Many years of now
“When I’m Sixty-Four” is 44 years old. I was 20 when it came out, in the summer of 1967, one among thirteen perfect tracks on The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. For all the years since, I’ve thought the song began, “When I get older, losing my head…” But yesterday, on the eve of actually...
Curing the commercial Web blues
Last week we spent a lot of time here, in Venice: The triangular marble plaza on the edge of the Grand Canal of Venice is known informally as Bancogiro, once one of Italy’s landmark banks, and now the name of an osteria there. The plaza is part of Rialto Mercado, the marketplace where Marco Polo...
Overlooking Detroit
Got my first good clear look at Detroit and Windsor from altitude on a recent trip back from somewhere. Here’s a series of shots. What impressed me most, amidst all that flat snow-dusted spread of city streets, a patch of grids on the flatland of Michigan and Ontario, flanking the Detroit River and its islands, was...
Royal pains
The Royal Wedding isn’t my cup of tedium, but olde blog buddies Eric and Dawn Olsen will be covering the show for The Morton Report, so I urge you to follow it there. I’ll do my best as well. Not speaking of which, I am old enough to remember the last Royal Wedding, which happened...
World Wide Catacombs
What started as plain old Web search has now been marginalized as “organic”. That’s because the plain old Web — the one Tim Berners-Lee created as a way to hyperlink documents — has become commercialized to such an extent that the about the only “organic” result reliably rising to first-page status is Wikipedia. Let’s say...
World wide puddle
Nicholas Carr is ahead of his time again. The Big Switch nailed computing as a utility, long before “the cloud” came to mean pretty much the same thing. His latest book, The Shallows, explored the changes in our lives and minds caused by moving too much of both online — again before others began noticing how...
The necessity of inventions
Over on Facebook, @DonThorson and friends have been pondering the provenance of Invention is the mother of necessity. Writes Don, “… heard that once from Doc Searls – I think its an original. Seems more true everyday. (think facebook, smartphones, the internet, computers).” So I responded, Back in the ’80s, I had a half-serious list of...
Accidental Lessons: Reflections on the Challenger Tragedy
[This piece was written for Triangle Business (in Raleigh, North Carolina ) and published twenty-five years ago, on February 10, 1986. Since it might be worth re-visiting some of the points I made, as well as the event itself, I decided to dust off the piece and put up here. Except for a few spelling...
Al Jazeera in Egypt is cable’s ‘Sputnik moment’
Cable companies: Add Al Jazeera English *now* Jeff Jarvis commands, correctly, on his blog — and also in Huffpo, under the headine We Want Our Al Jazeera English Now. For me now was a few minutes ago, when I read both items on the family iPad, which has been our main news portal since the...
Learnings from the Browser Wars
The question on Quora goes, What lessons can be learned from the first browser war between Microsoft and Netscape? I covered that war when it broke out, more than fifteen years ago. No magazine was interested in my writing then. Blogging was several years off in the future. All we had were websites, and that...
Curing High School
So I’m in the midst of my first encounter with PeerIndex, which I found through this Petervan’s Blog post. I’d been pointed to PeerIndex before, and to other services like it, and have always found them aversive. But this time the lead came from a friend and business associate, so I thought I’d check it out....
Name that car
The Kid has been scanning archival family photos and I’ve been uploading them to Flickr (where I have now passed 39,000 shots in that one site alone). Many of these photos are well over a hundred years old. Most are about eighty years old, give or take a decade or two. They’re from the collection...
