Category: Internet

  • High Fidelity, Pillow Talk, The Music Man: on technology and on ideas that rhyme, but then don’t

    Hey, this looks like a piece about old movies, and it starts out that way, but it’s also about how to think about technology. I even throw in a little Douglas Adams at the end. Ideas can rhyme like words do. When words rhyme, the rhyme helps us position ourselves inside a poem: we know…

  • Michael Wolff’s Just-Released Book is a Puzzler

    The dust-jacket of Television is the New Television: the Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age describes Wolff as a man with unparalleled access to powerful figures in media and the book as something that will change the reader’s thinking. Moreover, it frames Wolff as an archly bitchy writer with enemies who would…

  • I Want to be my own Big Brother: an App Daydream

    “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” (Gwendolyn Fairfax in Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”) I’m skeptical about how much corporations benefit from the data I generate.  If tracking my every movement worked, then Facebook would not keep trying to sell me the icky…

  • My 2014 in Books

    I read a lot — magazines, two newspapers, email newsletters, and countless social-media-shared links I chase down digital rabbit holes. I’d never know anything, for example, without Jason Hirshhorn’s magnificent daily Media Redefined. But I’m lost without books.  Actual books.  Whether paper or digital, if I’m not reading at least two books then I get…

  • IOS 8 Correction: I was WRONG (but check Location settings anyway & here’s why)

    Sunday morning after updating my iPad to IOS 8, I was horrified to see that just about all my apps were broadcasting my location 24/7/365, and I blamed the update thinking that Apple had toggled the settings from off to on. I wrote a post about it that you can find here, and I asked…

  • IOS 8 Warning: Look at your Privacy Settings

    Tuesday Update: I was wrong about Apple changing settings: see full Correction and explanation here.   Apple hates Google.  It REALLY hates Google. I have evidence. A few days ago I updated my iPad to IOS8. Today, as I was looking at email, a warning flashed across the device that roughly said: “Google is sharing…

  • 2 Kinds of Wearables: Info display vs. creation, and how they work with time

    Note: I’m keynoting about wearables at the Brand Innovators Fashion Week event on Friday, February 14, 2014.  The kind folks at Brand Innovators have published this piece as a white paper. You can learn more about the event and download the white paper here. People talk about wearable computers in one lumpy category, but doing…

  • Short post about “My Facebook Movie” — from Charming to Cloying in 21 hours

    The first person I saw share “My Facebook Movie” was Terry Kawaja, 23 hours ago as I write this short post.  I clicked.  I smiled. I shared mine a few minutes later. Then I looked at those of two friends and stopped. This morning I saw that my wife had shared hers, so of COURSE…

  • UP, UP and away… How a wearable computer changed my brain

    Old dogs can learn new tricks.  So can people young and old.  Behavior is metamorphic, although we seldom recognize that plasticity in the moment.  Instead, we think the world changes while we stay the same, that our children are less responsible than we were at their age but that we threw crazier parties.  We think…

  • Short Post: Best iGoogle Replacement

    I’m a devoted iGoogle user since it first came online, and so I staggered through all the stages of grief when Google announced that it was discontinuing the product 18 months ago… with the count down ticking down to November 1… just a few days from now. For months I’ve held on to the fond…