Random Bits

Fred Wilson, who has been at this even longer than I have, asks an interesting question: Is there an application in artificial intelligence that matters more than LLMs? And if so, what is it? and John Battelle, who’s always been watching Google more closely than most people I know, gets closer to the solution (the Agentic Web) but points out the primary problem with that approach, eventually…

So we’re 24 years past what happened on 9/11, a date I mark with this recurring series. I ended last year’s note on thoughts about the election: “who knows what 9/11/2025 looks like but one thing that is sure, it will be different but hopefully will be built on the learnings of how we can do better when we look at a past that instructs us on where we stumbled and where we succeeded.” It is…

I have a long piece on the Internet Library in the queue but wanted to interrupt the discussion as current events cannot be ignored. This post is touching on US politics and on questions regarding the rule of law so if you don’t believe in the basic principles of defending the US Constitution and/or democracy, then feel free to skip it and come back next week, when we’ll continue our foray into…

Now you can tear a building downBut you can’t erase a memoryThese houses may look all run downBut they have a value you can’t see – Open Letter (to a Landlord), Living Colour Something’s Rotten in the State of the Web The year was 1998. The number of broken weblinks in some of his documents ticked off Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web. As head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), he…

The early 1990s internet was, in many ways, closer to television and print media, than what we now know it to be. Websites were static, increasing the means of production and dropping the barriers to the means of distribution. Anyone could set up a website and allow the whole world to have access to it. But in practice, the traditional model of reach still existed.  A site like CNN.com could…

The early days of the internet being dominated by academics, researchers and tech enthusiasts meant disinformation could not find a great ground to grow into. But as internet usage grew, and its users moved from the traditional profile, conspiracy theorists and other bad actors who looked to spread disinformation found the internet to become a solid breeding ground for their effort. Hoaxes as…

I’m busy celebrating my birthday this weekend so no new content this week. But in the famous words of French writer André Gide “Everything has been said before. But since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.” So with that in mind, here are two pieces I wrote a long time ago, that remain foundational to the series you’re currently reading: Internet…

By the early 2000’s, blogs started to become popular. The flood of content they created, combined with the number of new sites made it difficult to keep track of all the new content. To solve this problem, Dave Winer, an early blogger and developer, pushed for usage of RSS (named “RDF Site Summary” by Netscape but popularized as “Really Simple Syndication” by Winer) as a tool to tie all the sites…

A societal internet triple threat hit America in the mid-1990s.  In the summer of 1995, Netscape, the company popularizing the use of internet browsing, went public on the stock market, igniting the imagination of anyone interested in making money of this new thing called the Internet.  By fall, America OnLine, the largest online service, connected to the usenet, the largest internet community…

Impersonation has a long history. “Internet Sock Puppets” are the latest version of such deceptive behavior.   Impersonation before the Internet In 181 BC, a “discovered” chest contained Latin and Greek books allegedly written by Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome. The books covered religious and philosophical subjects. The Roman Senate worried the texts undermined established Roman…

  In July 1993, cartoonist Peter Steiner submitted a batch of new drawings to the New Yorker. “I submitted it without thinking it was even the best cartoon in the batch,” he would tell the Washington Post 20 years later.  You’ve seen that cartoon, as it has spawned its own sub-memes for decades. It presented a dog, sitting on a chair, in front of a desktop computer. Next to him, another dog is…

A visitor from another planet looking at today’s news headlines may believe the internet to be the most destructive thing ever invented.  From roaming groups of extremists spreading their message of hate to questions about the veracity of simple facts, it appears that we are dealing with one of the worst inventions ever created.  Of course, because this is the internet, no consensus as to what…

Language has a strange way of defining boundaries. A proper phrasing leads to agreement; A misunderstanding sows discord. Agreement on meaning sits at its core. Take the word “internet.”  Use the word internet and it immediately opens up a myriad of meanings. The internet is both terrible and amazing at the same. But what is it? The internet is… an idea Look for a physical thing called “the…

With war in Ukraine and the Middle East, fires in LA, and worries about the upcoming administration, many of the people I know are feeling depressed and burnt out.  This topic recently came up in a discussion and I set up 10 rules for our times 1. Realize that this is one part in history and that we’ve been here before: I know it sounds crazy but this country has been in similar situations…

There’s an odd pattern to getting older: Some things feel like self-indulgent nostalgia while others remain engraved as promises you were meant to keep. In the days following 9/11, it was common to exclaim “Never Forget” and yet, as other crises came along, American society moved on, forgetting the lessons of those days. What made America great in the days following 9/11, what made the world…

Since OpenAI revealed ChatGPT, Silicon Valley has been obsessed with generative AI and its potential for making creating content even cheaper than it is today. Few appear to be creating tools to identify and de-emphasize such content as part of our content consumption. The ones who will may well be laying out the most important tools to allow humans to continue consuming online content. A Tale…