Society & Culture

Since last Friday, my life has seemingly been consumed with thinking about what happened at Sandy Hook elementary school. Maybe it’s the just horrific nature of the event. Maybe it’s that I’m a parent of two small kids, and I haven’t been able to stop hugging and kissing them and thinking about how ...

Yesterday, I spent the day at a meeting on “city innovation” at Harvard’s Kennedy School, with 30 or so CIOs, CTOs, and other technology executives from around the country. I did a short presentation on predictive analytics and cities (slides here) — thanks so much to everyone who sent in comments a...

I love halloween. I think it’s my favorite holiday. The thing that I like about it the most is that it’s one of the only days of the year where you have a reason to go out and meet all of your neighbors.  I spent a while last night walking around the neighborhood with Theo… Continue reading

It’s hard to find the right balance when bringing technology into our lives.  I do think lots of us suffer from some form of internet / social media addiction, and it’s getting easier and easier every day to bring all of that with us everywhere we go. This will only continue to accelerate (and I… Co...

I’m still frustrated with how book buying works. Totally randomly, we ended up watching the Tom Wolfe documentary on TV Friday night.  It was really great — incredible to get a behind-the-scenes look at how he operates.  He is clearly a master of the interview and a master researcher.  He has an inc...

Steven Johnson, one of my all time favorite writers and thinkers has a new book out: Future Perfect – The Case for Progress in the Networked Age. Go buy it; I’ll be here when you get back (I love it when bloggers say that — I almost always do it myself). In Future Perfect, Steven… Continue reading

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...

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...

Amazing things happen when people are stuck on a bus together. More on that in a bit. I spent yesterday afternoon with Chiefs of Staff and Chief Information Officers from about 10 US cities, at an event convened by the Harvard Kennedy School and Living Cities (a collaborative of large funders who fo...

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 ...

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

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… ...

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

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’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...

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’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...