The Santa Barbara News-Press was born in 1868 and died in 2023 at age 155. Its glory years ran from 1932 until 2000, when the New York Times sold it to Wendy McCaw, who rode it to hell. That ride began with the Santa Barbara News Press Controversy in 2006 and ended when Ampersand … | Continue reading
Journalism as we knew it is washing away. But the story is bigger than journalism alone, and bigger than a story alone can tell. (Image borrowed from the brilliant Despair.com.) We who care about journalism are asked to join the Save Journalism Project, and its fight against Big … | Continue reading
Contrails form behind jet aircraft flying through the stratosphere. Since high-altitude aviation is happening all around the earth more or less constantly, planes are painting the sky everywhere. (Here is one time-lapse.) Many contrails don’t last, of course, but many do, and tog … | Continue reading
Artificial is AI’s frst name. And Intelligence is a quality, not a quantity. You can’t measure it with a dipstick, a ruler, or an IQ test. If you could, you’d get the same result every time.* But being artificial doesn’t mean AI isn’t dangerous, fun or both. It is, and will be, w … | Continue reading
I think I will be the last person in Bloomington to try getting free over-the-air TV from what’s left of all the major networks. But that’s just my style, so roll with me while I explain how I’m hoping to do it, with the antenna above, which I’ll need because here is what the Sea … | Continue reading
Two things worth blogging about that happened this morning. One was getting down and dirty trying to make DALL-E 3 work. That turned into giving up trying to find DALL-E (in any version) on the open Web and biting the $20/month bullet for a Pro account with ChatGPT, which for som … | Continue reading
When Parisians got tired of cemeteries during the French Revolution, they conscripted priests to relocate bones of more than six million deceased forebears to empty limestone quarries below the city: a hundred miles of rooms and corridors now called The Catacombes. It was from th … | Continue reading
I just returned to DALL-E 3 after using its Microsoft version (currently called Copilot | Designer) for a while. But I can’t get in. See how it says “Try in ChatGPT↗︎?” When I do that, it goes to https://chat.openai.com/. After I log in there, it offers no clue about where DALL-E … | Continue reading
This post is for the benefit of anyone wondering about, researching, or going into business on the proposition that selling one’s own personal data is a good idea. Here are some of my learnings from having studied this proposition myself for the last twenty years or more. The bus … | Continue reading
After we came to Bloomington in the summer of 2021, we rented an apartment by Prospect Hill, a quiet dome of old houses just west of downtown. There were surprised to hear, nearly every night, as many police and ambulance sirens as we’d heard in our Manhattan apartment. Helicopte … | Continue reading
But not of who, how, and why. Start by looking here: That’s a page of TV Guide, a required resource in every home with a TV, through most of the last half of the 20th century. Every program was on only at its scheduled times. Sources were called stations, which broadcast over the … | Continue reading
Mom would have been 111 today. She passed in ’03 at 90, but that’s not what matters. What matters is that she was a completely wonderful human being: as good a mother, sister, daughter, cousin, friend, and teacher as you’ll find. There is a thread in Facebook (which seems to be d … | Continue reading
There was a moment in 2007 when Doc Searls took the blogroll off his blog. | Continue reading
The song “Ripple,” by the Grateful Dead, never fails to move me. Here’s a live performance by the Dead, in 1980, on YouTube. My favorite version, however, is this one by KPIG’s Fine Swine Orchestra, recorded by Santa Cruz musicians sheltering in place during the pandemic. That’s … | Continue reading
Thoughts I jotted down on Mastodon: 1) Blogs are newsletters that don’t require subscriptions. 2) Blogrolls are lists of blogs. 3) Both require the lowest possible cognitive and economic overhead. 4) That’s why they are coming back. I know, they never left. But you get my point. | Continue reading
As a cook, my Swedish mother was best known for her Swedish meatballs, an indelicacy now familiar as the reward for completing the big-box retail maze called Ikea. Second-best was the limpa bread (vörtbröd) she baked every Christmas. She once won an award for that one. Maybe twic … | Continue reading
On April 4, 1968, when I learned with the rest of the world that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, I immediately thought that the civil rights movement, which King had led, had just been set back by fifty years. I was wrong about that. It ended right then (check that … | Continue reading
The Cluetrain Manifesto will turn 25 in two months. I am one of its four authors, and speak here only for myself. The others are David Weinberger, Rick Levine, and Chris Locke. David and Rick may have something to say. Chris, alas, demonstrates the first words in Chapter One of T … | Continue reading
In Patreon: Blocking platforms from sharing user video data is unconstitutional, Ashley Belanger of Ars Technica reports that Patreon, the widely used and much-trusted monetization platform for creative folk, opposes the nearly absent personal privacy protections provided by a la … | Continue reading
Eight years ago I was asked on Quora to answer the question “What is the social justification for privacy?” This was my answer. Society is comprised of individuals, thick with practices and customs that respect individual needs. Privacy is one of those. Only people who live nake … | Continue reading
In the summer of ’22 we were still new to Indiana and in an exploring mood. Out of nowhere one afternoon my wife said, “Let’s go check out French Lick.” She just liked the name of the town, plus the idea of taking a half-day road trip under a sweet blue sky and big puffy […] | Continue reading
Back when I was on the board of my regional Red Cross chapter (this one), I learned four lessons about fund raising: People are glad to pay value for value. People are most willing to pay when they perceive and appreciate the value they get from a product or service. People are a … | Continue reading
How does The News Business see itself? Easy: ask an AI. Or a lot of them.* That’s what I’ve been doing. Here some results, nearly all answering the same three-word prompt: the news business. Here goes… Microsoft Bing (Full name: Microsoft Bing Image Creator from Designer), which … | Continue reading
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 Bloomin … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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: Wh … | Continue reading
“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. I once went with a friend to a concert by a famous pianist. The was a pianist and composer, with advanced degrees in both … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 have also both been lifetime United Club members for (counting…) thir … | Continue reading
Eight years ago, I posted The Biggest Boycott in World History, which was about ad blocking. At that time, hundreds of millions of people were blocking ads online: enough to justify the headline. Then, a few days ago, Cory Doctorow … Continue reading → | Continue reading
The Big Calendar here in Bloomington is one fed by other calendars kind enough to syndicate themselves by publishing feeds. It is put together by my friend Dave Askins, who writes and publishes the B Square Bulletin. Technically speaking, it … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Just sharing some stuff I said on social media recently.: It’s easy to make an ad hominem argument against anything humans do. If we had to avoid every enterprise with owners we don’t like, we might as well graze on … Continue reading → | Continue reading
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 … Continue reading → | Continue reading
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 … Continue reading → | Continue reading
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 … Continue reading → | Continue reading
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 … Continue reading → | Continue reading
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? In a word, facts. This should go without saying, but … Continue reading → | Continue reading
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 … Continue reading → | Continue reading
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: … Continue reading → | Continue reading
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 … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Facts don’t matter. Daniel Kahneman says that. So does Scott Adams. Kahneman follows those three words with these: ” .” Adams follows his three with “What matters is how much we hate the person talking.” | Continue reading
Journalism is in trouble because journals are going away. So are broadcasters that do journalism rather than opinionism. Basically, they are either drowning in digital muck or adapting to it. Also in that muck are a zillion new journalists, born … Continue reading → | Continue reading
How do people get news where you live? How do they remember it? For most of the industrial age, which is still with us, newspapers answered both those questions—and did so better than any other medium or civic institution. Newspapers … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter. — Thomas Jefferson News is the first rough draft of history. — … Continue reading → | Continue reading
From 2007 until about a month ago, I wrote on three blogs that lived at blogs.harvard.edu. There was my personal blog (this one here), ProjectVRM’s blog (also its home page), and Trunkline, a blog about infrastructure that was started by … Continue reading → | Continue reading
So I thought I’d give Bing a try at using ChatGPT to answer a question I had. The question was, “What group sings the theme song to the podcast ‘A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs’?” Bing search took … Continue reading → | Continue reading