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,...
No 2 SOPA
Today I’m in solidarity with Web publishers everywhere joining the fight against new laws that are bad for business — and everything else — on the Internet. I made my case in If you hate big government, fight SOPA. A vigorous dialog followed in the comments under that. Here’s the opening paragraph: Nobody who opposes...
Remembering Judith
I got to know Judith Burton when she was still Judith Clarke and Senior VP Corporate Marketing for Novell, in 1987. Novell had just bought a company called CXI, which had been a client of Hodskins Simone & Searls, the Palo Alto advertising agency in which I was a partner. By that time HS&S had...
Leveraging Hal
Hal Crowther remains my favorite essayist, regardless of whether or not I agree with him. (And on some things I don’t.) Like Hunter S. Thompson, Hal’s writing is beyond enviable and his characterizations often over the top. Here’s some of his latest, addressed to the #Occupy movement: “Go get a bath right after you get...
Holes in The Cloud
So our family of three is sharing a hotel room while doing some holiday stuff. The hotel charges about $20/day per device to use its wi-fi. We have seven devices that are Net-enabled, but so far have only one (my laptop) paying the fare — and the quality of the connection gets a D+ from Speedtest.net....
If you hate Big Government, fight SOPA.
Nobody who opposes Big Government and favors degregulation should favor the Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as SOPA, or H.R. 3261. It’s a big new can of worms that will cripple use of the Net, slow innovation on it, clog the courts with lawsuits, employ litigators in perpetuity and deliver copyright maximalists in the...
Broadband vs. Internet
By design, the Internet supports everything you can do with it. As deployed, it is no more capable than the infrastructures that carry it. Here in the U.S. most of the infrastructures that carry the Internet are owned by telephone and cable companies. Those companies are not only in a position to limit use of the...
Be careful about what you call dead
In The Web is on life support: Forrester Research, Marketwatch reports on a speech titled “Three Social Thunderstorms,” by Forrester CEO George Colony at LeWeb. Sourcing both the Marketwatch report and George’s slides, this appears to be what he said*… Thunderstorm One is “The Death of the Web.” Marketwatch: Colony said that several models of thinking...
