David Weinberger

Edward Burman recently sent me a very interesting email in response to my article about the 50th anniversary of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So I bought his 2003 book Shift!: The Unfolding Internet – Hype, Hope and History (hint: If you buy it from Amazo... (more)

Some wonderfully interesting stuff from Stephen Wolfram today. Here’s his Reddit IAMA. A post about what’s become of a New Kind of Science in the past ten years. And a part two, about reactions to NKS. And here’s a post from a couple of months ago that I missed that is, well, am... (more)

I am the lucky fellow who got to have dinner with James Bridle last night. I am a big fan of his brilliance and humor. And of James himself, of course. I ran into him at the NEXT conference I was at in Berlin. His in fact was the only session I managed to get to. (My schedule got ... (more)

The DSM — the psychiatric tome that lists diagnosable (and thus billable) disorders — is being overhauled. Famously, in an earlier edition, homosexuality stopped being counted as a disease. I have some hopes that some illnesses of the Internet will be formally recogni... (more)

MetaFilter popped up a three-year-old post from Derek Sivers about how streeet addresses work in Japan. The system does a background-foreground duck-rabbit Gestalt flip on Western addressing schemes. I’d already heard about it — book-larnin’ because I’ve never been to Japan... (more)

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. Matt Oswald... (more)

I’ve come in late to Ethan Zuckerman’s panel on worldwide memes. I heard the fabulous Brazilian discussion from my spot in the back of the room. Now I have seat and anasqtiesh, a Syrian blogger, is talking about the importance o memes in Syria’s repressive environment. For examp... (more)

For me, “impacted” refers to an unpleasant dental condition, and cannot be used as a verb. So, given my grammatical self-righteousness on this point, I was chastened to read a column written by William Safire sometime in 1989-1991 (in his anthology In Love with Norma Loquendi) cr... (more)

Carl Zimmer has a fascinating article in the NYTimes, which is worth 1/10th of your NYT allotment. (Thank you for ironically illustrating the problem with trying to maintain knowledge as a scarce resource, NYT!) Carl reports on what may be a growing phenomenon (or perhaps, as the ... (more)

An indie movie launching in September is holding a contest to find four songs for four scenes that need musical backing. The movie is We Made This Movie from Rob Burnett and Jon Beckerman (creators of the TV show Ed; Rob is the Late Night with David Letterman producer). Because ... (more)

I’m at the DPLA Plenary meeting, heading toward the first public presentation — a status report — on the prototype DPLA platform we’ve been building at Berkman and the Library Innovation Lab. So, tons of intellectual stimulation, as well as a fair bit of stress. The ... (more)

They say the way to succeed as a blogger is to use shocking headlines. Now you have mine. And it’s true. This morning at the Seattle airport, I had a very pleasant experience going through Securty, and no, I am not referring to an especially loving pat-down. Because I am a Speci... (more)

(Here’s a version of the text of a submission I just made to BoingBong through their “Submitterator”) Harvard University has today put into the public domain (CC0) full bibliographic information about virtually all the 12M works in its 73 libraries. This is (I believe) the large... (more)

The Chronicle of Higher Ed asked me to write a perspective on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions since this is the 50th year since it was published. It’s now posted . ... (more)

Outer Space from Sander van den Berg on Vimeo. ... (more)

A British game show that I never heard offers a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. As the host explains at the beginning, if both contestants agree to split the pot, they split it. If one chooses to split and the other to steal, the stealer gets the whole thing. If they both choo... (more)

Neelie Kroes is becoming one of the open Internet’s most influential supporters. Kroes is Vice President of the European Commission and is responsible for its “digital agenda.” At the Forum d’Avignon I was at (see here and here) she was just about the only person in a positon of... (more)

Secret Service scandal eclipses Obama trip That’s the headline in USAToday. It’s typical of the news coverage of the Secret Service scandal before the President arrived in Colombia. Let me fix that for you: Media’s decision to focus on the Secret Service scandal eclipses Obama tri... (more)

On April 1, rebels overran Timbuktu, so, according to a Reuters article, librarians, scholars, and citizens in this important site of Islamic learning are hiding away thousands of irreplaceable manuscripts. “Estimates for the total number of historic documents in the city, some o... (more)

Valdis Krebs has posted a map of books that Amazon says people who bought 2b2k also bought, and then the web of books that are one degree away from those books. It’s interesting to parse as you try to discern what the shared interests are. And I’m surprised that Amazon hasn’t pi... (more)