Questions – Doc Searls Weblog
What does the Internet make of us? was hard to find until I found it. Now it’s easy to find. What did Google learn, and how did it learn it? The law professors to whom I made The Case for MyT…| Doc Searls Weblog
Please find pricing labels that stick well enough to do their job, and the customer can get off without too much work. Thanks! P.S. In an unrelated matter, Grammarly suggested rewriting that second sentence this way: Please find pricing labels that adhere well enough to perform their intended function, yet can be easily removed by […]| Doc Searls Weblog
In Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, Alec MacGillis notes that the city at the center of a circle containing the largest population within a one-day drive is Dayton, Ohio. You can kinda see that in the map above, which I discovered through Brilliant Maps. They got it from the highly precient Defining US […]| Doc Searls Weblog
What I like best about Keith Teare‘s latest essay, Who Owns The Front Door to AI? If it isn’t you, its game over, is that it sounds like he’s setting up the case for personal AI. But he’s not. He’s describing how our AI-assisted lives will get sucked through better interfaces deep into one or more […]| Doc Searls Weblog
Happy for my sister and me, who are both still alive and well. I’m also happy for the thirty-three years Eleanor and Allen made a life and a family together. They were great people, great parents, great teachers, great friends to many, and much more. Both are still missed. Some links: Their wedding Eleanor Searls Allen […]| Doc Searls Weblog
What does the Internet make of us? was hard to find until I found it. Now it’s easy to find. What did Google learn, and how did it learn it? The law professors to whom I made The Case for MyT…| Doc Searls Weblog
We know more than we can tell. That was how Michael Polanyi distinguished between tacit and explicit knowing. We may know tacitly how we form speech, ride a bike, or sense when to shake hands with someone, or hug them. But we can’t explain all the signals and mechanisms involved. Not exactly. In the natural […]| Doc Searls Weblog
I wrote the original version of this post for the March 2018 issue of Linux Journal. You can find it here. Since images from archival material in the magazine no longer load, and I want to update this anyway, here is a lightly edited copy of the original. Bear in mind that what you’ll read […]| Doc Searls Weblog
I grew up under the red star, and right now I’m just to the right of it, on the third and top floor of the smallest residential building in northern Manhattan. When it hit, my wife and I both said, “That’s an earthquake.” We’ve experienced many in California, and know the feel. But none of […]| Doc Searls Weblog
When I read that some conversations with ChatGPT had appeared in Google searches, I did a search for “Doc Searls” ChatGPT and got a long and not-bad but not entirely accurate AI summary…| Doc Searls Weblog
Here is my answer to the question Does SiriusXM know what station you are listening to? The SiriusXM streaming app logs what you listen to, when, and how you interact with programs and channels across your devices (phone, pad, smart speaker, website through your browser, whatever). This data is used to personalize your “experience” (as […]| Doc Searls Weblog
A hazard of aging well is outliving friends and other people you love. For example, two of the three in the photo above. It dates from early 1978, when Hodskins Simone & Searls, a new ad agency…| Doc Searls Weblog
Ray Simone, my good friend and long-time business partner, died this morning. He was 63 years old. He is survived by his wife Gillian, his daughter Christina, and many good friends for whom he rema…| Doc Searls Weblog
And that guidance led to what I’m doing here. Late in the last millennium, I was the creative director and main copy writer for Hodskins Simone & Searls, a hot young advertising agency in…| Doc Searls Weblog
Today is the 100th birthday of Gail Jesswein, my father-in-law. Gail was the father of eight, the first of whom is my wife Joyce. Gail was a merchant mariner during World War II, when the casualty …| Doc Searls Weblog
Before there were search engines, there were directories. The biggest and best-known was Yahoo. On the first graphical browser (Mosaic), it looked like this: The directory idea made sense, because …| Doc Searls Weblog
Tenth in the News Commons series. The Santa Barbara News-Press was born in 1868 and died in 2023 at age 155. Its glory years ran from 1932 until 2000, when the New York Times sold it to Wendy McCaw…| Doc Searls Weblog
Eight years ago, I called ad blocking The Biggest Boycott in World History, because hundreds of millions of people were blocking ads online. (The headline came from my wife Joyce.) Then, a few days…| Doc Searls Weblog
