The Slow Hunch

One of my favorite ideas from the last 10 years is “The Slow Hunch” which my friend Steven Johnson popularized in his book Where Good Ideas Come From. Here is a good summary of the book, and the idea of The Slow Hunch is this: “World-changing ideas generally evolve over time as slow hunches rather… Continue reading

Saying Sorry

As I turned to write this, I was in the middle of reviewing a document a friend had asked me to look at a little while ago. In somewhat typical fashion, I had not done it right away, and had basically forgotten about it until he pinged me again, and even then I didn’t get… Continue reading

Internet meets world: rules go boom

Since 2006, I’ve been writing here about cities, the internet, and the ongoing collision between the two. Along the way, I’ve also loved using Tumblr to clip quotes off the web, building on the idea of “the slow hunch” (the title of this blog) and the “open commonplace book” as a tool for tracking the… Continue reading

Brutal honesty delivered kindly

On my way to SF this week, I stopped over in Boulder, visited Techstars and then had dinner with Brad Feld, where got to talking about the dynamics inside and around venture firms.  He has obviously been doing this for a long time, and for me, less of a long time (3-1/2 yrs at this point).… Continue reading

Failure is the tuition you pay for success

I couldn’t sleep last night, and was up around 4am lurking on Twitter.  I came across an old friend, Elizabeth Green, who is an accomplished and awesome education writer — you’ve probably read some of her recent NYT mag cover stories, and it turns out she has a new book out, Building a Better Teacher.… Continue reading

Coming Back Up for Air

The past three weeks have been really busy. First a trip to SF with the USV team, then to Austin for SXSW to put on We Heart Wifi, and finally to Iceland where we have been helping establish a new institute for internet policy at Reykjavik University. So as is typically the case, I have fallen… Continue reading

This is kind of a cop out, but…

As part of my goals for 2011, I’m trying to blog more regularly — once a week, right here, to be precise.  As I mentioned, I don’t quite have the rhythm down yet.  This is evidenced by the fact that I’m sitting in bed at 11:30pm on Sunday night writing this half-assed post, just so… Continue reading

Tumbling on

Most of the action is happening on my Tumblog these days.  For some reason I can’t stop posting there, and I can’t start here… Continue reading

New theme, and it's slightly less simple

During Theo’s morning nap today, I updated this blog’s theme.   I’m going to attempt to start using the blog more regulalry, as sort of an “open lab notebook,” and (in the true spirit of procrastination) figured I’d start by updating the theme. So here it is; I’ve ditched by previous Undesign for more of a… Continue reading

Welcome to the Undesign

Over the past two years, I’ve redesigned this website about 5 times, but never finished. Talk about frustrating. Eventually, I realized that I was getting nowhere, and that instead of a redesign, what I really needed was an undesign. So that’s what I did. Welcome to wrkng -1.0, my first undesign. Lately I’ve been getting… Continue reading