Tag Archives: Doc Searls

Early web influencers

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My blog clean-up project (ongoing) reminded me of these early-web influencers (for me). Some of these folks are still around but most are no longer the “stars” they were in the early days. Link to my posts below. (Descriptions by GPT 4o)

Visionaries, Theorists, and Futurists

  • Bruce Sterling – A science fiction writer and cyberpunk pioneer who explored the social and cultural implications of digital technology.
  • Clay Shirky – An influential thinker on Internet culture, crowdsourcing, and the power of decentralized networks.
  • Douglas Coupland – Coined “Generation X” and explored the cultural impact of digital technology in novels and essays.
  • Douglas Rushkoff – A media theorist who wrote about cyberculture, the social effects of technology, and digital optimism.
  • Kevin Kelly – Founding editor of Wired and a deep thinker on how technology shapes society and the future.

Journalists and Media Analysts

  • Dan Gillmor – A pioneer in citizen journalism, advocating for the participatory nature of news in the digital era.
  • Jeff Jarvis – A media critic who has been vocal about how the Internet disrupts traditional journalism.
  • Steven Levy – A tech journalist who chronicled the history of computing and the rise of the digital age.
  • Steve Outing – An early advocate for online news, exploring how journalism adapted to the Internet.
  • Terry Heaton – A television executive who recognized the shift from traditional media to digital platforms.

Tech Pioneers and Web Innovators

  • Chris Pirillo – Founder of Lockergnome, one of the earliest online tech communities, helping people understand software and the web.
  • Dave Winer – A key figure in the development of blogging, RSS feeds, and podcasting technology.
  • David Weinberger – Co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which framed how businesses should adapt to the Internet age.
  • Doc Searls – Another Cluetrain Manifesto author, emphasizing user empowerment and open-source principles.
  • Jakob Nielsen – The godfather of web usability, setting foundational principles for user-friendly web design.

Marketing and Culture Shapers

  • Halley Suitt – A prominent blogger and voice in the early blogosphere.
  • Hugh MacLeod – Known for his “gapingvoid” cartoons and commentary on creativity and business.
  • Mark Ramsey – A key voice in digital radio and podcasting strategy.
  • Scott Adams – Creator of Dilbert, which captured the absurdities of tech and office culture.
  • Seth Godin – A marketing guru who popularized permission-based marketing and how digital culture changes business.

Entrepreneurs and Digital Business Minds

  • Mark Cuban – Made his fortune selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo, later becoming a major figure in sports and media streaming.
  • Nikol Lohr – Less widely known, but active in early online DIY culture and communities.

The Spinner*

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“The Spinner* (with the asterisk) is “a service that enables you to subconsciously influence a specific person, by controlling the content on the websites he or she usually visits.” Meaning you can hire The Spinner* to hack another person.”

“You pay The Spinner* $29 (and the company) provides you with an ordinary link you then text to your friend. When that friend clicks on the link, they get a tracking cookie that works as a bulls-eye for The Spinner* to hit with 10 different articles written specifically to influence that friend. He or she “will be strategically bombarded with articles and media tailored to him or her.” Specifically, 180 of these things.”

— Doc Searls

Where are they now?

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You know how some insanely popular rock group has a bunch of hits and then… just disappears. At least from the media mainstream. They didn’t get less talented overnight and, sure, tastes change but this always seemed odd to me. In reviewing blog posts from the early days of the web, I see something similar. Here are some of the people most influential (for me) from that era (in no particular order): Bruce Sterling, Chris Pirillo, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Kevin Kelley, Jeff Jarvis, Seth Goden.

On second thought, I’ll bet the folks are still around but — like everyone else — have migrated to social media, abandoning their blogs. Perhaps the web they wrote about and — in some cases — predicted, disappeared/never happened.

The Intention Economy

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The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge by Doc Searls

I’m only about one-third of the way into the book but finding no shortage of notable and quotable nuggets. In no particular order:

“Likewise, rather than guessing what might get the attention of consumers —or what might “drive” them like cattle—vendors will respond to actual intentions of customers. Once customers’ expressions of intent become abundant and clear, the range of economic interplay between supply and demand will widen, and its sum will increase. The result we will call the Intention Economy.”

“This new economy will outperform the Attention Economy that has shaped marketing and sales since the dawn of advertising. Customer intentions, well expressed and understood, will improve marketing and sales, because both will work with better information, and both will be spared the cost and effort wasted on guesses about what customers might want, flooding media with messages that miss their marks. Advertising will also improve.”

“The volume, variety, and relevance of information coming from customers in the Intention Economy will strip the gears of systems built for controlling customer behavior or for limiting customer input. The quality of that information will also obsolete or repurpose the guesswork mills of marketing, fed by crumb trails of data shed by customers’ mobile gear and Web browsers. “Mining” of customer data will still be useful to vendors, though less so than intention-based data provided directly by customers.” — Page 2
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“It’s an eyeball bubble. Investments in tracking-based advertising assume impossibly high values for customers attention.” — Pg 41
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“Now imagine you’re back in 1982. Somebody tells you that in twelve years, the world will adopt a new communications system that nobody owns, everybody can use, and anybody can improve. The system will be all-digita and will provide ways for anybody ro communicate with anybody, anywhere in the world, and to copy and share anything that can be digitized—including mail, print publications, music, radio streams, TV programs, and movies at costs that approach zero. Would you believe it?” — Page 94
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“Like the universe, there are no other examples of it (the Internet), and all our understandings of it are incomplete.” – pg 96
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“To become totally personal, advertising needs to cross an existential bridge, to become a different corporate function. It must become sales – without the human sound or the human touch.” — pg 41
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“We can’t ignore the huge numbers of people who live within our on the shores of the fast money river that flows through advertising, especially online. And it won’t stop until the bubble pops.” -pg 39
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It’s easy to forget that the term branding was borrowed from the cattle industry. The idea was to burn the name of a company or product on to the brains of potential customers.”
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“In the United States, the typical hour-long American TV drama runs forty-two minutes. The remaining eighteen minutes are for advertising. Half-hour shows are twenty-one minutes long, with nine left for advertising. That’s 30 percent in each case. The European Union sets a limit of twelve minutes per hour for advertising on TV, which comes to 20 percent. Ireland holds broadcasters to ten minutes per hour, or 16.7 percent.”
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Beyond the iPad

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Doc Searls’ fantasy for the iPad involves interactivity with the everyday world:

“Take retailing for example. Let’s say you syndicate your shopping list, but only to trusted retailers, perhaps through a fourth party (one that works to carry out your intentions, rather than sellers’ — though it can help you engage with them). You go into Target and it gives you a map of the store, where the goods you want are, and what’s in stock, what’s not, and how to get what’s mising, if they’re in a position to help you with that. You can turn their promotions on or off, and you can choose, using your own personal terms of service, what data to share with them, what data not to, and conditions of that data’s use. Then you can go to Costco, the tire store, and the university library and do the same. I know it’s hard to imagine a world in which customers don’t have to belong to loyalty programs and submit to coercive and opaque terms of data use, but it will happen, and it has a much better chance of happening faster if customers are independent and have their own tools for engagement. Which are being built. Check out what Phil Windley says here about one approach.”

Doc’s “story none dare tell”

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Doc Searls says we need a new leadership narrative:

“…what’s “super” about U.S. superpower — a near-limitless ability to make high-technology war, backed by a fighting force of finite size with few allies — is an anachronism. I’m not sure the people of any Great Nation are ever ready to face the fact that the height of their military and economic powers has passed. Or that the leadership they most need to assert is no longer only a military and economic one.”

If we can no longer win every war we start and our economy isn’t Number One… is it possible for the U.S. to still be “super?” Let’s hope so.

This is a thoughtful and insightful post on America, leadership and journalism. Worth a read.

Procrastinate like your life depends on it

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Doc Searls –who happens to be the same age as I– draws some insight from the movie No Country for Old Men:

“The central figure, Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, is a psychopathic killer who personifies death and chance in unequal measure.

His motives? His quarry is money, but that’s just a point on a path. There is no doubt that he will get the money, and that people will die along the way. But death itself has no motive. It is merely inevitable. Like Anton Chigurh. The Terminator, the Alien, the guy DiNiro played in Cape Fear… all the relentless bad guys we’ve known… don’t compare easily with Chigurh. Because all the others could be, and were, defeated.

Death can’t be defeated. In Chigurh, it could only be wounded, because he is death in human form. But he is still death.

Which is on my mind more as I get older. The old men in the movie — Tommy Lee Jones and cohorts of his generation — are barely older than me, if they’re older at all.

Being older, if not yet “old”, requires increased acquaintance with the certainty that Your Time Will Come.

I plan to procrastinate. For some things that’s a helpful skill.”

I’ll be 60 years old next Saturday and, like Doc Searls, mortality has been more on my mind. In coming days I might post a thought or two on birthdays that end in zero and what –if anything– I’ve learned in the last 6 decades (I like the sound of that better than “sixty”). But once the day has come and gone,  I’m going to try not to think/write about it.

Doc Searls: What’s Around the Bend?

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Doc Searls is on a panel (Public Media 2008) titled Technology and Trends: What’s Around the Bend? From his list of ten, here are three I found interesting:

  • Cell phones will be the new radios and televisions. This will start to happen in a big way the minute Apple opens its iPhones to independent developers of native applications (rather than just ones that run in a browser).
  • Websites will become as inadequate as transmitters. That is, both will remain necessary but insufficient means for reaching listeners and viewers, and for relating to them. “Live Web” methods such as streaming, file sharing, social networking and “rivers of news” will all play roles as well.
  • Archives will be the ultimate killer kontent. Stations and networks will come to value not only their own archives, but will work to make those archives as easy as possible to find, consume and otherwise use — and to open CRM systems for VRM tools to make it as easy as possible for listeners and viewers to voluntarily pay for the privilege. Bigger inventory, bigger income.

I couldn’t begin to guess the number of hours I’ve spent archiving material (I think Doc hates the term “content”). MissouriDeathRow.com; Legislature.com; Missouri Supreme Court oral arguments; and –once upon a time– Missouri State Highway Patrol accident reports. We saved damn near everything but I can’t say that I noticed a huge appetite for that archived material and I was never smart enough to make any serious money with it. But we’ve got it.

“Public Media”

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Doc Searls says the Net makes radio and TV transmitters obsolete the moment high-enough-bandwidth wireless connectivity becomes ubiquitous.

“We’re one good UI away from the cell phone becoming a radio. (Thanks to the iPhone, it already serves as a TV.) And we’re one smart cell company away from radio- and TV-as-we-know-it from being replaced entirely — or from moving up the next step of the evolutionary ladder. Public broadcasters know that. That’s one reason they now call themselves “public media”, a move that separates the category from its transport methods.

Will this someday be an issue for our networks? Radio Iowa. Wisconsin Radio Network. Nebraska Radio Network. Time will tell.