Liveblog: Saturday Summaries

Liveblog:

Saturday Summaries

Fri, May 22, 2015 at 4:47 PM by Doc Searls.

Saturday Summaries

Sydney:
- Sydney — I have accumulated so much stuff I want to remember and write about, while hanging with friends old and new in Australia and New Zealand. So many pieces wanting to be posted.
- I did just get one up: First we take Oz, at the ProjectVRM blog. It's important. Go read it. Meanwhile, some links to tabs I'm closing before boarding the plane to Auckland. And, if I have time in Auckland or Los Angeles, ones I close before taking the weekend's final flight, to San Francisco. (And perhaps, after that, on board a train. It's gonna be a lotta travel.) Here goes...
  - Dave: The Point of Liveblogging. Bonus link: the expand all button.
  - Ev Williams: Medium is not a publishing tool. Cool. Now I wanna know how it's not a silo, or transcends the silo-ish nature of all publishers. Put a more personal way: How can Medium bring back Evhead? Or my own blog? Bonus link: What's going on at Medium?
  - Ray Ford in The Independent: Death on the Deck. What can go wrong hiking in the mountains above Santa Barbara. Bring water.
  - Business Insider: using people's DNA to shame them publicly for littering. A new use for a slightly old technology.
  - SI: Coaching Stephen Curry, the Best Shooter in the Universe. Bonus link.
  - Nafeez Ahmed in Medium: Secret Pentagon report reveals West saw ISIS as strategic asset — Anti-ISIS coalition knowingly sponsored violent extremists to ‘isolate’ Assad, rollback ‘Shia expansion’.
Auckland:
- Why Mozilla needs to lead the charge on behalf of users, against advertising at all costs. Pull quotage:
  - "I believe that Mozilla can make progress in privacy, but leadership needs to recognize that current advertising practices that enable 'free' content are in direct conflict with security, privacy, stability, and performance concerns -- and that Firefox is first and foremost a user-agent, not an industry-agent.
  - "Advertising does not make content free. It merely externalizes the costs in a way that incentivizes malicious or incompetent players to build things like Superfish, infect 1 in 20 machines with ad injection malware, and create sites that require unsafe plugins and take twice as many resources to load, quite expensive in terms of bandwidth, power, and stability.
  - "It will take a major force to disrupt this ecosystem and motivate alternative revenue models. I hope that Mozilla can be that force."
- Bruce Kushnick in HuffPo: Verizon's 'Pick Your Own Cable TV Channels' Is Just Another Bait & Switch — Read the Fine Print.
- Collective Evolution: Editor In Chief Of World’s Best Known Medical Journal: Half Of All The Literature Is False.
- On an (not the) iTunes of Journalism. Interesting.
- Now that's a tantrum.
- Other stuff I do:
  - Sunsets
  - Sunrises
  - Mountains
  - Utah
  - Washington
  - Colorado
  - Wyoming
  - Glacier
  - Arizona
  - New York
  - Zermatt
  - Aurora
  - San Andreas
  - Grand Canyon
  - Italy
  - Canada
  - Zion Canyon
  - Greenland
  - San Francisco
  - Clouds
  - Paris
  - Flag
  - Fireworks
- Daily Fintech: Blockchain based Digital Identity will disrupt commerce and government.
- Vox on the Santa Barbara oil spill. Dig who provided the shot of the oil platform.
- A photo of mine also shows up here.
- An interview with yours truly. Another I was pointed to this evening.
Los Angeles:
- This is my longest Saturday ever. A week ago was my shortest, since I skipped over it, flying from Friday to Sunday en route from New York to Wellington.
- My experience with four airlines on this trip:
  - American: Just got a ticket on an earlier American Airlines flight than I had scheduled, so I can get to San Francisco for a family event nearby. I have no privileges on American, and at this point don't want any. The agent at the counter was barely friendly and mostly officious. [Later...] Now on board an American 737, seat 28A, near the back. The seat is comfortable and legroom isn't bad. The big thing for me is the windows. They're big, clean, unscratched and with a great view toward the ground. By contrast, United's new 787 Dreamliner has huge windows, but they start at the shoulder and go up from there: nice view of the sky, but poor of the ground. Kinda defeats the purpose of looking outside. Odd: They said this was a full flight and had lots of standbys, but they just closed the door and there are two empty seats next to me. Okay, gotta turn this off now. Departing...
  - United: It's probably not fair to compare American to United, with which I have flown way over a million miles, and have Star Allance Gold privileges, plus a lifetime membership in their club (bought long ago, wisely, by my wife, when it was cheap). Could be United treats its unprivileged passengers the same. Hard to tell with samples of one. Anyway, my only United leg on the current trip was Newark to Los Angeles, which went nicely. The rest was all Air New Zealand and Qantas.
  - Qantas: Had two flights with them, from Wellington to Melbourne, and from Melbourne to Sydney. All fine. They seemed nice.
  - Air New Zealand: The one to beat in this group. What a good, fun, helpful airline. Took them both ways from LAX to Auckland, plus a leg from Sydney. All good experiences. Love 'em.