Latest publications
Read my latest stories for The Wall Street Journal, Passcode, The Harvard Business Review, JSTOR Daily and more.
10 funny things to read or do online from a hotel room
Welcome to Social Media for Bored Travellers
4 easy steps to creating a Twitter list from your conference backchannel
You know you're at a conference with a great backchannel when you want to stay in touch with all the folks who've been tweeting away under the designated hashtags. That's how I felt about the Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR) conference last week: from the...
Leaning into online struggles
The fourth time I got a call from the principal's office, I knew I had to rethink our school year. One of our kids was having a tough time in class, and I had already made several visits to the teacher, the classroom and the principal's office. Not only was I worried...
Internet researchers tackle the future of reading & publishing at AOIR
True confession: I treat conference panels as competitive events. Whenever I'm participating in a multi-speaker panel my secret goal is to "win" the panel. This doesn't mean I try to take down my fellow panellists: it's not like wrestling or ice hockey, where you've...
10 myths about ethnography, from Tom Boellstorff
This post originally appeared on the SIM Centre website. There was a lot to love about anthropologist Tom Boellstorff's dynamic, thought-provoking keynote to the Association of Internet Researchers. But I figured that my design colleagues, many of whom use...
Social e-books as online communities, for AOIR 2011
Tomorrow I'm off to the conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, an event I've always wanted to attend and this time actually get to present to! I'm part of a session on Books and Publishing, where I will be talking about the e-book research I am now...
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.