25 Years Later: The Good and Bad of the Web

25 Years Later: The Good and Bad of the Web

By 2016 Cisco expects 3.4 billion Internet users. If we step back, and if we’re willing to speak in sweeping generalizations, what can we say about the good and bad that the World Wide Web has brought us over the past 25 years? How will it shape the lives of its next billion users?

Non-Profit Journalism in Central America

Non-Profit Journalism in Central America

I’m in Central America for the next two weeks to try to better understand a new phenomenon — the rise of small, online, non-profit, investigative journalism projects. They tend to be led by the giants of Latin American journalism who over the decades have...
Networks, Power, Philanthropy

Networks, Power, Philanthropy

Open Society Institute, the network of philanthropic foundations established by billionaire George Soros, has long promoted access to information because it understands that information is power and that people in positions of power often try to withhold information...
Cloud Intelligence

Cloud Intelligence

Seven Billion Brains on Planet Earth Every morning we – all seven billion of us – wake up with a certain amount of cognitive energy, our mental fuel tank for the day to come. We use up this cognitive energy every time our brain must process information and...

[Review] Here Comes Everybody

Thinking back on it, I’m not sure I really learned anything new – not in terms of ideas nor anecdotes – from Here Comes Everybody. And yet I’ll probably end up buying copies for both sets of my grandparents and anyone else I care about who...

Digital Folklore and Anecdote Ownership

I am reading two excellent (and related) books by two talented authors: Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. They both belong to a relatively recent genre of writing which attempts to explain the impact of the Internet on...
On Freedom and Familiarity

On Freedom and Familiarity

Freedom A couple days ago I wrote that “these days” we have too many choices and that, perhaps, those choices impede our happiness because each decision carries the heavy uncertainty of all the other options we ruled out. From the thoughtful and meaningful...