Greatest Hits

Cute Cats to the Rescue? Participatory Media and Political Expression

Some years back, I gave a talk at O’Reilly’s ETech conference that urged the audience to…

What comes after election monitoring? Citizen monitoring of infrastructure.

I spent last week in Senegal at a board meeting for Open Society Foundation, meeting organizations t…

Beyond “The Crisis in Civics” – Notes from my 2013 DML talk

Two weeks ago, I gave the opening keynote at the Digital Media and Learning conference in Chicago. T…

How do we make civic crowdfunding awesome?

Ten people each contribute $100 a month into a pool. They meet once a month and discuss possible pro…

When the world is your dance teacher

In 2005, Matt Harding posted a video on the internet. It’s a compilation of clips of him danci…

An idea worth at least 40 nanoKardashians of your attention

In my class today, celebrated science journalist Alister Doyle shared an insight that crystalized fo…

The tweetbomb and the ethics of attention

Bachir (Chiren) Boumaaz, known as “Athene”, is an online gamer known for his prowess at …

The Passion of Mike Daisey: Journalism, Storytelling and the Ethics of Attention

I am telling you that I do not speak Mandarin, I do not speak Cantonese, I have only a passing famil…

Unpacking Kony 2012

Traduzido para o Português por Natália Mazotte e Bruno Serman This Monday, March 5th, the advocacy…

Understanding #amina

On Monday, June 6th, a post appeared on the blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus” announcing tha…

CHI keynote: Desperately Seeking Serendipity

I’m giving the closing keynote at CHI 2011 this afternoon. I’m thrilled to have the chan…

Overcoming political polarization… but not through facts

A recent New York Times poll suggests that Americans are in a dark mood. 70% of people think the cou…

Those White Plastic Chairs – The Monobloc and the Context-Free Object

Ian Frazier, writing about the return of seals to the waters that surround New York City, offers thi…

What if Tunisia had a revolution, but nobody watched?

On December 17, a 26 year old Tunisian man named Mohamed Bouazizi reached the end of his rope. An un…

Makmende’s so huge, he can’t fit in Wikipedia

“After platinum, albums go Makmende” “They once made a makmende toilet paper, but …

Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention

Secretary Clinton’s recent speech on Internet Freedom has signaled a strong interest from the …

Is ad-supported journalism viable in a pay-for-performance age?

While a great deal of what I write here is underinformed speculation, this piece is unusually specul…

Mapping: Infrastructure and flow

I love airline route maps. I’ve fallen asleep staring at the tangle of possible journeys so of…

Innovation from Constraint (the extended dance mix)

I gave a talk a few weeks ago in Barcelona that was pretty well-received and widely blogged. Specifi…

The polyglot internet

I’ve been invited to participate in the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on …

Financial models for “difficult” journalism

One of the themes I was struck by at the Berkman at Ten conference was the idea that the net is now …

Homophily, serendipity, xenophilia

There’s been a small but fascinating blog conversation going on surrounding the term “ho…

The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech

I’d forgotten just how much fun ETech is. Not only are the talks some of the most creative and…

The 5-4-3 double play, or “The Art of Conference Blogging”

When I was about seven years old, my father taught me how to score a baseball game. We were probably…

Incremental infrastructure, or how mobile phones might wire Africa

One of the consequences (intended or otherwise) of the TED Global conferencein Arusha, Tanzania last…

Draft paper on mobile phones and activism

I’m giving a talk on activist uses of mobile phones in the developing world later this month. …

Just how crazy is Joseph Kony?

The ongoing war in northern Uganda is one of the worst conflicts one rarely hears about. Jan Egeland…

Recovery 2.0 – thoughts on what worked and failed on PeopleFinder so far

Update: The interface to search the PeopleFinder database is up. According to our friends at Salesfo…

Africa’s a continent. Not a crisis.

My friend Brian at Black Star Journal has an excellent critical response to my post a few days back …

Behold the Power of String

I got interested in gers about ten minutes before I first landed in Mongolia. As the plane descended…

Media Attention, the UN, Sean MacBride and “ancient” media history

Last week, I had the pleasure of leading a class of Digital Democracy, a Harvard Law School course b…