I spent part of the train ride home today working on a coding project (the Highrise bookmarklet I blogged about wanting on Monday).  It’s almost done and I’m excited to start using it. I am not a great programmer, but I like it a lot. I only took one CS course in college. I really… Continue reading

As I write this, I’m sitting on the platform at the Back Bay Amtrak station in Boston, waiting for the train to New York. At 9am (6 minutes ago), I got a text message prompting me to write a blog post today. It said “Get your blog on!  It’s a good thing”.  The text message,… Continue reading

Update: I built it. I’ve used Highrise as a lightweight CRM for a few years now.  It’s fine for my needs — basically keeping track of people who I meet on email. The thing that really made Highrise start to work for me is integration with Gmail, via Rapportive.  Being able to add someone to… Continu...

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to invest lately.  I’m not just talking about investing money, in savings or stocks or whatever; I mean investing in a broader sense, in yourself and in everything you do. I am without question an urgency addict — as a general rule, I procrastinate, let t...

Last week at the Media Lab, we had the pleasure of hosting USPTO Director Dave Kappos and several members of the PTO’s senior staff, to brainstorm ways that we might use technology in creative ways to help the patent office work better, and to help the patent system work better in general.  The meet...

This morning started out in such a great way.  I’m on a mailing list at the Media Lab called “awesome”, and this morning Kasia Hayden sent around a link to this incredible piece of creative work: It’s a marriage proposal presented as a “live lip-dub” of Bruno Mars’ “Marry You“.  Basically a live mus...

Continuing my series of posts on this week’s Freedom to Connect conference, here is Larry Lessig‘s closing keynote. It was a big thrill for me to see Larry deliver one of his trademark presentations in person.  I remember the first time I saw one online: his Free Culture introduction from OSCON 2002...

In the spirit of posting highlights from this week’s Freedom to Connect conference, I’d like to next point to the talk given by former FCC chairman Michael Copps, entitled “Step Number One to Getting our Democracy Right”.  Here’s the video: The full text is here, and it’s probably a quicker read tha...

Yesterday at the Freedom to Connect conference, Eben Moglen delivered a fantastic talk entitled “Innovation Under Austerity”.  It’s about an hour long and is really worth the watch. Eben lays out, in clear, compelling terms, the case for open, decentralized, bottom-up innovation as the clearest way ...

The Civic Works team at OpenPlans just launched another sweet micro-site: cibi.me — for NYC’s forthcoming bike share program. The site is notable for a few reasons: First, it’s beautiful and fun to use.  The OpenPlans team has been putting out a ton of these small, beautifully designed and really fu...

Last week, Twitter did something big: they introduced a new patent assignment agreement that binds them to use their patent arsenal only for defensive purposes.  In an environment where things are getting ugly in software patent land, this is a bold move. The agreement (here on GitHub), which they’l...

Yesterday at the Center for Civic Media, our lunch guest was S. Craig Watkins, a professor at UT Austin working on a variety of projects under the heading of “Connected Learning”.  In his blog post about the idea, Dr. Watkins defines this as: the increasingly complex ways in which young people’s lea...

I’m not a hard core follower of GTD, but I do believe that working from the top of your inbox all day long is a recipe for disaster.   However, accessing email is important and necessary.  Problem is, with most email clients (I use gmail), you have to pass through the inbox (risking distraction) to…...

The Internet works differently than most other things we’re used to.  20th century humans are accustomed to hierarchy, control and scarcity.  The Internet, by contrast, is distributed open, and abundant.  That difference is fundamental — it not only empowers what’s possible on the Internet (which we...

When the Internet erupted on January 18th to voice its discontent with SOPA and PIPA, it was a moment of loud power.  Fight for the Future has a nice infographic describing everything that happened that day: 115,00 websites blacked out, 10mm signatures gathered, 8mm calls to congress; all in one day...

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently thinking about networks.  By networks, I mean groups of people, connected to one another via the Internet, who are able to do things and solve problems together by way of their direct connections to one another. As seemingly obvious as that definition may be...

From the Yak Shaving department Working from the top of the inbox is a recipe for working on stuff that isn’t important. But, sometimes you need to write emails.  The problem is, to write an email you need to first go to your email client, which usually means passing by your inbox.  For me, this… Co...

Here are slides from a talk I gave at the Living Cities Strategic Forum on Technology and Civic Change. Continue reading

Today I spent some time with Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures.  Among other things, we were talking about what’s going on at Code for America and Civic Commons, as well as the latest in the fight to save the Internet. Separately, during the day today, the USV team was interviewing candidates ...

My paperwork went through today, so I can finally say it in public without fear of jinxing myself… I am proud and very excited to say that I’m officially joining the MIT Media Lab as a visiting scholar, through the Center for Civic Media.  I’ve been coming here for the weekly lunches and research me...