.Design) Pull-quote: “However, if Apple has any particular hope, it’s this: Amazon and Google are both invasive with consumer data. These companies track our activity largely with the goal of selling us something at just the right moment. Apple is far more transparent. It’s actively pushing machine learning to the device level by developing an on-device machine learning #API and working on a specialized machine learning chip to bring advanced AI to your phone, theoretically, without all your data going to a server, where it might be accessible by the government, advertisers, and more. It’s making cross-device #encryption a standard, which means a federal agent who seizes your phone at a border crossing—which happened during the Muslim ban—can’t as easily download its contents and read it all. And most of all, that new HomePod speaker, powered by Siri, will anonymize and encrypt everything you say. That means your private questions are not tied to your Apple ID for later reference. Such is not the case for Amazon’s and Google’s assistants. Apple has and will make trade-offs to protect consumer privacy. (Many of us, at the end of the day, get some value out of a Google knowing our history of things we’ve searched, even if it’s constantly #creepy.) It might not work, but at least we’re getting a clear picture of Apple’s big gamble going into the next decade: that people will continue paying more than they should for hardware, with the hope that it’s not just nicely designed, but that it operates with discretion, too.” All fine, but he misses another reason people pay more for Apple stuff: customer #support, especially at Apple Stores. Amazon and Google can’t, and don’t, compete.

#Photography

• Where my photos show up in  : Gizmodo, Scientific American (again), VentureBeat, BlogThinkBig, BusinessInsider (again), Wikipedia (that’s one of >1000), KALW, Motherboard, KNAU, Popular Science, SFGate, The Architect’s Newspaper (also earlier here and here), Iowa Public Radio (a picture taken underground at Harvard Law School, btw), E&E News (also here), KPCC, Curbed, MIT Technology Review, Observer, Chicago Business (again), Boston.Curbed, Center for Biological Diversity, Renewables Now, RadioWest, DNAinfo, High Country News, Brave New Coin, BuzzBuzzHome, Farmington Daily Times, KNPR, GrindTV, NonProfit Quarterly, Environmental Health News, UtilityDive. The list is so long that I haven’t found an end to it. And it’s all because I license them to require attribution only, with no other restrictions. Few if any of those shots would win awards. But they all found use, which is what really matters.

#Other

• Open Source Comes of Age. My latest in @LinuxJournal.
• Trump air traffic control explained (Aarin Marshall in Wired, tracking required). #aviation
• United Airlines CEO compensation to be tied to customer satisfaction. (Frequent Business Traveler) And if the numbers are negative, he’ll be dragged head first out of his office and thrown out of the building.
• Eager to read this new Doug Rushkoff book. Meanwhile I’ll just keep envying his ability to do everything and still pump out books. Fucking amazing.
• State of the News Media (Pew Research). A compendium of research publishings by Pew.
• Friends in the business tell me this news is good for #music. Or what’s left of the record business.
• An interview with the great geologist Eldridge Moores. #geology
• A one-email history of a cable business (Vernon Chatman in The New Yorker)