Blogging
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Feed Time
Two things worth blogging about that happened this morning. One was getting down and dirty trying to make DALL-E 3 work. That turned into giving up trying to find DALL-E (in any version) on the open Web and biting the $20/month bullet for a Pro account with ChatGPT, which for some reason maintains its DALL-E… Continue reading
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On Blogs
Thoughts I jotted down on Mastodon*: 1) Blogs are newsletters that don’t require subscriptions. 2) Blogrolls are lists of blogs. 3) Both require the lowest possible cognitive and economic overhead. 4) That’s why they are coming back. I know, they never left. But you get my point. *I just learned that my Mastodon account is… Continue reading
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All home now
From 2007 until about a month ago, I wrote on three blogs that lived at blogs.harvard.edu. There was my personal blog (this one here, which I started after retiring my original blog), ProjectVRM‘s blog (also its home page), and Trunkline, a blog about infrastructure that was started by Christian Sandvig when he and I were… Continue reading
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Truckin’ forward
Welcome to my new old blog. My old-old (but not oldest) blog—the one I’ve written since 2007—is still there, in complete archival form, at blogs.harvard.edu/doc, where it has always been. It is now also here with a different URL: doc.searls.com, which had pointed at blogs.harvard.edu/doc for many years. Now it points here, to its native… Continue reading
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Moving on
I started this blog in August 2007 after the host for my original blog went away. (That blog has been preserved, however. Find it at http://weblog.searls.com.) At the time I was told something like “Hey, Harvard has been around since 1636, so your blog will last a long time here.” Well, the duration will be… Continue reading
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The Long View
This blog has been looking like my personal obituary section, and I suppose it is. While I promise to change that, for this post I’ll stick with the theme, and surface some correspondence with an old friend who recommended that I read The Five People You’ll Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom. In the correspondence… Continue reading
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The Matrix 4.0
The original Matrix is my favorite movie. Not because it was the best movie. Rather because it’s the most important, at least for our Digital Age. (It’s also among the most rewatchable. Hear that, Ringer? Rewatch the whole series before Christmas.) And now the fourth Matrix is coming out: The Matrix Resurrections. Here’s the @TheMatrixMovie‘s… Continue reading
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Redux 002: Listen Up
This is a 1999 post on the (pre-blog) website that introduced my handful of readers to The Cluetrain Manifesto, which had just gone up on the Web, and instantly got huge without my help. It was also a dry run for a chapter in the book by the same name, which came out in January, 2000. As best I can recall,… Continue reading
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Welcome to the 21st Century
Historic milestones don’t always line up with large round numbers on our calendars. For example, I suggest that the 1950s ended with the assassination of JFK in late 1963, and the rise of British Rock, led by the Beatles, in 1964. I also suggest that the 1960s didn’t end until Nixon resigned, and disco took off,… Continue reading
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Toward new kinds of leverage
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” Archimedes is said to have said. For almost all of the last four years, Donald Trump was one hell of an Archimedes. With the U.S. presidency as his lever and Twitter as his fulcrum, the… Continue reading
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Reality 2020.05.08
In The Web and the New Reality, which I posted on December 1, 1995 (and again a few days ago), I called that date “Reality 1.995.12,” and made twelve predictions. In this post I’ll visit how those have played out over the quarter century since then. 1. As more customers come into direct contact with… Continue reading
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There are better ways to save journalism
In a Columbia Journalism Review op-ed, Bernie Sanders presents a plan to save journalism that begins, WALTER CRONKITE ONCE SAID that “journalism is what we need to make democracy work.” He was absolutely right, which is why today’s assault on journalism by Wall Street, billionaire businessmen, Silicon Valley, and Donald Trump presents a crisis—and why we… Continue reading
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On renting cars
I came up with that law in the last millennium and it applied until Chevy discontinued the Cavalier in 2005. Now it should say, “You’re going to get whatever they’ve got.” The difference is that every car rental agency in days of yore tended to get their cars from a single car maker, and now… Continue reading
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Elseware
I’m blogging mostly at doc.blog these days. Just letting you know. Nothing wrong here. Partly it’s easier there. I can just post, y’know? Like tweeting, but without the icky limits. But mostly it’s that I see the future of blogging there, rather than on WordPress and platforms like it. I mean, they’re fine for publishing, and I won’t… Continue reading
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Where the nickname came from
My given name is David. Family members still call me that. Everybody else calls me Doc. Since people often ask me where that nickname came from, and since apparently I haven’t answered it anywhere I can now find online, here’s the story. Thousands of years ago, in the mid-1970s, I worked at a little radio station owned… Continue reading
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Open Word—The Podcasting Story
Nobody is going to own podcasting. By that I mean nobody is going to trap it in a silo. Apple tried, first with its podcasting feature in iTunes, and again with its Podcasts app. Others have tried as well. None of them have succeeded, or will ever succeed, for the same reason nobody has ever… Continue reading
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Blogging the way it ought to be
Function follows form. Since the form of a WordPress blog (which this is) favors writing long pieces over short ones, that’s mostly what I’ve written here, since I started in August 2007. Essays, you might say. Since the form of a 1999.io blog is writing pieces of any length, and posting them easily from a… Continue reading
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Help: why don’t images load in https?
For some reason, many or most of the images in this blog don’t load in some browsers. Same goes for the ProjectVRM blog as well. This is new, and I don’t know exactly why it’s happening. So far, I gather it happens only when the URL is https and not http. Okay, here’s an experiment. I’ll… Continue reading
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Toward an ethics of influence
This event is now in the past and can be seen in its entirety here. Stop now and go to TimeWellSpent.io, where @TristanHarris, the guy on the left above, has produced and gathered much wisdom about a subject most of us think little about and all of us cannot value more: our time. Both of us… Continue reading
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The Adblock War Series
Here is a list of pieces I’ve written on what has come to be known as the “adblock wars.” That term applies most to #22 (written August of ’15) those that follow. But the whole series works as a coherent whole that might make a good book if a publisher is interested. Why online advertising sucks,… Continue reading