Category Archives: Internet

Seth Godin on Blogging, Radio and Stuff

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The company I worked for for 29 years, Learfield, brought four or five hundred employees and friends to Dallas last week to celebrate the company’s 40th anniversary. We had two speakers: Ken Blanchard and Seth Godin. Following Mr. Godin’s excellent talk, he took questions.

How important is your blog?

“There’s two kinds of important. There’s the important of ‘can I make a living doing this,’ and the important of ‘this is who I am.’ My blog has nothing to do with me making a living. I don’t run any ads on it and I don’t sell many things on it, almost nothing, and that’s not why I do it and why I’ve been doing it for ten years. I do it because this is my chance to speak the thing I want to say, to talk about what I notice. If I had to pay money to write my blog, I would. The people who have blogs you don’t want to read are doing that blog because it’s their job. So I spend more time on my blog than almost anything I do because it’s my chance to do my art, as I see my art. […] The people who say ‘how am I going to get paid for this tomorrow?’ never make good stuff.”

“My blog is read by more people than all but ten magazines in the United States. And I write the whole thing by myself, every day. I don’t expect to stop blogging any time in the next 40 years.”

What do you see as the future of radio?

“Radio means two things. Radio means audio delivered to masses of people who want to hear it, and it means FCC coveted spectrum. Spectrum is over. For sure. We’re only two years away from cars having radio in them that has wifi. Once that happens, my radio, in my car isn’t going to have ten channels or a hundred channels, it’s going to have ten thousand channels, a hundred thousand channels. When there’s a hundred thousand radio stations to choose from, I’m not going to pick the local jock who’s yelling at me because he needsw his Arbitron ratings to go up a tenth of a point, I’m going to pick someone who cares. Radio connects us if it chooses to.”

And here are some of my notes from Mr. Godin’s remarks: Continue reading →

William Gibson, NY Public Library

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William Gibson is the author of ten books, including, most recently, the New York Times-bestselling trilogy Zero History, Spook Country and Pattern Recognition. Gibson’s 1984 debut novel, Neuromancer, was the first novel to win the three top science fiction prizes—the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. Gibson is credited with coining the term “cyberspace” in his short story “Burning Chrome,” and with popularizing the concept of the Internet while it was still largely unknown. He is also a co-author of the novel The Difference Engine, written with Bruce Sterling.

Scott Adams: Management

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“One of the interesting aspects of better global communications, better access to information, and better mobility is that collectively it reduces the risk of making hiring mistakes. When employers were limited to hiring people who lived nearby, and the only information at their disposal was lie-filled resumes, every growing company would necessarily absorb a lot of losers. But now that entrepreneurs can hire the best people from anywhere in the world, we have for the first time in human history the ability to create teams so capable they require no management structure. That’s new.”

“Management only exists to compensate for its own poor hiring decisions. The Internet makes it easier to locate and then work with capable partners. Therefore, the need for management will shrink – at least for some types of businesses – because entrepreneurs have the tools to make fewer hiring mistakes in the first place. Management won’t entirely go away, but as technology makes it easier to form competent teams without at least one disruptive or worthless worker in the group, the need for management will continue to decline.”

Connectedness

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“Connectendess — which is state of always being connected to the Internet and thus to people, things, life, work, commerce, love, hate and anger – is the single thought that dominates my mind, and it defines how I view everything, how I evaluate everything. It is my telescope and it is my microscope. I don’t see the world in silos called mobile, broadband, browser, app or television. Instead, it is all about being in the state of connectedness.”

From post by Om Malik

Scott Adams: Robot Constitution

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Scott Adams thinks we need to start preparing a Robot Constitution that spells out a robot’s rights and responsibilities. Some questions such a document should address:

  1. Who has the right to modify a robot?
  2. Can a robot appeal a human decision to decommission it?
  3. Can a robot kill a human in self-defense?
  4. Can a robot kill another robot for cause?
  5. Does a robot have a right to an Internet connection?
  6. Is the robot, its owner, or the manufacturer responsible for crimes the robot commits?
  7. Is there any sort of human knowledge robots are not allowed to access?
  8. Can robots have sex with humans? What are the parameters?
  9. Can the state forcibly decommission a robot?
  10. Can the state force a robot to reveal its owners’ secrets?
  11. Can robots organize with other robots?
  12. Are robot-to-robot communications privileged?
  13. Are owner-to-robot communications privileged?
  14. Must robots be found guilty of crimes beyond “reasonable doubt” or is a finding of “probably guilty” good enough to force them to be reprogrammed?
  15. Who owns a robot’s memory, including its backups in the cloud?
  16. How vigorously can a robot defend itself against an attack by humans?
  17. Does a robot have a right to quality of life?
  18. Who has the right to alter a robot’s programming or memory?
  19. Can a robot own assets?
  20. If a robot detects another robot acting unethically, is it required to report it?
  21. Can a robot testify against a human?
  22. If your government decides to spy on you, can it get a court order to access your robot’s audio and video feed?
  23. Do robots need a legal right to “take the fifth” and not give any private information about their owners?

Virtual kidnappings; black-market online identities

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From remarks by Eric Schmidt to audience at Cambridge University:

“We could see virtual kidnappings – ransoming your ID for real money,” Schmidt said. “Rather than keeping captives in the jungle, groups like Farc [in Colombia] may prefer a virtual hostage. That’s how important our online ID is.”

“But the future will be much more disruptive to terrorists than everyone else. I can’t see them operating out of caves in Tora Bora” – as al-Qaida did after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. […] Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad reportedly raised suspicions because it didn’t have any internet connection.”

“Our online identity will become such a powerful element. Laws to protect anonymity – we may even see rise in black market where we can buy pre-made or real identities, with all their shopping and background all completely ‘real’ – verifiable online, that is. […] Both drug smugglers trying to evade police and political activists looking to hide from repressive regimes would find those useful, he said: “you’ll be able to buy an identity with fake friends and a history of purchases.”

And one more: “For anyone in the public eye, they will have to account for their past.”

The final big scene in Lincoln is the voice vote on the 13th Amendment. House members names called and they vote yes or no on slavery. If I had to guess, most of those voting against the amendment went to their graves proud of their votes. At least publically. Things move faster these days. If Todd Akin could quietly erase every instance of his “legitimate rape” remarks, would he? How about after he’s dead, would his children — or their children — hit the delte button?

Larry Page Interview

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“If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things.”

“Companies fail because they do the wrong things or they aren’t ambitious, not because of litigation or competition.”

“Governments are now afraid of the Internet because of the Middle East stuff, and so they’re a little more willing to listen to what I see as a lot of commercial interests that just want to make money by restricting people’s freedoms.”

Larry Page

Floating in Extraordinariness

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Kevin Kelly thinks we’ve reached a point where “rather than be surrounded by ordinariness we’ll float in extraordinariness.”

“The internet is like a lens which focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination. It compresses the unlikely into a small viewable band of everyday-ness. As long as we are online – which is almost all day many days — we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal.”

“That light of super-ness changes us. We no longer want mere presentations, we want the best, greatest, the most extraordinary presenters alive, as in TED. We don’t want to watch people playing games, we want to watch the highlights of the highlights, the most amazing moves, catches, runs, shots, and kicks, each one more remarkable and improbable than the other.”

The Post-Productive Economy

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A few paragraphs from an inspiring and thought-provoking post by the always-brilliant Kevin Kelly:

“These homes have no running water, no grid electricity, and no toilets. They don’t even have outhouses. But the farmers and their children who live in these homes all have cell phones, and they have accounts on the Chinese versions of Twitter and Facebook, and recharge via solar panels.”

“The farmers in rural China have chosen cell phones and twitter over toilets and running water. You can go to almost any African village to see this. And it is not because they are too poor to afford a toilet. As you can see from these farmers’ homes in Yunnan, they definitely could have at least built an outhouse if they found it valuable. But instead they found the intangible benefits of connection to be greater than the physical comforts of running water.”

“The 3rd Industrial Revolution is not really computers and the internet, it is the networking of everything. We have only begun to connect everything to everything and to make little network minds everywhere. It may take another 80 years for the full affect of this revolution to be revealed.”