Doc Searls Weblog

Cool

• Britt Blaser’s flying stories. The dude is a terrific writer who has lived to tell, and tell well. He should do that more often. Speaking of which, I interviewed him for this podcast.
• How 24 Tiny Satellites Could Change Business Forever. By Nate Hindman and Joe Epstein. Subhead: “Skybox doesn’t want to see pictures of Earth from space just for kicks. It wants to scour the globe for information that will remake industries.” It’s about Skybox, to which I gave $100 in its Kickstarter campaign. Don’t have the t-shirts yet. (Not needing them either. I just noticed for the first time that t-shirts were a perk.) And I look forward to my fifteen minutes.
• Libraries don’t have to be a thing of the past – just look at Melbourne’s. By Anita Sethi in The Guardian. Subhead: “Taking a close look at some of the most glorious of the world’s public libraries, from Australia to England, is a reminder of just how vital they are the world over.”
• The New Yorker channels The Onion with Shouts & Murmurs:
  • Even More New Features of Your Gmail Inbox! By Ethan Kuperberg.
  • Amazon Founder Says He Clicked on Washington Post By Mistake. By Andy Borowitz. Also by Andy:  Boehner Urges Republicans To Rest Up for Meaningless Votes Ahead.

Personal data and independence

• The Independent Purchase Decision Support Test, by Adrian Gropper, M.D. Pull quote: ” What I need is an Agent that’s independent of my ‘provider’ institution EHR and communicates with that EHR using the Stage 2 guidelines without any interference from the EHR vendor or the ‘provider’. It’s my choice who gets the Direct messages, it’s my choice if I want to ask my doctor about the alternatives and it’s my doctor’s choice to open up or ignore the Direct messages I send.” (EHR is Electronic Health Record.)
• Your data is your interface. By Jarno Mikael Koponen in Pando Daily. Pull quote: “Before solving the ‘Big Data’ we should figure out the ‘small’ personal part. Algorithms alone can’t make me whole. Different services need my continuous contribution to understand who I really am and what I want. And I believe that apps and services that openly share their data to provide me a better user experience are not far off.”
• Jarno is also the father of Futureful (@futureful) which Zak Stone of Co.Exist (in Fast Company) in says “hopes to bring serendipitous browsing back to the web experience by providing a design-heavy platform for content discovery.” Just downloaded it.

Media

• The rebirth of OMNI — and its vibe. Subhead: Glenn Fleishman on the imminent reboot of the legendary science and science fiction magazine. In BoingBoing. Two bonus links on the OMNI topic:
  • Remembering the Future
  • The almost-complete OMNI archive
• Jeff Bezos buys the Washington Post. This is either wonderful for journalism or horrifying. By Sarah Lacy in Pando Daily. Pull quote: “John Doerr…described an entrepreneur with uncommon focus and discipline around what the customer wants. I guess the future of the Post will ride on who Bezos sees as ‘the customer’ and what’s in his best interest.”
• Donald Graham’s Choice, by David Remmick in The New Yorker.
• Here’s Why I Think Jeff Bezos Bought The Washington Post. By Henry Blodget in Business Insider. Pull-quote:
  • First, I’d guess that Jeff Bezos thinks that owning the Washington Post will be fun, interesting, and cool. And my guess is that, if that is all it ever turns out to be, Jeff Bezos will be fine with that. This is a man who invests in rockets and atomic clocks, after all. He doesn’t necessarily make these investments for the money. Or bragging rights. Or strategic synergies.
  • Second, I’d guess that Jeff Bezos thinks that there are some similarities between the digital news business and his business (ecommerce) that no one in the news business has really capitalized on yet.
• The Natives Are Feckless: Part One Of Three. By Bob Garfield in MediaPost. Pull-quotage:
  • Well done, media institutions. You have whored yourselves to a hustler. Your good name, such that it remains, is diminished accordingly, along with your trustworthiness, integrity and any serious claim to be serving the public. Indeed, by bending over for commercially motivated third parties who masquerade as bona fide editorial contributors, you evince almost as little respect for the public as you do for yourself.
  • There’s your native advertising for you. There’s the revenue savior being embraced by Forbes, the Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Business Insider and each week more and more of the publishing world.
  • According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, sponsored content of various kinds was a $1.56 billion category in 2012 and growing fast.
• Future of TV might not include TV. By Shalini Ramachandran and Martin Peers in The Wall Street Journal. It begins, “Predicting that transmission of TV will move to the Internet eventually, Cablevision Systems Corp Chief Executive James Dolan says ‘there could come a day’ when his company stops offering television service, making broadband its primary offering.” And wow:
  • In a 90-minute interview on Friday, the usually media-shy 58-year-old executive also talked about his marriage, his relationship with his father Chuck and his after-hours role as a singer and songwriter. He said his rock band, JD & the Straight Shot, toured with the Eagles last month.
  • Mr. Dolan said that on the rare occasions he watches TV, it is often with his young children, who prefer to watch online video service Netflix, using Cablevision broadband.
  • He added that the cable-TV industry is in a ‘bubble’ with its emphasis on packages of channels that people are required to pay for, predicting it will mature ‘badly’ as young people opt to watch online video rather than pay for traditional TV services.
• Making TVs smart: why Google and Netflix want to reinvent the remote control. By Janko Roettgers in Gigaom.
• Hulu, HBO, Pandora coming to Chromecast. By Steve Smith in MediaPost. Pull-quote: “A battle over content clearly is brewing between Google and Apple. Apple TV has recently expanded its offerings of content providers to include HBO Go, Sky TV, ESPN and others. The two companies are pursuing different delivery models as they try to edge their way onto the TV. Apple TV is a set-top box with apps, while Chromecast relies on apps that are present on mobile devices to which the dongle connects.”
• Setting TV Free. By yours truly in Linux Journal.

Tech

• Standards, Monopoly and the Quantified Self. In which Phil Windley unpacks Why the Quantified Self Needs A Monopoly, by Matt Asay in ReadWrite. I have a comment under Phil’s post.
• We Need a New Church Committee: It’s time for a basic re-evaluation of intelligence operations. By Yochai Benkler in the New Republic.
• World innovation clusters. In MIT Technology Review. Leaders are (in descending order by $ investment):
  • Silicon Valley
  • Boston
  • Paris-Saclay
  • Skolkovo/Innovation City
  • Beijing
  • Israel
  • Bangalore
  • Tech City London

Retail

• Amazon “Upends” Another Industry Sector: Grocery. Are You Next? By Alistair Barr in The River.
• Mobile POS Systems More Popular WIth SMBs. By Mark Walsh in MediaPost.
• The Mobile Wallets Flying Under the Radar. By Chuck Martin, in MediaPost.
• Dear Hotels: Quit Being A-Holes. By yours truly in Linux Journal.

Legal

• A Tipping Point Against The Copyright Monopoly Regime Is A Lot Closer Than You Think. By Rick Falkvinge in TorrentFreak.

Handbaskets to hell

• Is Facebook a Public Utility? Yes, says Filmmaker Cullen Hoback. By Paul Detrick in Reason I like Cullen’s movie Terms and Conditions May Apply, but I think we dilute the meaning of Public Utility by calling Facebook one.
• Other Agencies Clamor for Data N.S.A. Compiles. By Eric Lichtbau and Michael S. Schmidt in The New York Times.
• Copyright, Click Wrap and the Fourth Circuit Court, by Raving Lunacy.