Savor the irony
Now comes news (via Peter Kafka in All Things D and Jason Boog in Galleycat) that robot-written “stories” are turning up on the pages of Forbes and other publications. The robots are made by Narrative Science, which (says its About page) “started life as a joint research project at Northwestern University Schools of Engineering and Journalism.”...
The Jeremy Lin story
Why Jeremy Lin suddenly such hot stuff? Last night I listened to sports radio from ESPN, WFAN in New York, KNBR in San Francisco, and WEEI in Boston, as well as to KOVO here in Provo, Utah (where I’m hanging this week). One of the talkers put it best, saying something like this: “Let’s face it....
For personal data, use value beats sale value
Should you manage your personal data just so you can sell it to marketers? (And just because somebody’s already buying it anyway, why not?) Those are the barely-challenged assumptions in Start-Ups Seek to Help Users Put a Price on Their Personal Data, by Joshua Brustein in The New York Times. He writes, People have been willing to give...
Surf’s up! Look north
According to this… … the Aurora is on. The Kp Index has hit 5, and a geomagnetic storm is on. Here’s today’s SpaceWeather on the matter. Follow the links there. Bear in mind that the aurora are curtains of light up to a thousand miles high. So if the auroral oval is pushed down over...
2025 in 2012
Marcel Bullinga is a Dutch futurist and author of Welcome to the Future Cloud. Today I got pointed on Twitter to a Q&A with Bullinga by Aaron Saenz at SingularityHub. Interesting stuff. An excerpt: SH: Welcome to the Future Cloud seems to be very supportive of intellectual property (IP) rights and digital rights managements (DRM). Are...
PR’s problems, 20 years later
I was near the end of my career as a PR guy when I wrote the essay below for the January 1992 issue of Upside. Since then Upside has been erased. Some bits of it still persist on the Internet Archive, but nothing before 1996. But I did save my own draft of the piece, and put it up...
Can’t lose, in a way
I grew up in New Jersey and New York, rooting for the Giants. (And, in the Namath era, the Jets too.) Then, after 20 years in North Carolina (mostly as a college basketball fan), I lived in the Bay Area for 25 years, and rooted for the 49ers there. One daughter lives in the Bay...
Discovering Raditaz
Read here about Raditaz, which I hadn’t heard about before. It’s a competitor to Pandora. Some differences: unlmited skips, no ads, geo-location. I started out by setting up three “stations,” based on three artists: Lowell George, Seldom Scene and Mike Auldridge. I’m on the Mike Auldridge station now, and guess what comes up? Dig: Not...
Ancient present
Reality 2.0 was my original blog: a pile of stuff I wrote before there were blogs. All of it is old now, but some of it still rings new. Since Reality 2.0 is deep in the Searls.com basement, I’ve decided to surface some old pieces that might be interesting, for whatever reason. The one below was...
Happy to have been there
That’s what many thought when they first saw the poster for Hassle House, in Durham, North Carolina, back in ’76 or so. As soon as any of the posters went up, they disappeared, becoming instant collectors’ items. At the time, all I wanted was to hire the cartoonist who did it, so he could...
What I’d like to say on the subway
When I was young, New York subways were dirty, noisy and with little risk of improvement. But, even if the maps weren’t readable (as with this 1972 example), there were lots of them. Now the subways are much nicer, on the whole, and being improved. But there is now a paucity of maps. In fact,...
