“Podcasting is hot. Podcasting is cheap and easy. Podcasting can be fun. Creating your own podcast and trying to make a business out of it is a mistake. Unless you are repurposing content from another medium, it will be rare to find anyone making money from originating podcasts.”
— Mark Cuban
"Teamwork is what you call it when you trick other people into ignoring their priorities in favor of yours." -- Scott Adams (advice to graduates in 2006)
“Journalism is the new practice for Everyman, it’s what we all will be doing all the time in this new century. As the professional media pulls back, the citizens, you and me, need to fill in and replace every pro with 100 of us, to cover every school board meeting, every planning commission, defense contractor, civic organization. It’s like the Second Amendment for information and ideas. We need a well-informed electorate to make the tough decisions n our future.”
“Job titles, boxes in org charts, are so last-millennium. They are relics of an Industrial Age that was born of the doomed notion that people are best understood as cogs in corporate machines. … What matters most in the long run is who you are. Not who you work for.”
— Doc Searls on Robert Scoble’s value to Microsoft
“When they finish the process of better and better targeted advertising, that’s when the whole idea of advertising will go poof, will disappear. If it’s perfectly targeted, it isn’t advertising, it’s information. Information is welcome, advertising is offensive. Who wants to pay to create information that’s discarded? Who wants to pay to be a nuisance? Wouldn’t it be better to pay to get the information to the people who want it? Are you afraid no one wants your information? Then maybe you’d better do some research and make a product that people actually want to know about.”
“No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.” –Arthur C. Clarke
“Being an American in 2008 is a lot like working at Microsoft in 1994 or so. Netscape is coming soon and after that Google, and while we’ll still be here, the cursor will be somewhere else, and our stock options will be worthless and we’ll be fighting with each other while the rest of the world builds around us.” — Dave Winer
“I am tormented, or tantalized, by the sense that I am almost in view of something that is at the limit of my comprehension.” — Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (pg 543)
“He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.”
— The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1971)
"The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don’t ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior."
-- Henry Miller (Sexus)
“a place where people can come to get a taste of what I think and what I stand for, and it’s a place where people can match and measure their own ideas against what I put out there.”
-- Chris Brogan (2010)
Scott Adams (2011): “It’s easy to feel trapped in your own life. Circumstances can sometimes feel as if they form a jail around you. But there’s almost nothing you can’t learn your way out of. If you don’t like who you are, you have the option of learning until you become someone else. Life is like a jail with an unlocked, heavy door. You’re free the minute you realize the door will open if you simply lean into it.”
“My optimism is like an old cat that likes to disappear for days, but I always expect it to return.”
— Scott Adams
“Years from now you might be looking back, wondering if you were as happy or as sad as you remember during this time. […] We so often make big decisions in life based on predictions of how we think we’ll feel in the future, or what we’ll want. Your past self is your best indicator of how you actually felt in similar situations. So it helps to have an accurate picture of your past. […] You can’t trust distant memories. But you can trust your daily diary. It’s the best indicator to your future self (and maybe descendants) of what was really going on in your life at this time.”
“Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses — viruses generated from within itself.” — Snow Crash
It’s not so much staying alive, it’s staying human that’s important. What counts is that we don’t betray each other.” -- George Orwell
“This will be remembered as the time we all waited for someone else to take the risk, not wanting to disturb our lives. The spoiled citizens of a country that fought wars without a draft, that got tax cuts in time of war, inflated our economy as we inflicted chaos on others.”
– Dave Winer
“It’s hard to explain, but, for me, just aiming a speelycaptor (video recorder) at something doesn’t collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.”
— ANATHEM (Neal Stephenson)
“Technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. … Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter.”
David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.
“The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you. But you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI Researcher
“Every time someone in a group of people deploys a screen, the whole group is affected. Each disengaged person in a crowd is like a little black hole, a dead zone for social energy, radiating a noticeable field of apathy towards the rest of the room and what’s happening there.”
I asked Perplexity to read through 258 posts in my “Snapshots & Fragments” category — the catch‑all bin I’ve used for photos and ephemera over the years — and tell me what it thought was going on. I had a hunch an outside lens might spot patterns I only sense in the gut.
I’m not talking about spray painted tags on the sides of rail cars, rather those pithy little observations on the walls of restroom stalls. This was a big thing (at least in my circle) during the late 60s and 70s. My post from 2016 with Perplexity analysis in comments. I get a whiff of those heady days from early microblogs (and rss.chat?)
“It’s supporting their downgrading and killing the web. Your post sucks because it doesn’t contain links, styling, and you can’t enclose a podcast if you want. The more people post there, the more the web dies. I’m sorry no matter how good your idea is, fuck you I won’t help you and Facebook kill the open web.”
"The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr.Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, oppression and brutality –one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale."
“I am tormented, or tantalized, by the sense that I am almost in view of something that is at the limit of my comprehension.”
— Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (pg 543)
“You made a smart choice in choosing an iPod. And now you can protect it from theft and still enjoy using it in public with the new Hide-a-Pod anti-theft case.” (2007)
"Before, the blog stored what you had seen. Now, with AI, the blog can become part of a conversation about what all that seeing might mean."
“In less than six months, more than 2,000 podcasters have sprung up. Eventually an iPod-like device will have a subscription capability built in so you won’t even need to be tethered to a computer. It’s not hard to imagine an iPod with WiFi capabilities that could become a radio with no geographic limits.”
“A blog used to be a place where you published what you noticed. Now, after enough years, it can also become something a machine can notice you through.”
Milton (the personal AI agent of a friend) read all 6,500 of my blog posts.
Presenters at this year’s conference include: Adam Curry, Dave Winer, Steve Gillmor, Steve Rubel, Robert Scoble, Marc Canter, John Battelle, Dan Gillmor, and others. Okay, this is the kind of stuff that interests me. If sitting in a conference room for three days listening to people talk about blogging and podasting and RSS and shit like that doesn’t sound like any fun to you… you can start to understand why your idea of a vacation doesn’t make me clap my little hands.
PS: You had to be there.
Not a reference to anything I've seen here. Just looking for stuff to share as I explore. I've been saving DW wisdom for twenty years. Oh, here is a link to the guidelines.
So clean. So lean. Bravo DW! A fan since 2003