Business
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On cryptocurrencies, blockchain and all that
Take a look at this chart: CryptoCurrency Market Capitalizations As Neo said, Whoa. To help me get my head fully around all that’s going on behind that surge, or mania, or whatever it is, I’ve composed a lexicon-in-process that I’m publishing here so I can find it again. Here goes::: Bitcoin. “A cryptocurrency and a… Continue reading
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Google enters its chrysalis
In The Adpocalypse: What it Means, Vlogbrother Hank Green issues a humorous lament on the impending demise of online advertising. Please devote the next 3:54 of your life to watching that video, so you catch all his points and I don’t need to repeat them here. Got them? Good. All of Hank’s points are well-argued and make complete sense. They… Continue reading
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Daily Tab for 2017_06_09
#Publishing When I heard that Backchannel would be moving to Wired while Google’s Contributor service (“buy an ad removal pass for the web”) was not only rolling out, but already deployed by some publishers (e.g. by Business Insider UK)—and while Wired (with the rest of Condé Nast) was still mistaking tracking protection for ad blocking (and hitting readers with… Continue reading
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Daily Tab for 2016_06_07
For today’s entries, I’m noting which linked pieces require you to turn off tracking protection, meaning tracking is required by those publishers. I’m also annotating entries with hashtags and organizing sections into bulleted lists. #AdBlocking and #Advertising Jack Trout died. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (co-written with Al Ries) did for advertising what The Elements of Style… Continue reading
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The Daily Tab for 2017_06_06
Required viewing: A Good American, a documentary on Bill Binney and the NSA by @FriedrichMoser. IMHO, this is the real Snowden movie. And I say that with full respect for Snowden. Please watch it. (Disclosure: I have spent quality time with both Bill and Fritz, and believe in both.) Bonus dude: @KirkWiebe, also ex-NSA and a colleague of Bill’s.… Continue reading
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An Archimedian Approach to Personal Power in the Land of Giants
On a mailing list that obsesses about All Things Networking, another member cited what he called “the Doc Searls approach” to something. Since it was a little off (though kind and well-intended), I responded with this (lightly edited): The Doc Searls approach is to put as much agency as possible in the hands of individuals… Continue reading
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Where the nickname came from
My given name is David. Family members still call me that. Everybody else calls me Doc. Since people often ask me where that nickname came from, and since apparently I haven’t answered it anywhere I can now find online, here’s the story. Thousands of years ago, in the mid-1970s, I worked at a little radio station owned… Continue reading
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Open Word—The Podcasting Story
Nobody is going to own podcasting. By that I mean nobody is going to trap it in a silo. Apple tried, first with its podcasting feature in iTunes, and again with its Podcasts app. Others have tried as well. None of them have succeeded, or will ever succeed, for the same reason nobody has ever… Continue reading
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Have we passed peak phone?
I shot this picture with my phone on the subway last night, while no less absorbed in my personal rectangle than everyone else on the subway (and I do mean everyone) was with theirs. I don’t know what the other passengers were doing on their rectangles, though it’s not hard to guess. In my case it was… Continue reading
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Brands need to fire adtech
Brands are starting to bail from adtech, and news about it is coming fast and hard. The New York Times said AT&T and Johnson & Johnson were pulling their ads from YouTube, concerned that “Google is not doing enough to prevent brands from appearing next to offensive material, like hate speech.” Business Insider said “more… Continue reading
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Defibrillating a dead horse
Before we start, let me explain that ATSC 1.0 is the HDTV standard, and defines what you get from HDTV stations over the air and cable. It dates from the last millennium. Resolution currently maxes out at 1080i, which fails to take advantage even the lowest-end HDTVs sold today, which are 1080p (better than 1080i).… Continue reading
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How True Advertising Can Save Journalism From Drowning in a Sea of Content
Journalism is in a world of hurt because it has been marginalized by a new business model that requires maximizing “content” instead. That model is called adtech. We can see adtech’s effects in The New York Times’ In New Jersey, Only a Few Media Watchdogs Are Left, by David Chen. His prime example is the Newark… Continue reading
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Exploring the business behind digital media’s invisibility cloaks
Imagine you’re on a busy city street where everybody who disagrees with you disappears. We have that city now. It’s called media—especially the social kind. You can see how this works on Wall Street Journal‘s Blue Feed, Red Feed page. Here’s a screen shot of the feed for “Hillary Clinton” (one among eight polarized… Continue reading
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Let’s give full credit to human ingenuity
In The American Dream, Quantified at Last, David Leonhardt in The New York Times makes a despairing case for a perfect Onion headline: American Dream Ends When Nation Wakes Up. Like so much else the Times correctly tries to do, the piece issues a wake-up call. It is also typical of the Times’ tendency to… Continue reading
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A few words about trust
[3 December update: Here is a video of the panel.] So I was on a panel at WebScience@10 in London (@WebScienceTrust, #WebSci10), where the first question asked was, “What are two aspects of ‘trust and the Web’ that you think are most relevant/important at the moment?” My answer went something like this:::: 1) The Net… Continue reading
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Uber’s pending sale of your personal data
This is a second draft of this post, corrected by Denise Howell’s comment below. Key facts: I am not a lawyer. She is. Good one, too. So take heed (as I just did). And read on. Uber has new terms for you: User Provided Content. Uber may, in Uber’s sole discretion, permit you from time… Continue reading
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The egg on Zuck’s face
Nearly all the ads I see on Facebook are fake news items like these two, next to Mark Zuckerberg’s latest post, which is, ironically, about fake news: Besides being false and misleading clickbait, these ads are not from espn.com. They’re from http://espn.com-magazines.online. They are also bait for a topic switch, since they’re actually about a… Continue reading
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Consumers can’t help health care. Customers can.
Economically speaking, the American healthcare system is not built for patients, because patients aren’t the ones paying for it directly. Insurance companies are. See, health care in the U.S. is mostly a B2B insurance business. It is only B2C when insurance doesn’t cover expenses to the patient. And even then, insurance still pays for it… Continue reading