For Immediate Release Archives

The metaverse is not your destination

When Meta fka Facebook announced its change of purpose and name last year to become a self-described “social technology company,” it was widely seen as a signficant move in establishing the leading role in defining and enabling the metaverse as the next level up from current social networks, AR, VR, virtual worlds, the whole online shebang that is layered onto the current Internet. Which gets to my point in this article – considering the question, “What is the metaverse?” Some…

The Uber Files data leak and the chasm between ethics and lobbying

On July 11, the Guardian newspaper dropped a bombshell across the media and political landscapes with the first revelations about Uber and its law-breaking activities around the world, on an industrial scale, in the pursuit of profits. News about the Uber Files published by the Guardian and a global array of media partners was the visible first step in making use of a treasure trove of data leaked by a whistleblower to shine a bright spotlight on a company that…

Keep an open mind about AI

The suspension of a Google engineer called Blake Lemoine, who claimed an AI (artificial intelligence) in the form of a computer chatbot he was working on had become sentient and was thinking and reasoning like a human being, has stimulated a lot of comment over the past few weeks following the story’s publication in the Washington Post. It formed the starting discussion that Shel Holtz and I had in this month’s long-form episode 263 of the For Immediate Release podcast,…

Pivoting the FIR podcast

When Shel and I started the For Immediate Release podcast, usually abbreviated to ‘FIR,’ in January 2005, we had a big vision for it. We wanted to have a conversation about topics that interested us at that intersection of business, communication, and technology. As we noted in a post on December 21, 2004, introducing the forthcoming podcast, “We’ll bring a balanced view on what’s going on in the US and Europe in communication, technology and other relevant topics.” We thought…

Moving the podcast market

News that Apple’s new podcast subscription service is being delayed until June because Apple needs to tweak the Apple Podcasts app is a good reminder of how important the user experience is and ensuring it delivers on expectations. It’s also a great illustration of how a market moved. In the early homebrew days of podcasting, it was common for many podcasts to sound like they’d been recorded in the back of a garden shed on a rainy day, or the…