Category Archives: Books

The Long View

This blog has been looking like my personal obituary section, and I suppose it is. While I promise to change that, for this post I’ll stick with the theme, and surface some correspondence with an old friend who recommended that … Continue reading

Posted in Blogging, Books, Friends, Future, Obituary, Quote | Leave a comment

Saving the Internet—and all the commons it makes possible

This is the Ostrom Memorial Lecture I gave on 9 October of last year for the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. Here is the video. (The intro starts at 8 minutes in, and my part starts just after 11 minutes … Continue reading

Posted in Books, Future, Geology, Ideas, infrastructure, Internet, Journalism, Ostrom Workshop | 1 Comment

The Giant Zero

The world of distance Fort Lee is the New Jersey town where my father grew up. It’s at the west end of the George Washington Bridge, which he also helped build. At the other end is Manhattan. Even though Fort … Continue reading

Posted in Books, Broadcasting, Ideas, infrastructure, Places, Politics, privacy, problems, Technology | Tagged , , , | 21 Comments

The greatest western I’ve ever read

— is John McPhee‘s Rising From the Plains. It’s one book among five collected in Annals of the Former World, which won a Pulitzer in 1999. In all five, McPhee follows a geologist around; and all five of the geologists … Continue reading

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On @Cluetrain, @advertising @social and #NewClues

In There Is No More Social Media — Just Advertising, Mike Proulx (@McProulx) begins, Fifteen years ago, the provocative musings of Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger set the stage for a grand era of social media marketing with the publication … Continue reading

Posted in Books, Business, Cluetrain, Future, Harvard, history, Identity, Internet, marketing, Past, Social, Technology | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

On marketing’s terminal addiction to personal data fracking and bad guesswork

Quit fracking our lives to extract data that’s none of your business and that your machines misinterpret. — New Clues, #58 That’s the blunt advice David Weinberger and I give to marketers who still make it hard to talk, sixteen … Continue reading

Posted in Books, Business, Cluetrain, Internet, problems, Technology | 3 Comments

#10books that changed my life

There’s a challenge going around Facebook: to name ten books that have changed your life. So I’ve thought about my own, and kept a running list here in draft form. Now that it’s close enough to publish, methinks, here they … Continue reading

Posted in Art, Awesome, Books, Culture, Geology, history, Links | 1 Comment

Hart Island: a movie we need, about zombies as heroes

As Halloween approaches (and death itself, for all of us, eventually), I find myself thinking, Do zombies always have to be bad? And, What if zombies were good? And, Hey, maybe good zombies are what we call ‘angels’. Then I find myself wondering … Continue reading

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Thoughts on privacy

In Here Is New York, E.B. White opens with this sentence: “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” Sixty-four years have passed since White wrote that, and … Continue reading

Posted in Books, Business, Cluetrain, Future, history, Internet, Links, News, Past, Personal, Personal clouds, problems, Technology, VRM | Tagged , , , , | 44 Comments

Terror as a second or third order effect of personal communication surveillance by governments

Several years ago, during a session at Harvard Law School led by a small group of Google executives, I asked one of those executives about his company’s strategy behind starting services in categories where there was no obvious direct business … Continue reading

Posted in Berkman, Books, Business, Ideas, Internet, News, problems, Technology | 9 Comments