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I had a short, fun and productive trip to New Orleans to attend and speak at the Collision conference. It doesn’t look like any of the panels I moderated got their own write-up, but I did get mentioned by Politico for attending the Cato Institute’s 40th-birthday celebration Saturday. That kind of publicity weirds me out a little.

5/2/2017: New sights, Collision

I didn’t know I’d be doing this interview of Machine Zone CEO Gabe Leydon–on the conference’s center stage–until the night before. The organizers asked if I could fill in, and I said sure. Our chat went well, but in retrospect I should have asked pressed Leydon on the risks to his ambitious and somewhat vague data-platform dreams.

5/2/2017: The journey towards corporate monopolies: The evolution of browsing, Collision

I interviewed Jon von Tetzchner, developer of the Opera and Vivaldi browsers, about the state of the market. You can see our chat 34 minutes into this video.

5/2/2017: Ad-blocking does more harm than good, Collision

I moderated a debate between Business Insider senior correspondent Steve Kovach and AdBlock CEO Matt Maier.

5/3/2017: Why Hulu with Live TV and other streaming TV services are worth the money, Yahoo Finance

The idea for this post debunking three common arguments against cord-cutting came together in my head as I walked from my hotel to the New Orleans convention center that morning.

5/4/2017: How will big data drive competitive intelligence?, Collision

This is an extraordinarily vague and buzzwordy title–I was prepared to start saying such replacement phrases for “big data” as “binary donuts,” “brand dances,” “bonus daguerrotypes,” and “brave daisies” to avoid repeating that two-word combo 50 times–but my conversation with Interana CEO Ann Johnson and DAQRI co-founder Gaia Dempsey stayed on the incisive side.

5/4/2017: Next level: Realtime for the cloud, Collision

My interview with Machine Zone CMO Kristen Dumont–a little more down to earth than Tuesday’s chat with the CEO–starts at about an hour and 58 minutes into this clip.

5/5/2017: These are the tech industry’s 2 biggest concerns about Trump, Yahoo Finance

I wrote much of this Collision recap on the flight back from New Orleans, then spent as much time on the piece in some editorial back-and-forth Friday.

5/7/2017: Facebook Live video, Al Jazeera

I talked about Facebook’s plans to hire another 3,000 people to police Live video.

5/7/2017: How to get AT&T’s cheaper wireless plans, USA Today

The cheaper, data-capped forms of AT&T’s Mobile Share Advantage plans have gotten harder to find on the carrier’s site, and this column explains why.

It will cost me a few hundred dollars to try iOS 9’s new support for ad-blocking tools, courtesy of that feature not working on my vintage iPad mini. (Thanks for not documenting that and other incompatibilities, Apple.) But even after I upgrade to an iPad mini 4, I probably still won’t treat myself to an ad-reduced mobile Web by paying for such popular content blockers as Crystal or Purify.

I mentioned the reasons why in a comment on my Yahoo Tech post Tuesday, but the answer deserves a little more space.

It’s not about a sense of professional loyalty, although I would feel more than a little dirty undercutting the advertising revenue that helps news sites pay me and my friends in the business.

(Ars Technica founder Ken Fisher made that argument well in this March 2010 post.)

This is more a case of me trying to keep a little of the common touch online. In general, I stick with default settings so I will experience the same issues as the average Web user (also, I’m lazy). I will depart from defaults to keep my devices secure–that’s why Flash isn’t on this laptop–but installing extra apps to get a cleaner Web experience gets me too far from that ideal.

In particular, relying on ad blocking invites me to recommend sites without realizing their annoyance factor. If a site’s going to throw a sign-up-for-our-newsletter dialog before you can read every story, I don’t want to learn about that behavior afterwards from grumpy readers.

(My occasional client PCMag.com often presents that kind of newsletter dialog. And yet I gladly refer people there, because their journalists do good work. See, it’s complicated!)

I also need to know if my regular clients are getting obnoxious with the ads–remember, I was at the Post when an overload of ads and social-media widgets began to bog down everybody’s reading–on the chance that my complaint to management improves matters. You’ll tell me about that kind of problem, right?