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October 6, 2015

Doc Searls’ "The Adblock War" series

Adblocking is, as Doc Searls claims, “the biggest boycott in human history.” Since August 12, Doc’s been posting what I can only call an in-depth, analytical, evidence-based rant. It is not to be missed.

  1. Separating advertising’s wheat and chaff (12 August 2015)
  2. Apple’s content blocking is chemo for the cancer of adtech (26 August 2015)
  3. Will content blocking push Apple into advertising’s wheat business? (29 August 2015)
  4. If marketing listened to markets, they’d hear what ad blocking is telling them (8 September 2015)
  5. Debugging adtext assumptions (18 September 2015)
  6. How adtech, not ad blocking, breaks the social contract (23 September 2015)
  7. A way to peace in the adblock war (21 September 2015, on the ProjectVRM blog)
  8. Beyond ad blocking — the biggest boycott in human history (28 Septemper 2015)
  9. Dealing with Boundary Issues (1 October 2015 in Linux Journal)

Doc says (in an email) he is “building the case for what ProjectVRM, Customer Commons and Mozilla (notably its Content Services group) are quietly doing to disable surveillance capitalism.”

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Categories: cluetrain, marketing Tagged with: adblock • advertising • cluetrain • doc searls Date: October 6th, 2015 dw

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July 21, 2012

Doc Searls: WSJ centerfold!

Actually, it’s more like Doc Searls: Wall Street Journal Cover Boy!

It’s a testament to Doc and also a hopeful sign of the times that the WSJ today features on its weekend cover a story by Doc about the theme of his new book, The Intention Economy. The title of the piece is “The Customer as a God,” a headline Doc didn’t write and isn’t entirely comfortable with. But the piece is strong. And getting it on the cover of WSJ is like getting a story about VRM on the cover of CRM Magazine. Which Doc also did.

A sample:

big business continues to believe that a free market is one in which customers get to choose their captors. Choosing among AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon for your new smartphone is like choosing where you’d like to live under house arrest. It’s why marketers still talk about customers as “targets” they can “acquire,” “control,” “manage” and “lock in,” as if they were cattle. And it’s why big business thinks that the best way to get personal with customers on the Internet is with “big data,” gathered by placing tracking files in people’s browsers and smartphone apps without their knowledge—so they can be stalked wherever they go, with their “experiences” on commercial websites “personalized” for them.

It is not yet clear to the perpetrators of this practice that it is actually insane…

Congrats, Doc.

 


The headline brings to mind the most embarrassing headline I ever found one of my articles placed under. The article was about the need for human leeway in decisions about what constitutes copyright infringement. The title Wired supplied without my knowledge (that’s how magazines work) was: “Copy protection is a crime against humanity.” I can see the pun they intended, but taken at face values, it implies I think copy protection is on a par with genocide. I of course don’t even think copy protection is a crime.

And, yes, I am aware that the title for this post is also guilty of wild overstatement. I’m assuming — no offense, Doc — that even casual readers will understand that it’s hyperbole for humorous effect. Haha.

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Categories: cluetrain Tagged with: cluetrain • doc searls • headlines • vrm • wsj Date: July 21st, 2012 dw

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April 7, 2011

Shel Israel’s Cluetrain interviews

Shel Israel [twitter:ShelIsrael] has posted email interviews with Doc Searls and me about how cluetrain came about and how it’s held up. He asked us the same questions. We responded fairly consistently about the history, but ran down different paths in the more forward-looking questions.

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Categories: business, cluetrain, marketing Tagged with: cluetrain • doc searls • marketing • shel israel Date: April 7th, 2011 dw

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November 13, 2010

Doc around the clock, and around the world

Doc Searls has a brief post about wandering his way around the world and across the decades thanks to librarians, archivists, and the good folks of New Zealand.

Btw, be sure to click on the link to what Doc calls his “favorite family photo of all time.” OMG, he looks exactly the same.

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Categories: libraries, open access Tagged with: doc searls • libraries Date: November 13th, 2010 dw

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