Just trying to make stuff happen
Well, almost. Tomorrow I fly back to Indiana, where it has been stormy the whole time I've been gone, seems like. In a couple of months, I'll be scanning all the photos I have in dozens of three-ring albums, but keeping the photos themselves, which I want to organize chronologically behind tabbed dividers in boxes [ ]
A flipping iceberg. I subscribed to the Los Angeles Times early last year when I was writing about the challenges for journalism in covering the wildfires there. That was in my News Commons series, which I think has some brilliant and useful stuff. But it didn't go anywhere, so I wasn't sure about renewing. But [ ]
Live and re-learn I ve been a citizen of California for 41 years, and I learned here long ago that the narrow staircase-like parallel terraces on many ranchland hillsides were caused by cattle grazing on horizontal paths, because ungulates aren t climbers. I have seen cattle on some of these, so the story made sense. But my [ ]
Also, it s not podcasting if you can t skip ads Spotify is reportedly improving what we do anyway on podcast apps: hitting the 30-second skip-forward button when the host says we ll be back after a quick break. (On Pivot, I might hit the +:30 button six or seven times, because that first quick break is up [ ]
Another Para Digm Spotted one of the above, flying up and down East Beach in Santa Barbara. If I were half my age, I d be up there too. Unhuman Matt Hinkle: The Week AI Agents Got Hands. It begins, The chat window era just ended. This week, AI agents got hands — Cloudflare shipped a [ ]
Check them out Hackernoon today: Cyber Libertarians: Esther Dyson The Knowledge Age. Esther is an old friend and one of my favorite people. Front burner for her right now is .agent. Exit signals Last night we were suffering through one of the most annoying movies we've ever seen (Ladies First on Netflix, which, among other [ ]
Until Linux Journal hired me in 1996, no publication—tech or otherwise—would employ me. Not full-time, anyway. I was too obsessed with the Internet, the Web, and what I saw as the dawn of a new reality: a digital world we would co-occupy with the natural one. So I self-published on the Web, at Searls.com, where [ ]
On big changes in nowheres becoming somewheres Audacy, by far the most stressed-out owner of too many radio stations, is killing off another big old signal: KXNT/840 in Las Vegas. I dug into that, and wrote about it on Trunkline, my neglected blog about infrastructure that will soon get a big facelift. C****heck them out [ ]
Why we need Searls Glasses (first described 16 years ago) Wetherspoons bans Meta Glasses in pubs amid privacy concerns Book now The next three IIWs: November 3 5, 2026 IIWXLIII #43 Fall 2026 April 27 29, 2027 IIWXLIV #44 Spring 2027 October 19 21, 2027 IIWXLV #45 Fall 2027 Early bird ends [ ]
We now have an internet of stuff, at the heart of which are the distribution and fulfillment centers that have been replacing farmland and former broadcast transmitter sites near highways and airports everywhere. (The one above straddles I-65 in Whitestown, Indiana, northwest of Indianapolis.) In The Rise of the Stupid Network, which he wrote in 1997, [ ]