Doc Searls Weblog

Just trying to make stuff happen

  • The New News Business

    Eigth in the News Commons series.

    How Microsoft Bing Image Creator illustrates EmanciPay

    Back when I was on the board of my regional Red Cross chapter (this one), I learned four lessons about fund raising:

    1. People are glad to pay value for value.
    2. People are most willing to pay when they perceive and appreciate the value they get from a product or service.
    3. People are most willing to pay full value when the need or opportunity to pay is immediate, and the amount they pay is up to them.
    4. People are willing to pay more when they have a relationship with the other party (seller, service provider, philanthropy, cause, whatever)

    Here’s something I wrote in The Cluetrain Manifesto (10th anniversary edition) about all four lessons at work:

    Not long after Cluetrain came out in early 2000, I found myself on a cross-country flight, sitting beside a Nigerian pastor named Sayo Ajiboye. After we began to talk, it became clear to me that Sayo (pronounced “Shaiyo”) was a deeply wise man. Among his accomplishments was translating the highly annotated Thompson Bible into his native Yoruba language: a project that took eight of his thirty-nine years.

    I told him that I had been involved in a far more modest book project—The Cluetrain Manifesto—and was traveling the speaking circuit, promoting it. When Sayo asked me what the book was about, I explained how “markets are conversations” was the first of our ninety-five theses, and how we had unpacked it in a chapter by that title. Sayo listened thoughtfully, then came back with the same response I had heard from other readers in what back then was still called the Third World: “Markets are conversations” is a pretty smart thing for well-off guys from the First World to be talking about. But it doesn’t go far enough.

    When I asked him why, he told me to imagine we were in a “natural” marketplace—a real one in, say, an African village where one’s “brand” was a matter personal reputation, and where nobody ruled customer choices with a pricing gun. Then he picked up one of those blue airline pillows and told me to imagine it was a garment, such as a coat, and that I was interested in buying it. “What’s the first thing you would say to the seller?” he asked.

    “What does it cost?”

    “Yes, you would say that,” he replied, meaning that this was typical of a First World shopper for whom price is the primary concern. Then he asked me to imagine that a conversation follows between the seller and me—that the two of us get to know each other a bit and learn from each other. “Now,” he asked, “What happens to the price?”
    I said maybe now I’m willing to pay more while the seller is willing to charge less.

    “Why?” Sayo asked.

    I didn’t have an answer.

    “Because you now have a relationship,” he said.

    As we continued talking, it became clear to me that everything that happens in a marketplace falls into just three categories: transaction, conversation, and relationship. In our First World business culture, transaction matters most, conversation less, and relationship least. Worse, we conceive and justify everything in transactional terms. Nothing matters more than price and “the bottom line.” By looking at markets through the prism of transaction or even conversation, we miss the importance of relationship. We also don’t see how relationship has a value all its own: one that transcends, even as it improves, the other two.

    Consider your relationship with friends and family, Sayo said. The value system there is based on caring and generosity, not on price. Balance and reciprocity may play in a relationship, but are not the basis of it. One does not make deals for love. There are other words for that.

    Back in the industrialized world, few of our market relationships run so deep, nor should they. By necessity much of our relating is shallow and temporary. We don’t want to get personal with an ATM machine or even with real bank tellers. Friendly is nice, but in most business situations that’s about as far as we want to go.

    But relationship is a broad category: broad enough to contain all forms of relating—the shallow as well as the deep, the temporary as well as the enduring. In the business culture of the industrialized world, Sayo said, we barely understand relationship’s full meaning or potential. And we should. Doing so would be good for business.

    So he told me our next assignment was to unpack and study another thesis: Markets are relationships.

    That is why, six years after the first edition of Cluetrain came out, I started ProjectVRM (the R means Relationship) at the Berkman Klein Center, wrote The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), co-founded Customer Commons (in 2013), and am now a visiting scholar with the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, thinking out loud about how a news commons might thrive as a market of relationships—starting here in Bloomington, IU’s home town.

    In The News Business (which precedes this post), I said the three current business models for local news were advertising, subscription, and philanthropy, and promised a fourth. This is it: emancipayments.

    We* came up with this idea in 2009. Here is how the EmanciPay page on the ProjectVRM wiki puts it:

    Overview

    Simply put, Emancipay makes it easy for anybody to pay (or offer to pay) —

    1. as much as they like
    2. however they like
    3. for whatever they like
    4. on their own terms

    — or at least to start with that full set of options, and to work out differences with sellers easily and with minimal friction.

    Emancipay turns consumers (aka users) into customers by giving them a pricing gun (something which in the past only sellers used) and their own means to make offers, to pay outright, and to escrow the intention to pay when price and other requirements are met. And to be able to do this at scale across all sellers, much as cash, browsers, credit cards and email clients do the same. Payments themselves can also be escrowed.

    In slightly more technical terms, EmanciPay is a payment framework for customers operating with full agency in the open marketplace, and at scale. It operates on open protocols and standards, so it can be used by any buyer, seller or intermediary.

    It was conceived as a way to pay for music, journalism, or what any artist brings into the world. But it can apply to anything. For example, [subscriptions], which have become by 2021 a giant fecosystem in which every seller has separate and non-substitutable scale across all subscribers, while subscribers have zero scale across all sellers, with the highly conditional exceptions of silo’d commercial intermediaries. As [Customer Commons] puts it,

    There’s also not much help coming from the subscription management services we have on our side: Truebill, Bobby, Money Dashboard, Mint, Subscript Me, BillTracker Pro, Trim, Subby, Card Due, Sift, SubMan, and Subscript Me. Nor from the subscription management systems offered by Paypal, Amazon, Apple or Google (e.g. with Google Sheets and Google Doc templates). All of them are too narrow, too closed and exclusive, too exposed to the surveillance imperatives of corporate giants, and too vested in the status quo.

    That status quo sucks (see here, or just look up “subscription hell”), and it’s way past time to unscrew it.) But how?

    The better question is where?

    The answer to that is on our side: the customer’s side.

    While EmanciPay was first conceived by ProjectVRM as a way to make live payments to nonprofits and to provide a new monetization method for publishers. it also works as a counterpart to sellers’ subscription systems in what Zuora (a supplier of subscription management systems to the publishing industry, including The Guardian and Financial Times) calls the “subscription economy“, which it says “is built on ever changing relationships with your customers”. Since relationships are two-way by nature, EmanciPay is one way that customers can manage their end, while publisher-side systems such as Zuora’s manage the other.

    EmanciPay economic case

    EmanciPay provides a new form of economic signaling not available to individuals, either on the Net or before the Net became available as a communications medium. EmanciPay will use open standards and be comprised of open source code. While any commercial [Fourth party] can use EmanciPay (or its principles, or any parts of it they like), EmanciPay’s open and standard framework will support fourth parties by making them substitutable, much as the open standards of email (smtp, pop3, imap) make email systems substitutable. (Each has what Joe Andrieu calls service endpoint portability.)

    EmanciPay is an instrument of customer independence from all of the billion (or so) commercial entities on the Net, each with its own arcane and silo’d systems for engaging and managing customer relations, as well as receipt, acknowledgement and accounting for payments from customers.

    Use Case Background

    EmanciPay was conceived originally as a way to provide a customers with the means to signal interest and ability to pay for media and creative works (most of which are freely available on the Web, if not always free of charge). Through EmanciPay, demand and supply can relate, converse and transact business on mutually beneficial terms, rather than only on terms provided by the countless different silo’d systems we have today, each serving to hold the customer captive, and causing much inconvenience and friction in the process.

    Media goods were chosen for five reasons:

    1. because most are available for free, even if they cost money, or are behind paywalls
    2. paywalls, which are cookie-based, cannot relate to individuals as anything other than submissive and dependent parties (and each browser a users employs carries a different set of cookies)
    3. both media companies and non-profits are constantly looking for new sources of revenue
    4. the subscription model, while it creates steady income and other conveniences for sellers, is often a bad deal for customers, and is now so overused (see Subscriptification) that the world is approaching a peak subscription crisis, and unscrewing it can only happen from the customer’s side (because the business is incapable of unscrewing the problem itself
    5. all methods of intermediating payment choices are either silo’d by the seller or silo’d by intermediators, discouraging participation by individuals.

    What the marketplace requires are new business and social contracts that ease payment and stigmatize non-payment for creative goods. The friction involved in voluntary payment is still high, even on the Web, where one must go through complex ceremonies even to make simple payments.  There is no common and easy way either to keep track of what media (free or otherwise) we use (see Media Logging), to determine what it might be worth, and to pay for it easily and in standard ways — to many different suppliers. (Again, each supplier has its own system for accepting payments.)

    EmanciPay differs from other payment models (subscriptions, newsstand, tip jars) by providing customers with the ability to choose what they wish to pay and how they’ll pay it, with minimum friction — and with full choice about what they disclose about themselves.

    EmanciPay will also support credit for referrals, requests for service, feedback and other relationship support mechanisms, all at the control of the user. For example, EmanciPay can provide quick and easy ways for listeners to pay for public radio broadcasts or podcasts, for readers to pay for otherwise “free” papers or blogs, for listeners to pay to hear music and support artists, for users to issue promises of payment for for stories or programs — all without requiring the individual to disclose unnecessary private information, or to become a “member” — although these options are kept open.

    This will scaffold genuine relationships between buyers and sellers in the media marketplace. It will also give deeper meaning to “membership” in non-profits. (Under the current system, “membership” generally means putting one’s name on a pitch list for future contributions, and not much more than that.)

    EmanciPay will also connect the sellers’ CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems with customers’ VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) systems, supporting rich and participatory two-way relationships. In fact, EmanciPay will by definition be a VRM system.

    Micro-accounting and Macro-distribution

    The idea of “micro-payments” for goods on the Net has been around for a long time, and is often brought up as a potential business model for journalism. For example in this article by Walter Isaacson in Time Magazine. It hasn’t happened, at least not globally, because it’s too complicated, and in prototype only works inside private silos.

    What ProjectVRM suggests instead is something we don’t yet have, but very much need:

    1. micro-accounting for actual uses. Think of this simply as “keeping track of” the news, podcasts, newsletters, or music we consume.
    2. macro-distribution of payments for accumulated use (that’s no longer “micro”).

    Much — maybe most — of the digital goods we consume are both free for the taking and worth more than $zero. How much more? We need to be able to say. In economic terms, demand needs to have a much wider range of signals it can give to supply. And give to each other, to better gauge what we should be willing to pay for free stuff that has real value but not a hard price.

    As currently planned, EmanciPay would –

    1. Provide a single and easy way for consumers of “content” to become customers of it. In the current system — which isn’t one — every artist, every musical group, and every public radio and TV station has his, her or its own way of taking in contributions from those who appreciate the work. This can be arduous and time-consuming for everybody involved. (Imagine trying to pay separately every musical artist you like, for all your enjoyment of each artist’s work.) What EmanciPay proposes, however, is not a replacement for existing systems, but a new system that can supplement existing fund-raising systems — one that can soak up much of today’s MLOTT: Money Left On The Table.
    2. Provide ways for individuals to look back through their media usage histories, inform themselves about what they have been enjoying, and determine how much it is worth to them. The Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP), and later the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), both came up with “rates and terms that would have been negotiated in the marketplace between a willing buyer and a willing seller.” This almost absurd language first appeared in the 1995 Digital Performance Royalty Act (DPRA) and was tweaked in 1998 by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), under which both the CARP and the CRB operated. The rates they came up with peaked at $.0001 per “performance” (a song or recording), per listener. EmanciPay creates the “willing buyer” that the DPRA thought wouldn’t exist.
    3. Stigmatize non-payment for worthwhile media goods. This is where “social” will finally come to be something more than yet another tech buzzmodifier.

    All these require micro-accounting, not micro-payments. Micro-accounting can inform ordinary payments that can be made in clever new ways that should satisfy everybody with an interest in seeing artists compensated fairly for their work. An individual listener, for example, can say “I want to pay 1¢ for every song I hear,” and “I’ll send SoundExchange a lump sum of all the pennies wish to pay for songs I have heard over a year, along with an accounting of what artists and songs I’ve listened to” — and leave dispersal of those totaled pennies up to the kind of agency that likes, and can be trusted, to do that kind of thing. That’s the macro-distribution part of the system.

    Similar systems can also be put in place for readers of newspapers, blogs, and other journals. What’s important is that the control is in the hands of the individual and that the accounting and dispersal systems work the same way for everybody.

    I visited EmanciPay use cases twice in Linux Journal:

    There are two differences in the world today that should make it easier to code up something like EmanciPay:

    1. Smartphones and apps on them have become extensions of ourselves.
    2. AI.

    For the latter, I am not talking about the kind of centralized AI we get from Amazon, Microsoft/OpenAI, Adobe, and the rest. I’m talking about AI that’s as personal as our own underwear and gives us what Sam Altman calls “individual empowerment and agency on a scale we’ve never seen before.” That quote became the title of the post I wrote at that link. I will unpack it further in an upcoming News Commons post.

    But first I’ll dig deeper into what we need to develop EmanciPay, and how we can use it to scaffold up the kind of markets first imagined by The Cluetrain Manifesto, a quarter century ago.

    *Big hat tip to Keith Hopper for his thinking and work on this, especially toward ListenLog, which is now fourteen years ahead of its time. And that time will come. Also to Joe Andrieu, whose The User as a Point of Integration (published in 2007) is a founding document in the VRM canon. He reported on progress here in 2017. All hail writers who keep their archives alive on the Web.

    , , , , , ,

  • The News Business

    Seventh in the News Commons series.

    A display in the Breaking the News exhibit at the Monroe County History Center

    How does the news business see itself?

    Easy: ask an AI. Or a lot of them.*

    That’s what I’ve been doing. Unless otherwise noted, all the following respond to the same three-word prompt: the news business. Here goes…

    Microsoft Bing (Full name: Microsoft Bing Image Creator from Designer), which uses DALL-E 3:

    Dream Studio by Stability.ai (which, as you see, required a longer prompt than I used with the others):

    Deep Dream Generator:

    Adobe Firefly:

    Craiyon, again with a longer prompt:

    Stable Diffusion:

    Finally, a series from DeepAI., each generated in a different style.

    First, impressionism:

    Surreal graphics:

    Renaissance painting:

    Abstract painting:

    AI art:

    What do these say about the news business? Well,

    1. It’s mostly male.
    2. It’s mostly about newspapers, somewhat about TV, and idealized both.
    3. It used to be big.
    4. It doesn’t know what to make of the Internet.
    5. It’s obsolete in the extreme.

    For most of the prior century, the news business was big. In tech parlance, it scaled. Here in the U.S. and Canada, every town had a newspaper, and in some cases several. Many towns—and all cities—had radio stations. Every name-brand city had a TV station, or two, or more. The great newsweeklies, Time and Newsweek, had millions of subscribers and made lots of money. So did TV network news operations. Newsstands were everywhere.

    All of that has collapsed. Some print and broadcast news operations still exist, but most are shells of their former selves, and many put news icing on a cake of partisan talk shows. Exceptions to collapse are the surviving news giants (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal), and resourceful public broadcasters. (Pew Research shows NPR’s audience has long topped 20 million people, though it is slowly declining.)

    People today get most of their news through phones, tablets, and laptops. These are packed with apps that maximize optionality. People now hardly listen, watch, or read on schedules set by publishers, stations, or networks. Everyone with a smartphone had a limitless variety of news sources. Or sources within sources such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and old-fashioned social media such as Facebook and X.

    According to Pew, the top news sources for young people today are TikTok and social media. In other words, from each other. The threshold of news creation and production is also low. This is why, according to Exploding Topics, there are now over three million podcasts worldwide.

    As Scott Galloway put it in a recent Pivot podcast (which I can’t find right now), news is a shitty business—at least if you want to scale up something huge. It’s not even a great small business. But hell, neither is running a restaurant, a nail salon, a clothing shop, or a small farm. But those are real businesses.

    As Jeff Jarvis makes clear in The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet (which I highly recommend), we are at the end of one long era and the start of another one.

    In these early years of The Internet Age, the most substantive news and news businesses are the local kind. True, not everybody cares about local news. But everybody lives somewhere, and it does matter what goes on where people live. Belonging somewhere in the virtual world is optional, but it is mandatory in the physical one. And, as with running a restaurant, a store, or a farm, reporting local news is a labor of talent and love. It’s what we still call “a living.”

    Right now there are three models for the local news business: advertising, subscription, and philanthropy. In my next post, the eighth in this series, I’ll lay out the case for a fourth one.

    *I didn’t try Midjourney, DALL-E 3, or Stable Diffusion because they all require subscriptions, and I don’t feel like paying for those yet. DALL-E 2 yielded blah results.

    , , ,

  • Choices

    Choose wisely.

    Comment with wrong captions only.

    ,

  • A Supply Problem

    My last four boxes of Trader Joe’s High Fiber Cereal

    A while back, my gastroenterologist insisted that I get accustomed to eating high-fiber cereal in the morning. And so I have. It does work.

    He recommended Fiber One. I didn’t like it, but I put up with it until I found Trader Joe’s version, which tasted much better. Since Bloomington is more than an hour from a Trader Joe’s in Indianapolis (there are two on the north side, while we are way down to the south), I stock up when we’re up that way.

    Or I used to.

    In Palm Desert for Thanksgiving, I went to a Trader Joe’s there to find High Fiber Cereal missing from the shelves. When I asked a crew member (they’re called that) if they had any in the back, she came back out with the manager to tell me that High Fiber Cereal had, regrettably, been discontinued.

    I did not take it well.

    I then told them that I also lament earlier discontinuations of the house-brand Ancient Grains granola and its thick, labneh-like strained Greek yogurt. As I reported in the chapter about Trader Joe’s in The Intention Economy, the company takes customer requests to heart.

    I also see here that Fiber One is not getting out to store shelves, thanks to what General Mills calls “supply issues.” Since most of Trader Joe’s branded goods are made by other companies (including, presumably, General Mills), perhaps High Fiber Cereal will be re-continued.

    Meanwhile, here’s to a good digestive 2024.

     

     

    ,

  • Getting Us Wrong

    Prompt: ” hardscrabble farms next to a suburb full of volvo station wagons”

    Several thousand years ago, when I was on leave from journalism and working as a marketing dweeb, my small North Carolina firm learned about PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets), a techy new service that told me that my rural zip code was “Hardscrabble,” while the next one over was a suburb PRIZM called “Volvo Wagons” or something.

    My current zip, in Bloomington, Indiana, features five out of PRIZM’s 68 numbered types:

    • 48 Generation Web—Low Income Younger Family Mix
    • 47 Striving Selfies—Lower Midscale Middle Age Mostly w/o Kids
    • 15 New Homesteaders—Wealthy Middle Age Mostly w/ Kids
    • 51 Campers & Camo—Lower Midscale Middle Age Family Mix
    • 66 New Beginnings—Low Income Younger Family Mix

    None of which describes me or my wife.

    Sort of close is 05 – Country Squires: “Members of this segment fled the city life for the charms of small-town living. Many have executive jobs and live in recently built homes.” Except we didn’t flee and our home was built in  1899 or 1915. (Sources differ.) But we are building a house, so maybe that counts.

    A bit closer is 20 – Empty Nests: “Most residents are over 65 years old, but they show no interest in a rest-home retirement. With their grown-up children out of the house they pursue active, and activist, lifestyles.”

    But all of that stuff is just name-calling against typified populations—a form of -ism not much different than racism, sexism, or ageism. That’s why, on the receiving end, we tend not to like it, even if it brings us ‘relevant’ messages from sellers. (This happens far less than sellers think, and typically at the cost of privacy lost to surveillance.)

    All of us are as different as our faces and voices. Being different than everybody—even ourselves five minutes ago—is among our most human qualities. We all grow and change constantly, whether we want to or not.

    Marketing didn’t get that when PRIZM was invented in 1980, and it doesn’t get it today, for the simple reason that marketing was not built for talking to people. It was built for typifying people.

    Chris Locke, David Weinberger, Rick Levine, and I all thought there was hope for marketing when we wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999, because we saw the Internet as a radically new way to connect the demand and supply sides of markets directly, and personally.

    But marketing instead saw the Internet as a great way to spy on people and to typify them more than ever.  PRIZM persists, entrenched as ever. And conversations among customers and marketers happen in two very different and disconnected echo chambers, mostly using giant corporate platforms.

    For a sense of how thoroughly disconnected those chambers are, see any of Tom Fishburne’s Marketoons. They’re brilliant and spot-on.

    They also make clear—at least to me—that Cluetrain won’t prove right until marketing gets out of the way.

    Which it won’t on its own. Our side—the customers’ side—needs to obsolesce it. Some of us have been working on that here since 2006, here since 2013, and here since 2017.

    The image above was generated by the prompt in the caption under it, using what currently calls itself Microsoft Bing Image Creator from Designer, which persists in Microsoft’s long tradition of aversive and unmemorable names for products.

    , , , , , , ,
    , , , ,

  • A Moment of Applied Holiday Robotics

    Bing Image Creator’s response to the prompt, “A baby with a halo in the arms of a robot, surrounded by a loving family at Christmas”

    I asked ChatGPT and Bard to “List all Christmas holiday tunes in chronological order, by the year they were written, running from oldest at the top to the newest at the bottom.” ChatGPT gave me a lame list. Bard gave me a much better one, improved by my follow-ups. Here ya go:

    While creating a definitive chronological list of every Christmas tune throughout history is near impossible, I can offer you a comprehensive, categorized timeline of notable Christmas music spanning centuries, from ancient hymns to modern-day pop hits. Keep in mind this is not an exhaustive list, and some dates may be approximate:

    Pre-Renaissance Era (Before 1450)

    • 4th Century: “Hymnus ad Natales Domine Jesu” (attributed to Hilary of Poitiers) – One of the earliest known Latin hymns referencing Jesus’ birth.
    • 13th Century: “In dulci jubilo” – Traditional German carol celebrating the joy of Christmas.
    • 14th Century: “O Come, All Ye Faithful” – Latin hymn, believed to be of English origin, later translated into many languages.

    Renaissance Era (1450-1600)

    • 15th Century: “There Is No Rose” – Traditional English carol referencing Mary as a “spotless rose.”
    • 15th Century: “Deck the Halls” – Welsh carol with pagan roots, originally a celebration of the winter solstice.

    Baroque Era (1600-1750)

    • 1642: “What Child Is This?” – English carol based on a poem by William Chatterton Dix.
    • 1678: “Silent Night” – German carol written by Franz Xaver Gruber and Joseph Mohr.

    Classical Era (1750-1830)

    • 1818: “O Holy Night” – French carol originally titled “Cantique de Noël” with lyrics by Placide Cappeau and music by Adolphe Adam.

    Romantic Era (1830-1900)

    • 1865: “Jingle Bells” – American song originally written by James Lord Pierpont with lyrics unrelated to Christmas.
    • 1874: “O Little Town of Bethlehem” – American carol written by Phillips Brooks.

    20th Century and Beyond

    • 1934: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” – American song written by Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin for the Judy Garland film “Meet Me in St. Louis.”
    • 1942: “White Christmas” – American song written by Irving Berlin for the film “Holiday Inn.”
    • 1953: “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” – American rock and roll song written by Johnny Marks.
    • 1964: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” – American song written by Johnny Marks, based on the poem by Robert L. May.
    • 1973: “All I Want for Christmas Is You” – American pop song written and performed by Mariah Carey.
    • 1984: “Last Christmas” – English song written by George Michael for Wham!
    • 1994: “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” – American song written by J.C. Sprink and Haven Gillespie.
    • 2019: “All Is Well” – British song written and performed by James Arthur.

    This list showcases the evolution of Christmas music through various eras and genres. Remember, Christmas music is constantly evolving, with new carols and songs emerging every year.

    Happy Holidays!

    Then, “What about A Chrismas Song, by Mel Tormé? Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas? Frosty the Snowman? Mary’s Boy Child?”

    You’re absolutely right! I apologize for omitting those wonderful Christmas classics from my previous response. Here’s where they fit into the timeline:

    • 1946: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” – As mentioned previously, this beloved song by Judy Garland was written in 1934 by Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin.
    • 1951: “A Christmas Song” – This charming and introspective tune by Mel Tormé perfectly captures the bittersweet sentiment of Christmas.
    • 1950: “Frosty the Snowman” – Jack Rollins and Steve Nelson penned this playful Christmas carol about a jolly snowman in 1950.
    • 1956: “Mary’s Boy Child” – This moving gospel carol was written by Jester Hairston in 1956, based on an African American spiritual.

    My apologies for the earlier oversight. These songs undoubtedly deserve their place among the cherished Christmas tunes throughout history.

    Do you have any other Christmas music questions for me? I’m happy to delve deeper into the fascinating world of holiday melodies.

    Then, “Oh, and Rockin Around the Christmas Tree?”

    Ah, you’re absolutely right! How could I forget the infectious energy of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”? It definitely belongs on the list. In fact, it was written earlier than some of the others I mentioned:

    • 1958: “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” – This rock n’ roll Christmas classic, penned by Johnny Marks, brought a vibrant and playful edge to holiday music.

    Thank you for reminding me! Your keen eye for festive tunes is impressive. Merry Christmas and keep the musical celebration going!

    I stopped there. But I assume you can keep going here: https://bard.google.com/chat/5623a530dcc35251

    , ,

  • Feeling is Human

    Bing Image Creator draws “A machine inventing a human being.”
    “Honesty is the best policy,” George Burns said. “If you can fake that you’ve got it made.”
    The same applies to feeling in composition and musical expression. Long ago I went with a friend who was a pianist and composer, to a concert by a somewhat famous pianist. While I was enjoying the concert, she grabbed my hand and pulled us out of the place. “Didn’t you hear it?” she said after we left. “That guy wasn’t feeling it.”
    No AI will ever feel anything. There is no “next level” where it will feel in a human way—or at all—because AIs are machines and the human stuff they do is all emulation. That emulation can do superhuman stuff. But that doesn’t make them human. It makes them uncanny. And useful. (Hell, I’ve quickly come to rely on AI for lots of stuff, every day. It’s extremely handy and often fun.)
    All that uncanny stuff is emulation. Pattern matching. Way-cool parroting. Even when it can beat a human at Go or recite pi to trillions of digits, a machine is still just a machine. It ought to be good at stuff machines are better at than humans. Feeling isn’t one of them.
    Right now I want to finish this post. That want is a feeling in my creative drive. I’m not doing this shit just because I’ve been programmed to do it.
    As you sit, watch, and listen to musicians in a top-ranked orchestra, what amazes you most, besides the music they play, is fellow human beings can do this stuff at all, and do it together. Why sit, watch, and listen to robots doing the same, even if they do all of it better, technically?
    Will there be robot musicians as original, and moving, as Miles Davis? Will robot artists be better at doing Picasso than Picasso? Better at Shakespeare than Shakespeare?
    Not if they can’t feel. And, I submit, none ever will.
    ,

  • Start of an Era

    Bing Create’s visual answer to the prompt, “A world of open source software and hardware.”

    After 17 years and 761 episodes, FLOSS Weekly ended its run on the TWiT network yesterday. I hosted the last 179 of those shows. My career as a professional (meaning paid) advocate of open source also ended with that show. The full span ran from 1996, when I first appeared on the Linux Journal masthead, until yesterday: about 27 years.

    I still participate in market conversations around the many topics I covered in that span, but I’m mostly working on other stuff now. For example, in random-ish order:

    All of those are cars in a cluetrain, about which more below.

    They are also featured now and then on Reality 2.o, the podcast Katherine Druckman and I have been doing since our Linux Journal days.

    For many decades now, I’ve been spoiled by success. For example, open source, an expression whose current meaning was born in 1998, is now beyond huge. Here’s VentureBeat:

    Today, open-source software underpins almost everything: A whopping 97% of applications leverage open-source code, and 90% of companies are applying or using it in some way.

    GitHub alone had 413 million open-source software (OSS) contributions in 2022.

    “Open-source software is the foundation of 99% of the world’s software,” said Martin Woodward, VP of developer relations at GitHub.

    By covering open source for Linux Journal from the start, I helped make that happen.

    Same with The Cluetrain Manifesto. “Markets are conversations,” a one-liner of mine that became the first thesis in the manifesto, grew to become a meme that hasn’t gone away. The word cluetrain also appears almost daily in tweets on X, almost a quarter century after it was coined. (When Twitter was still itself, cluetrain was mentioned in tweets several times daily. The decline in cluetrain mentions is one small measure of how lame X has become.)

    Also blogging!

    Hmmm… I don’t think I ever blogged about my only encounter with Robin Williams. It was at some trade show in the early aughts. There was a scrum of attendees gathered around something or someone unseen in the middle. On the periphery was my old friend Tom Rielly, who quickly grabbed me and pulled me into the middle of the crowd, where stood Robin Williams, with two bags of swag. I almost said, “Hey, you look like Robin Williams, only shorter.” Then Tom introduced me, saying “This is Doc. He’s one of the top five bloggers in the world.” I said, “More like one of the top sixteen, but most of the others are duplicates.” Robin then said something funny, and I responded with something funny of my own, and an all-funny exchange ensued during which my separate self said, “Holy shit! I’m doing humor schtick with Robin Williams and holding my own!” After maybe half a minute of this, I excused myself, saying something like, “I’ll leave you to your private audience here,” and exited the crowd.

    Oh, and photography. As of this moment, my photos have had 16,855,107 views on one Flickr account, and 1,470,281 on the other. Visits to those run from the hundreds to thousands per day. A search for my name on Wikimedia Commons also brings up 1850 results, nearly all of which are photos I’ve shared using Creative Commons licensing that encourages use and re-use, which is why many (or most) of them find their way into Wikipedia articles.

    I’ve had less luck with the other missions I’ve listed above. But I believe in all of them, and in faith, I truck onward.

    By the way, FLOSS Weekly has not slipped below the waves. I expect it will be picked up somewhere else on the Web, and wherever you get your podcasts. (I love that expression because it means podcasting isn’t walled into some giant’s garden.) When FLOSS Weekly becomes re-manifest, I’ll point to it here.

    , , , ,

  • Please, United: Don’t Do It.

    A few among the countless photos I’ve shot from United Airlines window seats.

    I’ve flown 1,500,242 miles with United Airlines. My wife has flown at least a million more. Both of us currently enjoy Premier status, though we’ve spent much of our time with United at the fancier 1K level. We are also both lifetime United Club members and have been so for thirty-three years.

    Unlike many passengers of big airlines, we have no complaints about United. The airline has never lost our luggage or mistreated us in any way, even going back decades, to when we were no-status passengers. On the contrary, we like United—especially some of the little things, such as From the Flight Deck (formerly Channel 9) on some plane entertainment systems, and free live Internet connections (at least for T-Mobile customers, which we are). And we rolled with it when United, like other airlines, changed the way frequent fliers earn privileges.

    But now comes United Airlines Weighs Using Passenger Data to Sell Targeted Ads, by Patience Haggin in The Wall Street Journal. It begins,

    United Airlines  is considering using its passenger information to help brands serve targeted ads to its customers, joining a growing number of companies trying to tap their troves of user data for advertising purposes.

    Some of these targeted ads could appear on its in-flight entertainment system or on the app that people use to book tickets and check-in, people familiar with the matter said. United hasn’t made a decision yet and may choose not to launch a targeted-advertising business, some of the people said.

    Airlines have long taken advantage of the captive nature of their customer base to show them plenty of ads, including commercials on seatback screens, glossy spreads inside in-flight shopping catalogs or, for some, advertisements adorning cabin walls. Offering personalized advertising would greatly expand United’s advertising business, some of the people said.

    Of the 106 comments below the story, all but one opposed the idea, and the one exception said he’d rather not keep seeing ads for feminine hygiene products.

    The big question here is whether and how United might share personal data with parties other than itself. Because there are lots of companies that will pay for personal data, and United does have, as Patience says, “an advertising business.”

    What exactly is that business? Is it just showing ads to United customers? Or, in the process of now personalizing those ads, is it sharing data about those customers with “partners” in the adtech fecosystem, which has been hostile to personal privacy for decades, as a matter of course?

    Just based on this one story (and 99+% of the thumbs-down comments it got), it should be obvious that this is a terrible idea. But, this kind of idea is terribly typical in the marketing world today, and a perfect example of what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification, a label so correct that it has its own Wikipedia article. In The Guardian, John Naughton asks, Why do we tolerate it?

    Two reasons—

    1) It’s normative in the extreme. As I put it in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff, “Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.” Today the entire .X $trillion digital advertising business can imagine nothing better than getting personal with everybody. And it totally excuses the tracking required to make it work. Which it doesn’t, most of the time.that

    2) Journalists are afraid to bite the beast that feeds them. Here is a PageXray of where personal data about you goes when you visit that story without tracking protection (which most of us don’t have). Here is just one small part of the hundreds of paths that data about you travels out to advertising “partners” of The Wall Street Journal:

    Click on that link, wait for that whole graphic to load, and look around. You won’t recognize most of the names in that vast data river delta, but all of them play parts in a fecosystem that relies entirely on absent personal privacy online. And some of them are extra unsavory. Take moatads.com. Don’t bother going there. Nothing will load. Instead, look up the name. Nice, huh? (As an aside, why am I, a paying WSJ subscriber, subjected to all this surveillance?)

    I’ve challenged many journalists employed by participants in this system to report on it. So far, I’ve seen only one report: this one by Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times, back in 2019. (The Times backed off after that, but they’re still at it.)

    As for the consent theater of cookie notices, none of “your choices” are meaningful if you have no record of what you’ve “chosen” and you can’t audit compliance. (Who has even thought about that? I can name two entities: Customer Commons and the IEEE P7012 working group. My wife and I are involved in both.)

    Unless United customers stand up and say NO to this, as firmly and directly as possible, the way to bet is that you’ll start seeing personalized ads for all kinds of stuff on your seat back screens, your United app, and in other places to which data about you has been sold or sent by United, one way or another, to and through who knows. (But you’ll probably find some suspects in that PageXray.) Because that’s how great real-world brands are now enshittifying themselves into the same old fecosystem we’ve had online for decades now.

    Hey, it’s happened to TVs and cars. (And hell, journalism.) Why not to airlines too?

     

     

    , ,

  • How is the world’s biggest boycott doing?

    ad blocking

    Eight years ago, I called ad blocking The Biggest Boycott in World History, because hundreds of millions of people were blocking ads online. (The headline came from my wife, by the way.) Then, a few days ago, Cory Doctorow kindly pointed to that post in one of his typically trenchant Pluralistic newsletters.

    So I thought I’d check to see how the boycott is doing.

    It’s hard to find original sources of hard numbers on ad blocking. Instead, there are lots of what I’ll call claims. But some of those claims do cite or link to sources of some kind. Here are four:

    1. Brian Dean‘s Backlinko sources Hootsuite, saying 42.7% of Internet users employ ad blockers. Hootsuite, however, wants me to fill out a form that I am sure will get me spammed. So I’m passing on that. Meanwhile there are other interesting stats cited. Growson Edwards on Cipio.ai surfaces a bunch of Hootsuite graphics with interesting data.
    2. Statista last January said “the ad blocking user penetration rate in the United States stood at approximately 26 percent in 2020, indicating that roughly 73 million internet users had installed some form of ad blocking software, plugin, or browser on their web-enabled devices that year. While awareness of these services lies at almost 90 percent, the number of internet users actively leveraging the technology has stagnated in recent years following visible changes in online user behavior. The switch from desktop to mobile has arguably had one of the most significant impacts on ad block usage: As internet users increasingly browse the web via mobile devices, desktop ad block usage rates in the U.S. and many other parts of the world are dropping, albeit at varying speeds. While mobile ad blocking adoption is still at a nascent stage in the U.S., the global number of mobile ad blocking browser users is rapidly increasing.” On another page, Statista says marketers “can conquer ad blocking by offering personalized advertising.” Anybody want that? Give me a show of hands. Thought so.
    3. Blockthrough, an advertising company, offers a 2022 adblock report that requires filling out a form. So I passed on that one too, but can report that its “key insights” are these: “With 290M monthly active users globally, adblocking on desktop has climbed back close to its all-time-high from 2018,” and “The average adblock rate across geos and verticals is 21%, as measured across >10B pageviews on 9,453 websites.”
    4. Surfshark has some cool maps showing which countries hate ads most and least, based on searches for ad-blocking software. (France was at the top.)

    Perhaps more interesting than any of those stats (all of which are unsurprising) is using AI to generate graphics for a post such as this one. At first, I wanted the system (Bing Creator or whatever it’s called this week) to show two separate populations: one living blissfully in a land without advertising, and one with advertising everywhere. That was a fail. I couldn’t get it not to show advertising on both sides. Then I tried to get it to depict the blocking of ads, for example with a wall. That failed too, because advertising always appeared on the wall. Finally, I got the image above with a prompt asking for people who were happy to have advertising inside a giant bottle. Isn’t it crazy how fast the miraculous becomes annoying?

     

    , , ,

  • DatePress

    Sixth in the News Commons series.

    The Big Calendar here in Bloomington is one fed by other calendars kind enough to syndicate themselves through publishing feeds. It is put together by my friend Dave Askins, who writes and publishes the B Square Bulletin. Technically speaking, it runs on WordPress, and uses a plug-in called ICS. Dave is steadily improving it, mostly by including more feeds. But he also has a larger idea: one that satisfies the requirements I’ve been outlining in posts about deep (and deeper), wide, and whole news, plus a community’s (and journalism’s) need for facts and not just stories.

    What Dave suggests is a whole new platform, just for community calendars. He calls it DatePress (modeled on WordPress), and describes it this way:

    A bigger idea for community calendars

    WordPress is a fantastic platform for running all kinds of websites—from news sites that generate lots of chronological posts, to websites that are mostly static, and serve up encyclopedic information.

    For added, very specific functionality, WordPress fosters a robust ecosystem of plugins.

    But there’s one kind of plug-in that is worth developing as a platform in its own right: a feed-based calendar. What if the whole point of the website is to host a feed-based community calendar? Such as this one here. We can do that with the WordPress ICS Calendar plug-in, as we do at that link. But why use a plug-in to do a platform’s job?

    DatePress

    Let’s call this as yet undeveloped calendar platform DatePress, just as a placeholder. DatePress would be a calendar hosting web engine that is built from the ground up to host feed-based calendars. Maybe some enterprising soul develops a plug-in for DatePress that allows a user to add a blog to their calendar. But the one job for DatePress would be: Publish community calendars.

    DatePress does what?

    What kind of functions should DatePress have?  For starters, it should have the kind of features that  the WordPress ICS Calendar plug-in already includes. Specifically:

    • It should be easy to add feeds to a calendar, and specify a background color and  label for each feed.
    • The published display should include ways for a visitor to the published calendar to filter by typing into a box.
    • The published display should make it possible to add any individual feed displayed by the published calendar to their personal calendar.

    But there should be so many more tools for calendar administrators..

    • For any calendar feed, it should be possible to add a prefix to any event title in a specific feed, to help people who visit the published calendar understand what kind of event it is, without clicking through.
    • For any calendar feed, it should be possible to assign multiple tags, and it should be possible for calendar visitors to filter by tag.
    • For any view that a visitor to the published calendar generates with a filter, the parameters for that view should be passed to the URL window, so that a visitor can send someone a link to that view, or embed that specific view of the calendar in their own website. That view should also define a new feed, to which someone can subscribe.

    DatePress itself should know all about the content of feeds:

    • Duplicate events across feeds should be automatically identified  and collapsed into a single event.
    • When a feed is slightly non-compliant with the standard, behind the scenes, DatePress should be able to convert the feed into one that is 100-percent compliant.

    Why does DatePress need different levels of logged-in users, which really demands that it be a platform? Here’s how that looks:

    • Only some users, like the administrator, should be able to add or delete feeds from the calendar.
    • A curator should be able to manually flag events across all feeds—and all the events flagged by some curator would define a new feed. Visitors to the published calendar should be able to look at events by curator, and to add the curator’s feed to their own personal calendar. A curator should be able to embed a display of their curated calendar into their own website.
    • Annotators could add information to event displays, especially after an event is over.  After the events are over, their status will change to “archived.” Annotations  could include a simple confirmation that the event took place. Or maybe an annotation includes a caution that the event did not actually take place, because it was canceled. Annotations could include links to published news articles about the event. The calendar archive becomes a draft of a historical  timeline for everything that happened in some  place.

    Let’s please build this thing called DatePress.

    I think this is a great idea that can start to do all of these things and more:

    1. Pull communities together in many commons (such as we study here at IU’s Ostrom Workshop) around shared interests.
    2. String the pearls of local journals without any extra effort on anyone’s part.
    3. Give calendar hosts a way to think of their events as part of a bigger commons.
    4. Let rank-and-file residents tap the wisdom of those who are “in the know.”
    5. Recruit community members to the work of making local history more complete.
    6. Calendar archives could jump-start history-based newsrooms in communities everywhere.

    Please add your own.

    The images up top are among the best of the hundreds I’ve had Bing Create produce using DALL-E3. The prompt for these four was, “A library building with the name Date Press (spelled exactly that way) over the door. The roof and walls are calendars.” I insisted on exact spelling because without it the AI left out letters, obscured them, or added extra ones. I also separated Date and Press because it always screwed up “DatePress” when it was prompted with that as a word. And it never liked lower case letters, preferring always to use upper case. Visual AI is crazy and fun, but getting what one wants from it is a little like steering a cat by the tail.

    , ,

  • Some possible verities

    Bing Create paints “Adam Smith and Karl Marx being rained out in a brainstorm.”

    Just sharing some stuff I said on social media recently.:

    1. It’s easy to make an ad hominem argument against anything humans do.
    2. If we had to avoid every enterprise with owners we don’t like, we might as well graze on berries or something.
    3. Capitalism is way too broad a brush with which to paint all of business. As Peter Drucker put it, most people don’t start a business to make money. They do it to make shoes.
    4. The tech world we’ve had for the last few decades is deeply weird in many ways, such as its mix of thrown-spaghetti venture investments and psychotic incentives, e.g. wanting to break things, to run the world, to replace humans with cyborgs, and to work toward exits that will doom what’s already built while breaking faith with customers, workers, and other dependents. Economic thinkers of the industrial age, from Adam Smith and Karl Marx all the way forward, could hardly have imagined any of this shit. I still haven’t encountered any economic theory that can make full sense of it. (Though I’m not saying there isn’t one.)

    The prompt for the AI art is a riff on #4. Note that the AI doesn’t have a clear idea of how Adam Smith looks.

    ,

  • What symbolizes infrastructure best?

    Which of these best says “infrastructure?”

    I love studying infrastructure. I read about it (hi, Brett), shoot pictures of it, and write about it. Though not enough of the latter. That’s why I’ve started to post again at Trunk Line, my infrastructure blog.

    A post there earlier today was about “dig safe” markings (aka digsafe and dig-safe). I ran it in part so I could create a cool new site icon (and favicon). If you’ve opened any link to Trunk Line, you’ll see its eight colors, like a flag for infrastructure itself, in the page’s tab.

    But I’d like a title image that says infrastructure without explanation. The 36 images above were generated by Microsoft Bing’s Image Creator, using the prompt “A collection of images representative of infrastructure, including digsafe markings, a bridge, a high-voltage tower, a culvert, a road, a traffic light. Digital art.” Clearly it didn’t know what digsafe markings are, though Bing certainly does. (Wikipedia puts them under utility location.)

    Do any of those work for you? Just wondering. Suggestions for other prompts, perhaps?

    ,

  • Hah?

    Even though I have tracking turned off every way I can, I still see ads for hearing aids all over the place online. I suppose that’s because it’s hard to hide when one occupies a demographic bulls-eye.

    They’re wasted anyway because I’ve done my deal with Costco. Consumer Reports top-rates Costco’s best offering, and that’s what I’ll pick up later this month when I’m back in Santa Barbara and can go to the Costco store in Goleta. (There are none here in Bloomington. Nor a Trader Joe’s. Since those are our two dessert island requirements, we suffer.)

    I’ve had my hearing tested at Costco three times: in 2019, 2021, and last month. Each test looked roughly like what you see in the audiogram above, which is a test I did in September with my new Apple AirPods Pro. (2nd Generation). I got those because they kinda work as hearing aids. (In “transparency” mode. If you have them, give it a try.) The main problem with the ‘pods is that they tell people I’m not listening to them. Also, they tend to fall out of my head.

    As you see from that audiogram, my hearing loss is moderate at worst. And that notch at 4 kHz is at least partly due to tinnitus. At all times I hear several separate tones between 4 and 7 kHz at a volume that runs between 30 and 60 db, depending on the time of day and how much I’ve been exposed to loud sounds. (Amplified concerts, lawnmowers, and vacuum cleaners crank my tinnitus up to eleven, for hours afterward.)

    Since my hearing loss doesn’t test as severe, each Costco audiologist hat tested me has recommended against getting hearing aids. (Their tests were also far more complete than what I got from my otorhinolaryngologist, whose office also pitched me on hearing aids costing upwards of $5k.)

    The hearing aids won’t help my APD, and certainly not my ADHD (which actually isn’t that bad, IMHO). But they also won’t hurt. We’ll see—or hear—how it goes.

    ,

  • Some remodeling work

    As Dave says here, we’re remodeling this blog a bit, starting with the title image, which for the last few years has been a portrait of me at work, drawn by the fashion illustrator Gregory Wier-Quitton.

    My likeness online is not in short supply. Here’s a sampling from a DuckDuckGo image search for my name:

    image search for Doc Searls

    Dave likes this one, from Flickr:

    He also doesn’t think the current title art (which it is, literally) looks like me. I don’t either, for an odd reason you might not guess: I don’t wear glasses except when I’m staring at a screen. Or out in bright sunlight. And even then, I just wear off-the-shelf shades: typically the polarized ones that cost $21.99 at CVS.

    In fact, I did wear glasses most of the time between my senior year in college and the end of the millennium. You can see me with them in the title image of my original (1999-2007) blog:

    That’s from this photo of the four Cluetrain authors in the summer of 1999:

    That design was by Bryan Bell, who designed many of the early blogs.

    I wore glasses because studying a lot (which I didn’t bother doing until college) made me nearsighted, and reading and writing for a living kept me that way until I tested the theory that myopia is to some degree adaptive (and why studious kids seem to need glasses more than kids that aren’t). Starting in the ’90s, I tried to wear glasses as little as possible. That theory was proved, at least empirically, by vision improved to the degree that I no longer needed them to drive. That happened in the early ’00s. (My driver’s license doesn’t say I require them, and my vision is now 20/15 in my right eye* and 20/30 in my left.)

    I also don’t think it’s right to use a shot in which my head still had enough hair on top to comb. Until my late ’60s, I thought I was free of the family curse (on my mother’s side), but then most of my hair fell out as if I was on chemo. While it’s true, as Dave says, that I’ve had hair for most of the time I’ve been blogging—and for the much longer stretch of the time I’ve been writing—the simple fact is that I no longer look like I did when I needed a barber. Also, in 2017 my eyelids were surgically liberated by removing the forehead that was falling down into my vision, disabling my eyelids and squeezing my eyeballs out of spherity. (This was a medical move, not a cosmetic one.) This also altered my look.

    Somewhere in the oeuvre of Fran Liebowitz she advises readers worried about their aging faces to confront a mirror and realize this: “It only gets worse.”

    With that and the spirit of renovation in mind, does this blog need an image of me on top? I could fill my screen and yours running down a list of fine blogs and newsletters that don’t feature their authors’ image in a header—or anywhere except maybe an About page.

    For example, I love how Dave’s blog is titled with self-replacing images from his own library. If we were to do that here, I have 6 TB of photos we can choose from, with more than 66,000 of them on Flickr alone.

    But hell, maybe we could just use the most recent photo of me. This one was shot yesterday over breakfast downtown (at the Bucks Woodside of Bloomington, called Uptown) by my pal Dave Askins, after we discovered that the silverware was not only ferrous but well-magnetized:

    My wife hates that shirt, and that napkin is kinda weird, but here’s my thinking on the whole thing: at 76,  I’m still alive† and having fun. Such as right now.

    *My right eye improved to 20/20 until it got a cataract. When that became annoying, I had the cataract removed and replaced by a fixed lens that improved my vision to 20/15. The left eye also has a cataract; but can still focus, which is why I haven’t had that one fixed. Once it’s fixed I’ll need to wear glasses again: ones with progressive lenses, so I can read and look at close stuff. Meanwhile, I’m holding off.

    †If I read this right, most male babies born in the U.S. in 1947 are now dead. For more data of the actuarial sort, find sources here, here, here, and here.

    ,

  • 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 aren’t yet showing up on the giant spreadsheet I’m looking at, with expense-cutting in mind.

    I started blogging in Medium because Ev Williams created it, with lots of noble intentions, and I wanted to support Ev and his work. I also liked its WYSIWYG-y approach to composing pages. And I liked the stats, though I mostly stopped looking at them after they defaulted to highlighting how many claps a piece gets. I never liked the claps thing.

    I forget when and why I started paying. I half remember that it was around when they pitched me on maybe making money blogging after the subscription system started up. I wasn’t interested in that, but I was interested in Medium experimenting with money-making.

    But the whole system seemed kinda complicated, so I didn’t pay much attention to it. I just kept posting now and then, and it seemed to work well enough, I suppose because I didn’t see the paywall. Or worse, I did see the paywall when something I wrote got popular and became “Members Only” somehow.

    I see the paywall now on this post by Doug Rushkoff and this one by Cory Doctorow. Yes, I can read their whole posts in this browser, which has a cookie that remembers that I’m a paying member; but it doesn’t on any of the other browsers I use for different purposes, and I don’t feel like logging in on all of them.

    Call me old-fashioned, but I hate being teased into subscriptions. That’s why I’ve been dropping subscriptions to newsletters that tease readers into a paywall. I feel over-subscribed as it is, and the paywall tease is just rude. Ask, don’t coerce.

    Here’s a lesson, newsletter writers: Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters From an American is the top-earning newsletter out there, and she doesn’t have a paywall. She makes all that money (an estimated $5 mllion/year) in voluntary payments.

    The question for me now is,  Do I want to move my 105 Medium posts somewhere else, or just have faith that they’ll stay up where they are, in mostly readable form?

    The one thing I’m sure about now is that I’m done posting there. Ev is gone. My own reading and writing energies are too spread out. One less place to write is a good thing.

    I have three blogs right here using WordPress, and I want to focus on those, and on allied efforts that seem to be moving in the same directions.

    Some of my old Medium posts may be worth saving somewhere else, such as here. But maybe what I haven’t yet written is more important than what I’ve written already.

     

     

    , , , ,

  • Deeper News

    Fifth in the News Commons series.

    Let’s say you’re a public official. Or an engineer. Or a journalist researching a matter of importance, such as a new reservoir or a zoning change. What do you need?library

    In a word, facts. This should go without saying, but it bears saying because lots of facts are hard to find. They get lost. They decay. Worse, in their absence you get hearsay. Conjecture. Gossip. Mis and Dis information. Facts can also get distorted or excluded when they don’t fit a story. This is both a feature and a bug of storytelling. I reviewed this problem in Stories vs. Facts.

    So how do we keep facts from decaying? How do we make them useful and accurate when future decisions require them?

    Two ways.

    One is by treating news as history. You do this by flowing news into well0-curated archives that remain accessible for the duration.

    The other is to gather and produce facts that don’t make news but might someday—and flow those into curated archives as well.

    In both cases, we are talking about facts that decision-makers may need to do their work, whether or not their work produces news.

    So let’s start with history.

    Timothy Snyder defines history as “what’s possible.” In his Yale lectures on The Making of Modern Ukraine, he also says history is discontinuity. By that, he means we give the most significance to moments of change, to times of transition. Elections. Wars. Disasters. Championships. And we tend to ignore what’s not making news in the meantime. We also tend to ignore the kind of news that just burbles along, not sounding especially historical, but is interesting to readers, watchers, and listeners—and might be relevant again. This is most of what gets reported by the obsessives who still produce local news. But how much of that stuff gets saved? And where?

    Here in Bloomington, Indiana, the big industries for more than a century were limestone, furniture, and radio and television manufacture. Specifically,

    1. The limestone industry is still large and likely to stay that way until demand for premium limestone goes away (my guess is a few centuries from now).
    2. The furniture industry came and went in about seven decades, but at its peak Showers Brothers Furniture produced a lion’s share of the affordable furniture sold in the U.S.
    3. In the Forties and Fifties, so many radios and TVs were made here that Bloominngton for a time called itself “the color TV capitol of the world.”

    If you haven’t seen Breaking Away yet, please do. Besides being one of the greatest coming-of-age stories ever told, it’s an excellent look at Bloomington’s small-town/big university charms, plus its limestone industry and the people who worked in it, back when the quarries and the cutting plants were still right in town. (They’re still around, but out amidst the farmlands.)

    In Showers Brothers Furniture Company: The Shared Fortunes of a Family, a City and a University (Quarry Books, 2012), Carol Krause gives a sense of how huge a business Showers Brothers was at the time:

    Shipments averaged seventy rail carloads per month. The sawmill daily cut 25,000 feet of lumber at that time and secured its lumber by purchasing large tracts of land and then logging them. This is undoubtedly part of the reason that so much of the land around Monroe and surrounding counties had been completely clear-cut early by the  twentieth century.” (p. 121)

    Her source for that was the April 26, 1904 issue of Bloomington Courier, then one of two papers competing to serve a town of about seven thousand people. But countless other bits of history are forever gone. In her notes about sources, Krause writes,

    The business records of the Showers company have unfortunately been lost, and only a handful of the annual furniture catalogs survive, despite decades of publication. We no longer have the training materials that the company distributed to its salesme, and we have virtually no remaining business correspondence. As for family papers, we possess only the handwritten memoir of James Showers, the spiritual daybook of his mother, Elizabeth, and a small handful of family photographs. There is also no comprehensive Bomington history that sums up the major events or characters in the company’s history. Owing to the lack of records, this work relies largely upon accounts published in newspapers of the period. this record is fragmentary during the early years and we cannot consider any of it fully accurate or complete, because of the political partiality of the newspaper publishers. Nevertheless, newppaper records are the single largest remaining source of information available about the Showers family and its company, so this book reflects countless hours spent at the microfilm machines at the public library, perusing the headlines of bygone times. (p. xv)

    Bloomington is fortunate to have an unusually thick collection of factual resources in the Monroe County library system and history center. Without those, Carol Krause probably wouldn’t have written her book at all. (Alas, she passed in 2014. Here is a Herald-Times obituary.)

    The best sources I’ve found for Bloomington’s history as a broadcasting town are Bloomingpedia and Wikipedia. From the former:

    In 1940 RCA moved a major manufacturing plant from Camden, NJ to Bloomington. The 1.5 million square foot RCA plant, although originally planned to build radios, was converted to televisions when that technology became viable, and when the first television came off the line on September 6, 1949, “TV Day” was declared in Bloomington. The plant was located on south Rogers Street, and produced more than 65 million televisions over the next 50 years. The factory employed over 8,000 workers at its peak, roughly 2% of the entire Bloomington workforce, and also provided many jobs for industries servicing the plant. Sarkes Tarzian, Inc. was among these. For a while, Bloomington called itself the “Color Television Capital of the World”.

    Labor unrest began to swirl in the 1960’s. In 1964 5000 workers walked off the job over the protest of both management and union leaders. After a week, a new contract was approved and the workers returned to the assembly lines; but in October of 1966 the workers stuck again, claiming the company was in violation of the union contract, and several violent scuffles were reported. In 1967 a third, rather disorganized strike also took place.

    In 1968, over 2000 people were laid off; mostly the young female workers that were considered to be most skilled at the delicate work of assembling televisions on the line.

    RCA was bought by General Electric in 1986, then immediately sold to the French company Thomson SA, and rumors of the plant closing immediately began. On April 1, 1998, the last television rolled off the line and Thomson moved the plant to Juarez, Mexico, where RCA had had a small plant as early as 1968.

    And from Wikipedia:

    The Sarkes Tarzian company was an important manufacturer of radio and television equipment, television tuners, and components. Its FM radio receivers helped to popularize the broadcast medium. Sarkes Tarzian manufactured studio color TV cameras in the mid-1960s.[16] The manufacturing operations were spun off in the 1970s and today the company still exists as a broadcaster, owning several television and radio stations. Gray Television has owned a partial stake in Sarkes Tarzian, Inc., since the early 2000s.

    Those are all great sources, but the holes are bigger than the hills.

    We also have a new situation on our hands, now that we are completing what Jeff Jarvis calls The Gutenberg Parenthesis: the age of print. How do we best accumulate and curate useful facts in our still-new digital age?

    One solution is to archive everything possible, either retrospectively or constantly. The best retrospective case is made by David Gleason, a broadcast industry veteran, has scanned nine million pages of broadcast industry periodicals and reference works, and put them all on the Web in searchable form. The site is World Radio History, and it’s an extreme treasure. The best constant archiving enterprise is the Internet Archive , which (among much else) takes snapshots of sites across the Web, over and over, compiling a history of everything it has seen.

    But that’s a lot like seeing the world only every few days or weeks. Google and Bing get around that by indexing the whole Web constantly, with a time to index that rounds to zero. But, alas, it doesn’t remember everything it sees. Its short-term memory rounds to now as well.

    This wasn’t always the case. Old folks like me remember when what Google and its predecessors knew about websites was weeks or months old. When did this end?

    Well, back in 2003, my son Allen astutely noted that the World Wide Web was splitting between what he called the Static Web and the Live Web. Here is what I wrote about the former in the October 2005 edition of Linux Journal:

    There’s a split in the Web. It’s been there from the beginning, like an elm grown from a seed that carried the promise of a trunk that forks twenty feet up toward the sky.

    The main trunk is the static Web. We understand and describe the static Web in terms of real estate. It has “sites” with “addresses” and “locations” in “domains” we “develop” with the help of “architects”, “designers” and “builders”. Like homes and office buildings, our sites have “visitors” unless, of course, they are “under construction”.

    One layer down, we describe the Net in terms of shipping. “Transport” protocols govern the “routing” of “packets” between end points where unpacked data resides in “storage”. Back when we still spoke of the Net as an “information highway”, we used “information” to label the goods we stored on our hard drives and Web sites. Today “information” has become passé. Instead we call it “content”.

    Publishers, broadcasters and educators are now all in the business of “delivering content”. Many Web sites are now organized by “content management systems”.

    The word content connotes substance. It’s a material that can be made, shaped, bought, sold, shipped, stored and combined with other material. “Content” is less human than “information” and less technical than “data”, and more handy than either. Like “solution” or the blank tiles in Scrabble, you can use it anywhere, though it adds no other value.

    I’ve often written about the problems that arise when we reduce human expression to cargo, but that’s not where I’m going this time. Instead I’m making the simple point that large portions of the Web are either static or conveniently understood in static terms that reduce everything within it to a form that is easily managed, easily searched, easily understood: sites, transport, content.

    At the time I thought—we all thought—that the Live Web was blogs. In fact, I had something to do with first Live Web search engine, called Technorati, which David Sifry invented while helping me do research for this article on blogging for Linux Journal. Technorati just watched RSS feeds, which were the most alive thing on the Web at the time, and are still indispensable for everything that gets published online, including podcasts.

    For awhile Technorati and a bunch of competitors fought over who had the shortest time to index for blogs on the Live Web.  But then two things happened. One was that Google created its own search engine for blogs, called Google Blogsearch, and then moved its functions to its main search engine, reducing its time to index for everything—and steamrolling Technorati and its competitors in the process. The other was social media, originally with Twitter and Facebook. As those scaled from millions to billions of participants, blogs got backburnered for both readers and writers. (Though they have never gone away, and are today enjoying a new wave. Surf’s up!)

    As I shared in Deep News., Dave Askins of the B Square Bulletin would like us to create a “digital file repository”—” a place where anyone—journalists, public officials, and residents of all stripes—can upload digital files, so that others can have access to those files now and until the end of time. It can also serve as a backup for files that the city has made public on its website, but could remove at any time.”

    Dave has also added Monroe County (including Bloomington) to LocalWiki, which is Wikipedia’s place for places to have their own wikis, including digital file repositories. I’ve contributed a local media section.

    To put all this in perspective, read CNET Deletes Thousands of Old Articles to Game Google Search, subtitled, “Google says deleting old pages to bamboozle Search is ‘not a thing!’ as CNET erases its history.” Here’s the money graf:

    “Removing content from our site is not a decision we take lightly. Our teams analyze many data points to determine whether there are pages on CNET that are not currently serving a meaningful audience. This is an industry-wide best practice for large sites like ours that are primarily driven by SEO traffic,” said Taylor Canada, CNET’s senior director of marketing and communications. “In an ideal world, we would leave all of our content on our site in perpetuity. Unfortunately, we are penalized by the modern internet for leaving all previously published content live on our site.”

    This is the exact opposite of deep news. It’s about as shallow as can be.

    Not that Google is much deeper. I have a number of pages here that contain a unique word—kind of an Easter egg—that Google used to find if I searched for it. Now Google doesn’t. Why? whatever the reason, it is clear that Google is optimized for now rather than then.

    So we need to start creating deep and archival ways that serve meaning across time.

    I have a lot more to say about this, but want to get what I have so far up on the blog, where others can help improve the post. Meanwhile a bonus link:

    The Incredible Story Of Marion Stokes, Who Single-Handedly Taped 35 Years Of TV News

    The photo is one I shot of the Santa Barbara city library through the hall in the courthouse that leads from the Sunken Gardens to Anacapa Street.

    , ,
    , , ,

  • What is a “stake” and who holds one?

    I once said this:

    That’s Peter Cushing (familiar to younger folk as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars) pounding a stake through the heart of Dracula in the 1958 movie that modeled every remake after it. Other variants of that caption and image followed, some posted on Twitter before it was bitten by Musk and turned into a zombie called X.

    After work started on IEEE P7012—Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms, I posted this one:

    Merriam-Webster says stakeholder means these things:

    1: a person entrusted with the stakes of bettors
    2: one that has a stake in an enterprise
    3: one who is involved in or affected by a course of action

    Specifically (at that second link), a stake is an interest or share in an undertaking or enterprise (among other things irrelevant to our inquiry here).

    Do we have an interest in the Internet? In the Web? In search? In artificial intelligence? When “stakeholders” are talked about for any of those things, they tend to be ones in government and industry. Not you and me.

    Was anyone representing you at the White House Summit on Artificial Intelligence? How about the AI World Congress coming up next month in London? Or any of the many AI conferences going on this year? Of course, our elected representatives and regulators are supposed to represent us, mostly for the purpose of protecting us as mere “users.” But as we know too well, regulators inevitably work for the regulated. Follow the money.

    So my case here is not for regulators to play the Peter Cushing role. That job is yours and mine. We just need the weapons—not just to kill surveillance capitalism, but to do all we can to stop AI from making surveillance more pervasive and killproof than ever.

    At this point, just imagining that is still hard. But we need to.

     

    ,

  • Building Better AI

    What shall we make of AI?

    Marina Zannoli has something to say about that, and she’ll say it this coming Tuesday, October 17, at Indiana University—and online too, at 12pm Eastern time. The title of her talk is Mastering AI: What I Learned as the Chief of Staff of Fundamental AI Research at Meta.

    Though her work at Meta, Dr. Zannoli has come to believe that maximizing what’s useful about AI and minimizing what’s scary requires close collaboration between academic, industry, and governmental organizations. She’ll explain how in a lively discussion that will take place at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at IU, and online via Zoom (on a wall-sized screen).

    Her talk is the second in this year’s Beyond the Web Salon Series, themed Human +/vs. Artificial intelligence. It is co-hosted Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School, both at IU.

    The cost is $0, but you have to register to attend the Zoom. Do that here. And I’ll see you there.

    The image above was generated by Bing Image Creator, using a prompt I can’t find right now but was something like, “Give me an image of people building a giant AI.” It was my first whack at using the service, and I think it worked pretty well.

    , , ,

  • Stories vs. Facts

    Fourth in the News Commons series.

    Stories and facts have always been frenemies. Stories can get along fine without facts, though facts are good to have for framing up stories.* Facts by themselves are blah, and need stories to become interesting. So: different beasts, often in conflict.

    That conflict itself makes a good story. Such as right now, when my wife and I are watching The Diplomat on Netflix. The whole series is about the conflict between stories and facts. But then, so is every movie or series about journalism, newsrooms, or any topic where what’s true and what’s being said don’t square up.

    Back when we still had newspapers with newsrooms, senior editors constantly barked the same three words at reporters: What’s the story? They made that demand because stories are the base format of human interest. It’s why you keep watching, listening, and turning pages. You want to know the story.

    So it helps to know what exactly makes a story. Fortunately, the formula is simple. Stories have three elements:

    1. Character
    2. Problem
    3. Movement

    The character can be a person, a cause, a team, a country, a school, a politician, whatever. They can be good or bad, old or young, rich, poor, strange, or anything—as long as they are interesting. To be a character is to be interesting. Stories usually have a collection of them.

    The problem is anything that creates or sustains conflict. There can any number of problems as well.

    Movement has to be toward resolution, even if one never comes. Without movement, the story collapses.

    For example, if your team is up by forty points and there are two minutes left to play, the character that matters is you, and your problem is getting out of the parking lot. (There are many stories in your life, and you are the lead character in most of them.)

    Here are another three words you need to know, because they pose an extreme challenge for journalism in an age when stories abound and sources are mostly tribal, meaning their stories are about their own chosen heroes, villains, and the problems that connect them: Facts don’t matter.

    Daniel Kahneman says that. So does Scott Adams.

    Kahneman says facts don’t matter because people’s minds are already made up about most things, and what their minds are made up about are stories. People already like, dislike, or actively don’t care about the characters involved, and they have well-formed opinions about whatever the problems are.

    Adams puts it more simply: “What matters is how much we hate the person talking.” In other words, people have stories about whoever they hate. Or at least dislike. And a hero (or few) on their side.

    These days we like to call stories “narratives.” Whenever you hear somebody talk about “controlling the narrative,” they’re not talking about facts. They want to shape or tell stories that may have nothing to do with facts.

    But let’s say you’re a decision-maker: the lead character in a personal story about getting a job done. You’re the captain of a ship, the mayor of a town, a general on a battlefield, the detective on a case. What do you need most? Somebody’s narrative? Or facts?

    Wouldn’t it be better to have facts than to guess at them? Should you take as fact what somebody merely claims? My old friend Craig Burton said he trusted first-hand (his own) information less than 100% of the time, second-hand information less than half the time, and third-hand information not at all. When the stakes are truly high, it’s best to have facts. Let those drive the narrative, rather than the reverse.

    This is half of my case for Deep News. The other half is the need to formalize the way we accumulate facts over time, so the result is what we might call history-based news. Because history is made of facts. We’ll tell better stories and make better decisions if we base them on facts.

    So it matters how we assemble and accumulate facts, and how we do this together. I explain why in Deeper News.

    The image above combines the Story of Golden Locks, a painting by Seymour Joseph Guy (MET, 2013.604), via Wikimedia Commons, and a warning posted on Mt. Wilson in California.