publishing
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Whither Medium?
I subscribe to Medium. It’s not expensive: $5.00 per month. I also pay about that much to many newsletters (mostly because Substack makes it so easy). And that’s 0n top of what I also pay The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Reason, The Sun, Wired, and others that… Continue reading
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Toward customer boats fishing on a sea of goods and services
I’ll be talking shortly to some readers of The Intention Economy who are looking for ways to connect that economy with advertising. (Or so I gather. I’ll know more soon.) What follows is the gist of what I wrote to them in prep for the call. First, take a look at People vs. Adtech, and/or… Continue reading
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Building a Relationship Economy
In faith that nothing lasts forever, and that an institution that’s been around since 1636 is more likely to keep something published online for longer than one that was born in 1994 and isn’t quite dead yet (and with full appreciation to the latter for its continued existence), I’ve decided to re-publish some of my… Continue reading
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Beyond the Web
Note: This post was updated on the morning of 17 October 2023 (the one when I am writing this) to help me prepare for the latest salon in the Beyond the Web Salon Series, themed Human +/vs. Artificial intelligence, which is happening at noon today, co-hosted by Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School, both at IU. To prep for… Continue reading
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Just in case you feel safe with Twitter
Just got a press release by email from David Rosen (@firstpersonpol) of the Public Citizen press office. The headline says “Historic Grindr Fine Shows Need for FTC Enforcement Action.” The same release is also a post in the news section of the Public Citizen website. This is it: WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Norwegian Data Protection Agency today fined Grindr $11.7 million following… Continue reading
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One example of how subscriptions suck
My goal here is to make e this brilliant poster by Despair.com obsolete: Starting with just one magazine: The New Yorker. I’ve subscribed to The New Yorker for most of my life. As an adjective, loyal doesn’t cover what that magazine means to me. But wholly shit, they sure make subscribing a pain in the ass.… Continue reading
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Time for advertising to call off the dogs
Digital advertising needs to sniff its own stench, instead of everybody’s digital butts. A sample of that stench is wafting through the interwebs from the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, an ad industry bullphemism for yet another way to excuse the urge to keep tracking people against their wishes (and simple good manners) all over the… Continue reading
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So far, privacy isn’t a debate
Remember the dot com boom? Doesn’t matter if you don’t. What does matter is that it ended. All business manias do. That’s why we can expect the “platform economy” and “surveillance capitalism” to end. Sure, it’s hard to imagine that when we’re in the midst of the mania, but the end will come. When it… Continue reading
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Do you really need all this personal information, @RollingStone?
Here’s the popover that greets visitors on arrival at Rolling Stone‘s website: Our Privacy Policy has been revised as of January 1, 2020. This policy outlines how we use your information. By using our site and products, you are agreeing to the policy. That policy is supplied by Rolling Stone’s parent (PMC) and weighs more than 10,000 words. In… Continue reading
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On Linux Journal
[16 August 2019…] Had a reassuring call yesterday with Ted Kim, CEO of London Trust Media. He told me the company plans to keep the site up as an archive at the LinuxJournal.com domain, and that if any problems develop around that, he’ll let us know. I told him we appreciate it very much—and that’s… Continue reading
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Here’s a cool project: completely revolutionize shopping online
In 1995, shortly after she first encountered e-commerce, my wife assigned a cool project to the world by asking a simple question: Why can’t I take my shopping cart from site to site? The operative word in that question is the first person possessive pronoun: my. Look up personal online shopping cart and you’ll get… Continue reading
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Getting past broken cookie notices
Go to the Alan Turing Institute. If it’s a first time for you, a popover will appear: Among the many important things the Turing Institute is doing for us right now is highlighting with that notice exactly what’s wrong with the cookie system for remembering choices, and lack of them, for each of us using the… Continue reading
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Where Journalism Fails
“What’s the story?” No question is asked more often by editors in newsrooms than that one. And for good reason: that’s what news is about: The Story. Or, in the parlance of the moment, The Narrative. (Trend. More about that below.) I was just 22 when I wrote my first stories as a journalist, reporting… Continue reading
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Dear @WashingtonPost
This is wrong: Because I’m not blocking ads. I’m blocking tracking. In fact I welcome ads—especially ones that sponsor The Washington Post and other fine publishers. I’ll also be glad to subscribe to the Post once it stops trying to track me off their site. Same goes for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal… 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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Is this a turning point for publishing?
Publishing and advertising both need to bend back toward where they came from, and what works. I see hope for that in the news today. In Refinery29 Lays Off 10% of Staff as 2018 Revenue Comes Up Short, by Todd Spangler, (@xpangler) of Variety reports, Digital media company Refinery29, facing a 5% revenue shortfall for the year, is… Continue reading
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Journalism without Twitter
So I’m taking live notes at Blockchain in Journalism: Promise and Practice, happening at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, in the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism, to name the four Russian dolls whose innards I’m inhabiting here In advance of this gathering, Linux Journal, which I serve as editor-in-chief… Continue reading
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We can do better than selling our data
If personal data is actually a commodity, can you buy some from another person, as if that person were a fruit stand? Would you want to? Not yet. Or maybe not really. Either way, that’s the idea behind the urge by some lately to claim personal data as personal property, and then to make money (in… Continue reading
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Without enforcement, the GDPR is a fail
And the same goes for California’s AB-375 privacy bill. The GDPR has been in force since May 25th, and it has done almost nothing to stop websites that make money from tracking-based-advertising stop participating in the tracking of readers. Instead almost all we’ve seen so far are requests for from websites to keep doing what… Continue reading
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GDPR will pop the adtech bubble
In The Big Short, investor Michael Burry says “One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud.” Based on that assumption, Burry shorted the mania- and fraud-filled subprime mortgage market and made a mint in the process. One would be equally smart to bet against the mania for the… Continue reading