Internet
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What’s up with @TMobile in North Carolina?
Check this out: I took that screen shot at the excellent Oakleaf restaurant in Pittsboro, NC a few days ago. Note the zero bars (or dots) of telephone service, and the very respectable (tested!) data service. To confirm what the hollow dots said, I tried to make a call. Didn’t work. This seems to be… Continue reading
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Separating advertising’s wheat and chaff
Advertising used to be simple. You knew what it was, and where it came from. Whether it was an ad you heard on the radio, saw in a magazine or spotted on a billboard, you knew it came straight from the advertiser through that medium. The only intermediary was an advertising agency, if the advertiser… Continue reading
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What should we call the selling of our digital body parts?
In a provocative OuiShareFest talk titled You Are the Product, Aral Balkan says this: I think we are at the point where we have to ask ourselves the very uncomfortable question: What do we call the business of selling everything else about you, that makes you who you are, apart from your physical body? And why, if this… Continue reading
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What’s the best way customer love can help a brand?
In “Cool Influencers With Big Followings Get Picky About Their Endorsements,” Sydney Ember of the NY Times writes, The more brands that use influencers for marketing campaigns on social platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, the less impact each influencer has. At the same time, many influencers, who once jumped at the opportunity to endorse… Continue reading
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What am I doing here?
I was born sixty-eight years ago today, in Jersey City‘s Christ Hospital, at around eleven in the morning. I would have been born earlier, but the hospital staff tied Mom’s legs together so I wouldn’t come out before the doctor showed up. You know Poe’s story, The Premature Burial? Mine was like that, only going the other… Continue reading
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The Giant Zero
Many years ago, Craig Burton shared the best metaphor for the Internet that I have ever heard, or seen in my head. He called it hollow sphere: a giant three-dimensional zero. He called it that because a sphere’s geometry best illustrates a system in which every end, regardless of its physical location, is functionally zero… Continue reading
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Liveblogging roundup
I’ve also been liveblogging here. Particulars: May 29-31 (today) May 28 May 22 Be sure to use the Expand All button. HT to Dave. Continue reading
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We can all make TV. Now what?
Look where Meerkat and Periscope point. I mean, historically. They vector toward a future where anybody anywhere can send live video out to the glowing rectangles of the world. If you’ve looked at the output of either, several things become clear about their inevitable evolutionary path: Mobile phone/data systems will get their gears stripped, in both… Continue reading
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Newsstands are à la carte. How about online as well?
I travel a lot, and buy newspapers wherever I happen to be. That would be true online as well, if I could do it. But I can’t, because that’s not an option. For example, my butt is in California right now, but my nose is in Boston, where I’m reading the Globe. I don’t want a… Continue reading
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Captivity rules
In one corner sit me, Don Marti, Phil Windley, Dave Winer, Eben Moglen, John Perry Barlow, Cory Doctorow, Aral Balkan, Adriana Lukas, Keith Hopper, Walt Whitman, William Ernest Henley, the Indie Web people, the VRM development community, authors of the Declaration of Independence, and the freedom-loving world in general. We hold as self-evident that personal agency and… Continue reading
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The most important event, ever
IIW XX, the 20th Internet Identity Workshop, comes at a critical inflection point in the history of VRM: Vendor Relationship Management, the only business movement working toward giving you both independence from the silos and walled gardens of the world; and better means for engaging with every business in the world — your way, rather… Continue reading
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A blast from the independent past
I just ran across a post (below) on my old blog from Tuesday, July 12, 2005: a few months less than ten years ago. It was at the tail end of what Tantek Çelik calls the Independent Web. He gives the time frame for that as roughly 2001-2005, peaking in 2003 or so. “We took it as… Continue reading
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Thoughts on tracking-based advertising
Yesterday @davidweinberger and I were guests on screen at a @commongroundmcr session in Manchester, hosted by Julian Tait (@Julianlstar) and Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden). We talked for a long time about a lot of stuff (here’s a #cmngrnd search featuring some of it); but what seems to have struck the Chord of Controversy was something I blabbed: “Tracking-based advertising is creepy… Continue reading
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Local jazz radio coming to Kansas City
So I just learned that a Kansas City Jazz station is headed toward existence. If you love any of these musicians, this should be very good news. The story begins, By this time next year, Kansas City-style jazz might be bebopping out of a new radio station near you. The Mutual Musicians Foundation in the 18th and… Continue reading
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Blogging the #BlizzardOf2015 in #NYC that wasn’t
The blizzard hit coastal New England, not New York City. In fact, it’s still hitting. Wish I was there, because I love snow. Here in New York City we got pffft: about eight inches in Central Park: an average winter snowstorm. No big deal. I was set up with my GoPro to time-lapse accumulations on… Continue reading
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Maybe wallets can’t be apps
Danese Cooper (@DivaDanese) asks via tweet, Wallet App (and 1-button pay) as “compelling demo” apparently works equally well 4 BitCoin as 4 PayPal. @dsearls opinion? #BitcoinSummit Sounds cool, but I don’t know which wallet app she’s talking about. There are many. In my opinion, however, they all come up short because they aren’t really wallets.… Continue reading
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On marketing’s terminal addiction to personal data fracking and bad guesswork
Quit fracking our lives to extract data that’s none of your business and that your machines misinterpret. — New Clues, #58 That’s the blunt advice David Weinberger and I give to marketers who still make it hard to talk, sixteen years after many of them started failing to get what we meant by Markets are… Continue reading
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Every thing has a face, and vice versa
That line came to me a few minutes ago, as I looked and read through the latest photographic blog posts by Stephen Lewis in his blog, Bubkes). This one… … titled Farmyard, Grandmother, Chicken, and Ovid in Exile, is accompanied by richly detailed text, including this: The courtyard in the photo no longer exists; it and and… Continue reading
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How Radio Can Defend the Dashboard
Dash — “the connected car audiotainment™ conference” — is happening next week in Detroit. It’s a big deal, because cars are morphing into digital things as well as automotive ones. This means lots of new stuff is crowding onto dashboard spaces where radios alone used to live. This is a big deal for radio, since most listening… Continue reading