This blog has been going since 2007, and continues one that began in 1999 and is mothballed here. On the social front, my tweetage is at @dsearls and I maintain the customary pile of biographical jive here on Linkedin.
A few among the many hats I wear:
- Author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, published by Harvard Business Review Press May 2012.
- Alumnus fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. I continue to head ProjectVRM there.
- Co-founder and board member of Customer Commons, ProjectVRM’s nonprofit spin-off.
- Fellow at the Center for Information Technology & Society at UC Santa Barbara. There my focus is on work toward a book about the Internet and infrastructure, titled The Giant Zero.
- One of the four authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the iconoclastic web site that became the best-selling book in 2000 and still sells around the world in many languages. A 10th anniversary edition came out in 2009.
- Editor-in-chief of Linux Journal, the original Linux publication. Though it was shut down by its owner in 2019, I still maintain a large corpus of archival writing there, and co-host its continuing podcast, Reality 2.0.
- A radio veteran from way back (that’s where the “Doc” nickname came from… my given name is David). I sublimate that now by taking part in podcasts by others, including Steve Gillmor’s Gillmor Gang.
- A marketing, PR and advertising veteran. Most notably I co-founded Hodskins Simone & Searls, which was born in North Carolina in the late ’70s and grew in the late ’80s and early ’90s to become one of Silicon Valley’s top advertising and public relations agencies. (HS&S was absorbed by Publicis Technology in 1998.)
- A lifelong writer whose byline has appeared in The Wall Street Journal (most recently with The Customer as God: The Future of Shopping) OMNI, Wired, PC Magazine, The Standard, The Sun, Upside, The Globe & Mail, Harvard Business Review, Release 1.0 and lots of other places, including (of course) Linux Journal. Some archives are collected at Reality 2.0, which is at my personal portal, Searls.com, also home to my consultancy, The Searls Group.
- A photographer with too many pictures up on Flickr. Most are here. Nearly all carry attribution-only Creative Commons licenses, to encourage use for any damn thing at all. Thus more than 600 of those have found their way onto Wikimedia Commons, which is a staging zone for Wikipedia. I haven’t counted how many of my shots are in Wikipedia, but they accompany hundreds of Wikipedia articles. This one of the airport in Denver, for example, is on 22 different Wikipedia pages.
- A frequent speaker on any and all the above subjects.
In 2005 I received the Google/O’Reilly Open Source Award for Best Communicator.
In 2007 I was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in IT by eWeek.
Since I’m always working on too many things, and will only stop when I’m dead, I want my epitaph to read, “He was almost finished.”
I can be reached by email through doc @ [my last name] .com or dsearls @ cyber.law.harvard.edu.
Copyright 2018 Doc Searls
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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Thanks, Daveed. I know a ridiculous amount of radio and TV engineering data for somebody who isn’t an actual engineer. A lot of it is like knowing about steam power or incandescent light. It’s old school stuff, on the verge of becoming obsolete. Sorry to say I don’t know what Summerland Syndrome is. I’m also not sure NPR has saturated anything, but I can guess what you mean. Where do you live?
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We live in Alameda, in the San Francisco Bay area roughly opposite Hunter’s Point, apparently the outermost reaches of KDFC FM’s 90.3 signal (formerly KUSF). In the past two weeks the 90.3 signal is barely audible at 6:30 a.m. but seems to come up to normal by mid-day. After a frustrating hour on the internet searching for an explanation (power outage? weather? signal interference?) I found your history of the evolution of the USC network, which at least gives us a signal shopping list.
Question: are you aware of a source of information about what’s going on currently with the 90.3 signal?
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Hey Doc!
I’m a close follower of your work and recently wrote a piece of research on VRM for a student journal. I think it’s a very cool piece of tech and very inspiring for an array of industries and myself.
I work in advertising in London and am keen to start gathering insights on the possible connection between VRM technologies and the execution of GDPR as to me it seems rather obvious. I wonder if you would have any time to give your views on some questions around this area.
For example are these conversations happening at a macro level? In Europe we are heavily planning for the implications of GDPR but what does this mean for the US market and our ability to exchange data with them? From my understanding the US is moving in the opposite direction of Europe in terms of data management, do you foresee that this will cause trading issues? Ultimately what is the big role that VRM technologies will play in giving users control over their data and customization and what effect do you think it will have on the advertising industry or the ability of brands to connect with their audience?
I read through your blog post around good news for publishers and advertisers fearing GDPR. I would really love to understand the technical aspects behind this enforcement and the role that VRM tech can play.
I would love to keep in touch and get your views on all this. If it is an area that interests you than I would love to discuss this topic in more detail.
Best wishes for everything that you do!
Regards,
M -
First time to see your blog, the one on Montecito mudslide.
Thank you!
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I wonder if you have seen this map, which incidentally shows the Thomas fire perimeter as of December 26th? How was that perimeter established, by backfires?
Thank you for your work and this forum.
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Pingback from Topic Post – About me | My story on the web on September 7, 2018 at 10:51 am
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Just visited your flickr page and say you have over 52k photos uploaded. Wow, that is amazing and it’s great to see that you have images from 2004.
There is one image taken of the flowers on the ceiling at Bellagio Las Vegas that bought very fond memories of their buffer breakfast. As a Londoner, i had not seen anything like that here and wanted to taste everything.
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Woow, I had grow up reading your articles.
Today making some research on shipping crisis, I’ve got your website; over 12 years are passed, it’s been a wonderful sourprise.
I’m a Man today and work on antiques field, and manage this website https://antiquariatoo.com; please give me your feedback and, please don’t stop to write.
Thanks for all. -
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