If Joe Biden were running the government in March last year, the USPS would have sent free masks to every mailing address in the country. That would have been a master stroke. Someone at the USPS thought of this and got buy-in. Amazing. The politicians put a stop to it. #
Of all the rich successful tech people, Jack Dorsey stands out as someone who is trying to do something much more than be rich and successful in tech.#
Doc Searls: "The last flight I ever took was a spectacular pano across the continent on March 11, 2020, while escaping from New York via Newark Airport, where the departing planes were full and the ticketing and security spaces were already emptied. If you page through the photos, you'll see I've captioned every one; and in some cases have also made notes on the images as well."#
In a brief discussion about Global Voices on Twitter, I mentioned the idea that news has been unbundled, today no single publication delivers the news, as they used to. A story to illustrate. As a student at UW-Madison in the late 70s, I'd often go to the Memorial Union with a copy of the Chicago Tribune, on a sunny afternoon perhaps, and sit on the patio by Lake Mendota, people-watch, and read the news. Today I'd do it in a minute if I could, but today I'd read news on an iPad or laptop using RSS feeds. I'd have an all-in-one bundled news experience as I did in the 70s. But: My system kind of sucks, I never put any effort into maintaining it, and my system is vastly better than what most people get as a news experience. No wonder the truth has trouble getting out. The news industry blames Facebook, but as a former entrepreneur, I blame them. They've invested so little in understanding how their readers use their product. Their system is based on an incomplete understanding of their roles. The news industry product needs to be re-bundled. I believe the rewards will be huge for the first publication that bets on this idea. They wouldn't be the first, btw -- My.Yahoo did it in the 00's. Have the guts to point to your competition. And if you have a paywall, send them some money and some readers. Now that Jeff Bezos is retired, and owns such a platform, I would stand up and applaud if they had the guts to try this out. I'd also line up to hook my blog into such a network. Not because my writing depends on making money from it, it doesn't, but to help disrupt the news industry that's daydreaming itself to death over distribution, competition and economics. #I'm trying an experiment in Less Is More. After writing on Saturday that I am writing too much, I decided let's do one or two ideas every night and see what if anything changes. And also let's see if I can stick to it for a while at least. (Update: It didn't work.)#
PS: I did a blog-like stream on Twitter this morning. As I often say, 280 is a much better number of chars than 140. You can express more ideas in 280. #