David Weinberger

I’ve spent most of today working on something I haven’t done since August 18, 2009: Publish an issue of my old newsletter, Joho. I started it in around 1995 as an internal up-to-dater for Open Text where I was marketing vp. The idea was to share links, explain some stuff when I could, and crack wise. In other words, it was a lot like a blog that I folded up and sent through email once every few weeks. (In case you were wondering, Joho gets its name from this period: Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization.) When I left Open Text, I opened up Joho as a free online newsletter. I’d post the hmtl and send out the text. Because we still didn’t have blogs, much of the content consisted of amusing emails from readers, with my occasional semi-amusing riposte. As the new millennium dawned, I was blogging up a storm and thus felt less of a need — and had less time &mda... (more)

Power politics in the age of Google

[live-blogged yesterday] I’ve come in 30 minutes late (Sorry! I had it marked wrong on my schedule) to a panel at the Kennedy School about politics and the Net. The panel is outstanding: Susan Crawford, Micah Sifry, Nicco Mele, Alexis Ohanian [reddit] and Elaine Kamarck, moderated by Alex Jones. NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people. As I enter, Susan is s... (more)

[tech@state][2b2k] Real-time awareness

At the Tech@State conf, a panel is starting up. Participants: Linton Wells (National Defense U), Robert Bectel (CTO, Office of Energy Efficiency), Robert Kirkpatrick (Dir., UN Global Pulse), Ahmed Al Omran (NPR and Suadi blogger), and Clark Freifield (HealthMap.org). NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people. Robert Bectel brought in Netvibes.com [I use NetVib... (more)

[2b2k] The corruption of impact

According to a survey publishsed in Science [abstract][Slashdot] scientists are routinely pressured to include superfluous references in their papers in order to boost the Impact Factor of the journal publishing their paper. The Impact Factor is (roughly) a measure of the importance/influence of a journal, based on a two year average of how often its papers are cited. Careeers are made by publishing in high Impact Factor journals. This sort of corruption (which I talk about a bit in Too Big to Know) might seem like an inevitable imprecision in how we gauge something as vague as ... (more)

[2b2k] Moi moi moi

Steve Cottle has done a great job live-blogging my wrap-up talk at the Tech@State event. Thanks, Steve! I was the guest on Tummelvision a couple of nights ago, which is podcast tumble-tumult of persons and ideas. It doesn’t get much more fun than that. Thanks, Heather, Kevin, and Deb! The Berkman Center has posted the video of my book talk. Look on the bottom left to find the player and the links. KMWorld’s Hugh McKellar has posted his interview with me. And NYTECH has just posted a video of my talk there on Jan 25. The talk is about 45 mins and then there’s a lively Q&A. Thanks ... (more)