Blogging
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Seeing Deeply
Cities aren’t simple, especially mature ones. They are deep and complicated places that require equally deep attention to appreciate fully. That’s what I get from Stephen Lewis‘ insights about the particulars of present and past urban scenes and characters in Sofia, New York, Istanbul and other cities he knows well. His latest post, titled The Women’s… Continue reading
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Fred Wilson’s talk at LeWeb
I’m bummed that I missed LeWeb, but I’m glad I got to see and hear Fred Wilson’s talk there, given on Tuesday. I can’t recommend it more highly. Go listen. It might be the most leveraged prophesy you’re ever going to hear. I’m biased in that judgement, because the trends Fred visits are ones I’ve devoted my… Continue reading
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Wheat vs. Chaff
John Havens has an excellent piece in Mashable titled “It’s Your Data — But Others Are Making Billions Off It.” In a Web overflowing with chaff, it’s a fine grain of wheat. But it’s also camouflaged by chaff posing as wheat. I can tell, because I was interviewed for the piece, which links back to… Continue reading
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News isn’t about cable. Or newspapers. It’s about us.
Read Dave’s Cable News is Ripe for Disruption. Then Jay Rosen’s Edward Snowden, Meet Jeff Bezos. Then everything Jeff Jarvis has been writing about lately. Then listen to the August 9 edition of On The Media. Pay special attention to the history of New York’s newspapers, and the strike of 1962-3. Note how vitally important… Continue reading
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Long-form never stopped working
Fashions come and go. Verities do not. One verity respected by many old-fashioned writers and publishers is the simple fact that long-form pieces work better than short-form ones for the purpose of communicating in depth. If you want deep, and you’re writing prose, more of it will work better than less of it, given an… Continue reading
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Why durable links matter
In How podcasting got its name, Dave nicely outlines the derivation of the terms podcast and podcasting. That last link goes to the Wikipedia page, because pretty much any other link I put in there has a greater risk of breaking. And that’s what’s at issue here. Dave was able to date usage in part because others,… Continue reading
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How the Web is being body-snatched
Yesterday, when Anil Dash (@AnilDash) spoke about The Web We Lost at Harvard, I took notes in my little outliner, in a browser. They follow. The top outline level is slide titles, or main points. The next level down are points made under the top level. Some of the outline is what Anil said, and some of… Continue reading
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Old skool influential software
I came late to personal computing, which was born with the MITS Altair in 1975. The first PC I ever met — and wanted desperately, in an instant — was an Apple II, in 1977. It sold in one of the first personal computer shops, in Durham, NC. Price: $2500. At the time I was… Continue reading
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Aaron Swartz and Freedom
[Update on 18 January: A memorial service will be held tomorrow in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York. Many will speak, me included. Register at the first link. I’ve also added many more links to the stack below. I’ve also put together a too-short collection of photos I’ve taken of Aaron over… Continue reading
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Threading the year end
From Dave‘s Threads outline of posts… Here’s Dave’s What is Silicon Valley, and my reply. And here’s Dave’s Tech New Years Resolution, followed by my own pair. Pointing to those, in a way, makes good on the first installment of one of my resolutions. Continue reading
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Journalism is outlining
[Updated 1 December to add the addendum below. If you’re new to this post, start here. If you’ve read it already, start down there.] In Journalism as service: Lessons from Sandy, Jeff Jarvis says, “After Sandy, what journalists provided was mostly articles when what I wanted was specifics that those articles only summarized. Don’t give… Continue reading
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Read on
First, ICANN, Make a Difference: The $100 million raised by the sale of new Web domains should be used to wire Africa, by Sascha Meinrath and Elliot Noss. Ambitious and worthy, if it can actually be done. (I always like betting on optimists.) Second, a raft of advertising coverage. We’ll start with several from Don Marti: The… Continue reading
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Riding out the storm
7:30am Tuesday morning: I can tell the storm is over by tuning in to the Weather Channel and finding it back to the normally heavy load of ads, program promotions and breathless sensationalism. So I’ll turn ya’ll back over to your irregularly scheduled programs. Rock on. 11:14pm The Weather Channel just said 4.1 million homes… Continue reading
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Earth to Mars
At Tucows, learning to use Marsedit here, from Ross Rader, who is a veteran. This is while also talking deep OPML jive too. (Such as showing off how I’m using the OPML editor to post/comment in Dave‘s Threads.) Unrelated: I want my keyboard to paste ⊂⊃ (the r-button characters) as well. (Ross knows a lot… Continue reading
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Kidding around
Just discovered YouReputation while checking on what Drazen Pantic has been up to. (I met Drazen a decade ago while researching public Wi-Fi in New York for Linux Journal.) YouReputation is Drazen’s “viral search” engine. Here is the top result in a search for “John Hagel”: Thu Aug 23 06:33:50 2012 Viral Probability: 0.7092 Sentiment: 31%… Continue reading
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Writing with Bitly
Markets are conversations, they say. So yesterday I had one with MRoth, head of product for Bitly, the company whose service changes the other day caused a roar of negative buzz, including some from me, here. Users were baffled by complexities where simplicities used to be. Roger Ebert lamented an “incomprehensible and catastrophic redesign” and explained in… Continue reading
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Take us to The Rivers
News rivers were a brilliant idea in the first place. Perhaps, now that at least one high-profile publisher has embraced them, the rest might follow. But first, some history, in the best chronological order I can muster — Sometime way back there, Dave Winer created rivers of news for the NY Times and the BBC… Continue reading