Here’s my problem with Hypothesis, the annotation tool. I think it’s also an opportunity. A friend shares a list of “100 biggest Clinton Wikileaks Revelations” on Facebook. As expected, it’s just a mess of fuzzy thinking and misinformation, tied weakly to links to emails. I think — hey, here’s a good opportunity for Hypothesis. Maybe Continue reading

There is a lesser known argument about neoliberalism which sees neoliberalism not as a power grab by the elite, but as a form of statecraft which allowed politicians to distance themselves from hard decisions. From Matt Stoller’s summary of Greta Krippner’s Capitalizing on Crisis: The argument popularized by Inside Job filmmaker Charles Ferguson and Roosevelt Institute fellow Continue reading

A couple years back, in 2014, Ward Cunningham wrote a piece on wiki called “Internet of Broken Things”. After dealing with the failure of a home sensor network he wrote: This is how the internet of things will work. All the things will be interesting. We will think we own them because we will have Continue reading

The National Academies were incorporated by the government at various times — I think the Sciences (NAS) was incorporated by President Lincoln, and the other academies sometime after that. (I know, a deep history here). They serve the public interest in a number of ways, but one of the more prominent is they gather experts Continue reading

A short note about something that occurred to me today, one that will only make sense to people who have been following my Wikity project. When I first started to play around with Wikity as a PLE (Personal Learning Environment), I would usually follow this pattern: I’d set aside time for a writing session.  I’d Continue reading

Keynote given at Metropolitan State’s TLTS conference in Denver, CO.  A Sense of Audience I’m going to start by telling a story about how I got here. I’ve mentioned this on my blog once or twice, but this is the first time I’ve told this end to end in this way. I got here because Continue reading

Bit of discussion on Twitter today about whether the decentralized web is a pipe dream or a near-term possibility. My response to that is longer than a tweet, so I put it here. Many things about the decentralized web are hard. IPFS, the torrent-like file system that makes servers irrelevant, is pretty geeky right now. Continue reading

Readers here will have been following my discussion of the use of the Stream as a guiding metaphor for the web. The Stream has its roots in conversation. It organizes communication as a string of sequential events. This is opposed to the Garden, which has its roots in literary culture, and organizes knowledge spatially, as Continue reading