Internet & Platforms

A few things happened recently, which are causing an unexpected and totally interesting change in my digital life. 1) On the last day of our vacation, Theo dropped our iPad on a brick patio, smashing it to bits. 2) I realized that I could save over $100/mo by consolidating my wireless accounts, and ...

Yesterday afternoon, I caught up for a coffee with Andrew Parker.  After a wide-ranging and enjoyable discussion about app ecosystems and tech policy, we talked a bit about speed.  This post (which I’ll keep short, in its own spirit) is about why speed is so important, awesome, and magical. I wrote ...

This post has been a long time coming. This weekend, we hosted a BBQ at our house as part of the Summer of Internet Freedom.  Internet Freedom is nice and all, but really, it was just an excuse to fire up a batch of burger dogs. What’s a burger dog? I’m glad you asked. A… Continue reading

The Camellia Network is an organization that exists to support youth who are aging out of the foster system. It’s a new organization, just passing its first year, and yesterday they launched their revamped web platform.  Camellia is a new kind of support organization — rather than provide services d...

Today is the last day to submit comments to the White House on its plans for Intellectual Property enforcement for the coming year. This is yet another act in the fight for the future of everything, and it’s a relatively obscure and quiet one (as we expect many more will be, in the wake of… Continue...

In some small way, I feel like I arrived as a member of the internet today.  Joi took some photos of me, which are now in his stream (along with photos of countless other internet heroes of mine). Thanks to Jess for making me smile and laugh as we got going. I am terrible in photographs. I always… C...

Last week, I hung out with my old friend Nate Jaffee.  We played a bit of tennis (on the hottest day I can remember in recent history), had the standard and depressing discussion about how we both peaked athletically at age 16, and then got down to the important business of having a few beers… Conti...

I wrote the other day about wanting a better way to share slide presentations.  I think there is a huge opportunity here, and I don’t think anyone has nailed it yet. I consider this to be an open letter to Sliderocket, which is so close to capturing this opportunity but has (in my humble opinion)… C...

Last night at 3am, our daughter Brieza started crying, Frannie and I woke up, and I couldn’t get back to sleep.  So I crawled over into my office and started surfing the web.  For about two hours, I wandered from thing to thing, and seemed to keep hitting gems, like this classic Paul Graham article ...

Yesterday, I spent the day at the Awesome Summit — the first wholesale gathering of folks involved with the Awesome Foundation. In case you don’t know, the Awesome Foundation is a “micro foundation”, where each month, a group of 10 “micro trustees” donates $1000 (total; $100 per trustee) towards a p...

Today marks the launch of the Internet Defense League, an effort led by Fight for the Future to build permanent infrastructure for defending the internet. The idea is simple: build a loose, permanent coalition of individuas, companies and websites that stand at the ready to react to threats to the i...

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of being part of an event called Hacking Society — I helped organize the event w/ the folks at Union Square Ventures, and it was a real honor to spend a day surrounded by many of my internet heroes. It’s taken us a little while, but we’ve… Continue reading

It’s no secret that Kickstarter is radically changing the way people think about launching new products.  They are on a such tear helping projects get funded by the crowd (the latest being OUYA, an open gaming platform, which has raised $5mm so far, 5x its goal), that it’s no surprise that the model...

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

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

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...

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...