David Weinberger

CNN.com has posted my op-ed about why where you work is not about the quality of your life so much as about the substance of it. Judging from some of the reaction, I should emphasize that if the only way to save Yahoo were to require everyone to come to work every day, that would certainly be the right decision. But it seems clear to me that Marissa Mayer was sending a signal with this policy, for surely there are some people who were working productively from home. So, if the new policy is a signal and is not actually required to save Yahoo, then I think she has underestimated how disruptive a signal it is. [To late to stick in a spoiler notice? That was the essence of my op-ed.] Also, CNN.com has stripped out the links, I’m pretty sure unintentionally. Here they are: On dispersed coding teams [pdf] Mayer gets to bring her infant to work For Mayer, family comes... (more)

[misc] The Wars on Terrorism, Al Qaeda, Cancer, and Dessert

Steve Coll has a good piece in the New Yorker about the importance of Al Qaeda as a brand: …as long as there are bands of violent Islamic radicals anywhere in the world who find it attractive to call themselves Al Qaeda, a formal state of war may exist between Al Qaeda and America. The Hundred Years War could seem a brief skirmish in comparison. This is a different category of issue than the oft-criticized “war on terror,” which is a war against a tactic, not against an enemy. The war against Al Qaeda implies that there is a structurally unified enemy organization. How do you d... (more)

[berkman] Diana Kimball: Coding as a Liberal Art

Diana Kimball [twitter:dianakimball] is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk on coding as a liberal art. She’s a Berkman Fellow and at the Harvard Business School. (Here are some of her posts on this topic.) NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people. She says that she’s loved computers since she was a kid. But when she went to Harvard as an undergrad she decided to ... (more)

[2b2k] Why it’s ok to get your news through people who share your beliefs

I was steeling myself a couple of days ago to say something in a talk that believe but don’t want to: We shouldn’t feel guilty about relying on sources with whom we agree to contextualize breaking news. It’s ok. It’s even rational. For example, if the Supreme Court hands down a ruling I don’t understand, or the FCC issues a policy that sounds like goobledygook to my ears, I turn to sites whose politics I basically agree with. On the one hand, I know that that’s wrong on echo chamber grounds: I’m getting reconfirmed in beliefs that I instead should be challenging. On the other ha... (more)

A place for deadlines and editions?

I’m all for the continuous roil of the Internet. After all, time is continuous, so why should information be punctuated? But I wonder what it would be like if a site that consists of continuous inputs worked toward a moment when an edition is published. This is not a well-worked-out idea, but imagine a site like Reddit or a service like Twitter that decides that every day at, say, 5pm Eastern Standard Time (it’s where I live and it’s my hypothesis) it will publish an edition that contains the best of that day’s content as determined by some crowdsourced methodology: upvotes or r... (more)