Rough Drafts

Last night I watched the video release of Startup Dot Com, last year’s documentary about the rise and fall of GovWorks, a New York-based dot com. Interestingly, the founders, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman, have gone on to start a new company specializing in helping other companies wind up busin

Steve Gillmor: “LAST NIGHT I HAD a strange dream. The DRMocrats have just been re-elected, sweeping all three houses of government in a virtual landslide.”

Dan Gillmor notes that personal computing pioneer Doug Engelbart will be visiting a group of federal government IT executives this week, on a mission to raise their collective intelligence. Gillmor also posts a Howard Rheingold essay on Engelbart.

Lots of bloggers covered the DigitalID World conference in Denver last week, posting live transcripts, notes, and reports from the front of what turned out to be a very exciting conference. However, Jon Udell’s post is the first one that really boils down the conference and extracts some interesting

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott (1994). Susan gave me this book a few years ago and I just reread it in preparation for Nanowrimo. It’s amazing. Lamott manages to be inspiring, funny, wise, practical, entertaining, and encouraging all at once. And she writes with

Thomas Macaulay’s 1841 speech to Parliament covers the topic of copyright in exhaustive depth, but Weinberger says it’s eloquent and spot-on.

I signed up for National Novel Writing Month. My goal: To write a novel during the month of November. All considerations of quality, consistency, plot, and character will be tossed aside like so much worthless chaff, in pursuit of one goal: to write 50,000 words, or about 2,000 per day, most days. C

Movie and music moguls are hopping mad over the new technologies that are transforming digital entertainment. Washington is listening. What’s at risk? Your ability to enjoy DVDs and CDs you’ve bought, your privacy–even your control over your PC. Read more about it in my latest article for PC World,

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An almost-live report on the Eldred v. Ashcroft hearings.

Salon rides along with Brewster Kahle in the Internet Bookmobile, a van that’s equipped with a high-speed wireless Internet connection, a powerful printer, and a binding machine. They’re visiting schools, museums, and libraries, printing out hard copies of public-domain books for free. “In a print-o

Winer writes, vis a vis Google News, that “4000 pubs all reporting the same story is 4000 times more boring than one.” You could make the same claim about weblogs, but we’ll let that ride for now. What’s interesting to me about Google is that it can uncover new things — new publishers as well […]