This blog has been going since 2007, and was at Harvard.edu until 2023, when it moved to managed hosting at Pressable. It succeeds a blog I wrote from 1999 until 2007 and is mothballed here. Before personal publishing online was called blogging, I wrote on the Web here, when no publisher would have me—a condition that persists today. The one exception to periodicals’ lack of interest in having me work for them full time is Linux Journal, on the masthead of which I dwelled 1996 to 2019, lastly as editor-in-chief. While there, I led the magazine’s work toward making open source a thing.
What made me off-taste for magazines was (and remains) my interest in profoundly new and far-reaching ideas, rather than what I call “vendor sports” (Company A vs. Company B, or Issue X vs. Issue N) and buzzy self-replacing “narratives,” which is what we might still call stories. I’m more about facts. I also think stories are, while essential, also a giant fail. (Irony rules.) Here are three big ideas I’m working to make happen:
Except for News Commons, all of those ideas threaten business as usual on the Internet—while also opening far more opportunities, just as the Internet and the Web did in the first place, and we seem to have forgotten in what has become what Bruce Schneier (in 2012!) called a feudal digital age. I hope you live to see one or more of these ideas bear fruit. At age 78 already, I might not.
Here are some of the hats I wear while my gas tank is still full:
- Visiting scholar with the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University in Bloomington. With my wife Joyce (also a visiting scholar) we organize and host the Beyond the Web Salon Series* with both the Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School at IU. While doing this work we also reside in Bloomington, an awesomely cool college town. *It’s getting a new title this year: “After Analog.” Subtitle: “Identity, Privacy, Community, and Security in Our New Digital Age.”
- Author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, published by Harvard Business Review Press May 2012. That book reported on past and future work toward that economy, begun by ProjectVRM, which I launched in 2006, when I became a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The BKC kindly continues to host the project’s mailing list (of several hundred members) and wiki. Sir Tim Berners-Lee credits the book with inspiring his Solid Project. Others crediting the book and/or ProjectVRM for inspiring some of their ambitions are Consumer Reports (see here) and Kwaai.ai (a nonprofit working on personal AI, where I also volunteer as Chief Intention Officer).
- Co-founder and board member of Customer Commons, ProjectVRM’s nonprofit spin-off and the organization behind MyTerms.
- Emeritus fellow of the Center for Information Technology & Society at UC Santa Barbara. There I worked toward understanding the Internet as a form of infrastructure I call The Giant Zero. Maybe that will be a book eventually, but it’s back-burnered to the stuff above.
- One of the four authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the iconoclastic website that became the best-selling book in 2000, and still sells in many languages. A 10th-anniversary edition came out in 2009.
- Co-host of the Reality 2.0 podcast, which started at Linux Journal many episodes ago, and emeritus host of FLOSS Weekly, which I had fun doing through its final three years on the TWiT network.
- A marketing, PR, and advertising veteran. Most notably, I co-founded Hodskins Simone & Searls, which was born in North Carolina in the late ’70s and grew in the late ’80s and early ’90s to become one of Silicon Valley’s top advertising and public relations agencies. (HS&S was absorbed by Publicis Technology in 1998. Alas, evidence of HS&S is scant on the Net, and most of its archives were in the care of my two partners, Ray Simone and David Hodskins, who died in 2011 and 2022, and are deeply missed.)
- A lifelong writer whose byline has appeared in The Wall Street Journal (most notably with The Customer as God: The Future of Shopping) OMNI, Wired, PC Magazine, The Standard, The Sun, Upside, The Globe & Mail, Harvard Business Review, Release 1.0, and lots of other places, including (of course) Linux Journal. Some archives are also collected at Reality 2.0, which is at my personal portal, Searls.com.
- Partner with my wife Joyce in The Searls Group, the consultancy we activate when clients show up.
- A photographer with dozens of thousands of pictures on Flickr. Most are here. Nearly all carry attribution-only Creative Commons licenses to encourage use by others. As a result, close to 5000 of those have found their way onto Wikimedia Commons, which is a staging zone for Wikipedia. I haven’t counted how many of my shots are in Wikipedia, but they accompany hundreds of Wikipedia articles. This one, for example, is on nine different Wikipedia pages.
- A frequent speaker on any of the above subjects.
Other stuff:
- In 2005 I received a four-figure Google/O’Reilly Open Source Award for Best Communicator.
- In 2007 I was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in IT by eWeek.
Since I’m always working on too many things, and will only stop when I’m dead, I want my epitaph to read, “He was almost finished.”
I can be reached by email through doc at my last name dot com.
On the social fronts, I am these:
- https://journa.host/@dsearls
- https://www.facebook.com/docsearls
- http://twitter.com/@dsearls
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/docsearls
- https://@dsearls.bsky.social
- https://www.threads.net/@docsearls
Also, my given first name is David, which is still what family members and old friends call me. So does Wikipedia, in a page that needs improvement. I can’t do that, so if anyone wants guidance, talk to me.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, aka CC BY 4.0.
Last edited on 5 September 2025.
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