Latest publications

Pastebin highlights the relationship between technology and political change

Today's New York Times has a must-read article by Noam Cohen about the role of Pastebin in Occupy Wall Street. Pastebin is a site that is primarily used by programmers; it's a way to store, share and retrieve snippets of code. You might use Pastebin to share the...

Imagining innovation in the Google era

Neal Stephenson has written an important essay, Innovation Starvation, which I discovered via Ron Burnett. In it he grapples with the decline in world-changing inventions, and focuses particularly on the potential role of science fiction as an inspiration for...

#RIPSteve

We live and love online because Steve Jobs saw that technology could satisfy not only our brains, but also our hearts. Read the rest in my blog post for Harvard Business Review, Steve Jobs, Father of Social Media.

Steve Jobs in 10 Infographics

Steve Jobs is the rare tech innovator who will be remembered as much for his aesthetics as for contributions to functionality. No wonder that so much of his legacy can be captured graphically: 1. The history For an at-a-glance overview of the intertwined histories of...

Can smartphones create stillness?

If you want to learn something about stillness, visit a kindergarten class. I spent about 45 minutes with Little Peanut and his classmates today, and it gave me a whole new perspective on quiet -- or the lack thereof. In the half-hour in which these 19 kids were in...

10 early warning signs that you need to decrease (or increase) your time online

Yesterday I received what I accurately diagnosed as the Best Error Message Ever: Being a deeply religious person, I figured that an error message this…ummm…ironic? apt? transcendant?…must be some kind of sign from the universe. At first I thought it might be a sign to...

4 ways to protect your privacy and reputation on Facebook Timeline

My latest blog post for HBR takes a look at the new ooh! aah! Facebook Timeline, which comes tantalizingly close to fulfilling my wish list for a social media scrapbook without allowing me to easily print the damn thing already. (And I'm guessing it won't be long...

Facebook’s Timeline Will Impact Your Career

The advent of Facebook’s new Timeline feature gives you, your colleagues, and your customers a whole new set of reasons…

How to add yourself to your own Twitter list using HootSuite

Today I noticed an irony on the SIM Centre website: our Twitter sidebar widget, which does a lovely job of displaying tweets from all those who are connected to the SIM Centre, wasn't showing tweets from the SIM Centre itself. I realized that was because our sidebar...

6 solutions to the sadness of social media

Is social media making us sad? On the UK's Channel 4 News website, Benjamin Cohen is concerned that social media is changing the nature of friendship, and has adjusted his use of social media in response: I’ve stopped sharing as much, full stop....I’m not suggesting...