Writing.
Essays since 2006, plus a few things first published at USV. Occasional by design. The podcast lives on its own page.
- Jane Jacobs, Inspiration, and the Internet
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 ...
- Advocacy in the Age of Peak Guilt
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...
- When Paper is Better
Last week, I spent some time shopping for a new health insurance plan for our family. Two takeaways: 1) The new Massachusetts Health Connector is really great — the health connector is a state-run exchange that helps you find, choose, and purchase a health plan, either a state-run plan or a private ...
- The Internet Defense League
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...
- Hacking Society
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
- The Kickstarter Protocol
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...
- Waboba!
We spent this weekend in Cape Cod w/ Frannie’s family — her family has been renting the same small cottage by the beach in Truro for 35 years or so, and we spend a lot of time out there in the summer. This year, our old friend Tati introduced perhaps the greatest beach innovation ever.… Continue rea...
- digg: Sold for parts, in a good way
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… ...
- Institutions and Abuse
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...
- Transportation Networks aka Bike Share is Awesome
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
- Fights for the Future on Many Fronts
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
- Learning new things
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
- Highrise Chrome Extension
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
- Thinking about Freedom
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...
- Open source and open knowledge
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
- Automating your way out of bad behavior
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
- Wanted: Highrise Chrome Extension
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...
- Investing vs. getting in debt
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...
- Hacking Patents
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...
- Creativity and Free Culture
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...