Who’s really making money from the AI boom? — Claire Anderson (hi Claire!) asked me to break down the economics of AI. How is it going to make money, and for whom? In this post I’m not going to talk too much about how the technology works, and the claims of its vendors vs the actual limitations of the…

Let’s support tightly-focused, independent newsrooms. — Doc Searls writes about what he calls wide news: Local and regional papers covered politics, government, crises, disasters, sports, fashion, travel, business, religion, births, deaths, schools, and happenings of all kinds. They had reporters assigned across all their sections. No other medium could go as wide. Doc’s argument is that…

Open source licenses fall short of modern needs. — Dave Winer poses: If you think of yourself as an “open source developer” please ask yourself this question. Are you as committed to freedom for people who use your software as you are to freedom for developers? Not just freedom to modify the source code, but freedom to do anything…

Burning out personally feels a lot like burning out professionally. — Lately I’ve found myself feeling profoundly homesick. It’s come and gone for the twelve years I’ve lived in the US full-time, but this week I’ve been feeling it pretty much as intensely as I ever have. But perhaps homesickness isn’t quite the right word. If you pushed me, I’d have…

A story about terrible software and bad local government contracts — It turns out that Cheltenham Township, the municipality where I live across the northern Philadelphia border, incurs an extra earned income tax on top of the state and federal taxes that I’m used to paying. This would have been fine if I’d had any idea that such a tax existed…

Take that, web notifications! — Website notifications are a blight. I never want a website to be able to notify me about updates; these messages are interruptive, and like the vast majority of app notifications, they tend to be part of some marketing team’s growth strategy rather than a conduit to actually useful information. (Product…

Let’s forget about that other place once and for all. — When I was fifteen, I ran a little “e-zine” called Spire that was distributed on the cover CDs of various real, paper magazines. I thought it was pretty cool, and that nobody could possibly have known that it was run by a fifteen-year-old. (In retrospect, it was pretty obvious.) …

How I became a founder by accident — I fell into startups by accident. There were two paths I could have gone down at university. Next to an over-posed photo taken at a digital photo booth at a branch of Boots the Pharmacist in downtown Oxford, my high school yearbook declares that I’m likely to become a journalist…

Giving myself permission to dream big again. — I’ve been spending some time looking carefully at my professional goals. A few years ago, I open sourced the mission / vision / tactical worksheet I’d been using, which was inspired by high-level organizational strategy. First, it invites you to consider your “mission”: This is your north star. For example…