I haven’t been following the story of the Digg acquisition too closely, and have no perspective on the economics of it, but it does seem kind of awesome in a way.  In that, the acquirers of the various parts of digg seem to have each gotten something uniquely valuable (to them) and likely have the… ...

For the past few months, it seems like I can’t read the news without coming across another horrifying story of sexual abuse within “esteemed” institutions. Today marks the release of the “Freeh Report” — the independent analysis of what happened at Penn State with Jerry Sandusky.  The Washington Pos...

An amazing thing happened yesterday. I was on my way into Boston to get coffee with Jason Schultz — from my house, I had ridden my bike the 2 minute ride to the Green Line T, taken it downtown, and had just gotten off at Hynes Convention Center.  From there, it was to be about a… Continue reading

One of the things I’ve learned over the past few months is that the fight for the future is being fought on many, many fronts — and these fights take all shapes and sizes, and are constantly shifting and re-forming. Here are a few that are hot this week — each of which will be… Continue reading

I have two kids — a three year old, Theo, and Brieza, who is one.  It’s been amazing watching both of them grow. What’s funny about little kids growing is how it seems to happen in spurts.  Everything will be going along, normal day to day, and then all of a sudden you stop and… Continue reading

Last week, I wrote about wanting a Chrome extension for Highrise.  This week, I built a first pass: https://github.com/nickgrossman/highrise-chrome-extension Here’s a quick video demo of how it works: Continue reading

For the past few weeks, I’ve been involved with a community effort to draft a declaration of freedom for the Internet.  On Monday, it went live on the web, and is starting to get discussed. It’s been an amazing, fascinating and inspiring year in the internet community.  Today, the Verge has a nicely...

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…...