David Weinberger

David Weinberger is a senior researcher at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab.

Articles by David Weinberger

"We quote phrases and the like because we value them, whereas the name of the author almost always has no value to us." Posted April 29, 2013

If we take understanding as a tool used for a purpose, it becomes a wildly inefficient tool if we have to go back to first principles in order to understand anything. Posted March 31, 2013

"But knowledge isn't a big pile of facts..." Posted March 01, 2013

"We're discovering the power of iteration at scale—many hands making many small tweaks can accomplish knowledge tasks that the old methodology would never even have attempted..." Posted January 31, 2013

Knowledge is itself a sort of platform. It has no value by itself. It has tremendous value when put to use. Knowledge is a platform for decisions, for innovation and for community. Posted December 31, 2012

The problem is that knowledge often outpaces understanding. In the Age of the Net, if we want our knowledge to get very very big, knowledge is going to blow far past our understanding, and we aren't going to be able to afford to wait around for understanding to catch up. Posted October 30, 2012

"These experts within your business show all the signs of scholarship, except that scholarly papers are not their ultimate output..." Posted September 29, 2012

Attempts to permanently fix meanings to things, and attempts to identify knowledge as if it were valuable free of your context and projects, are misguided. Posted September 01, 2012

Usually when you hear someone use the word "interoperability," you should prepare to be pulled into a discussion about highly technical issues about the protocols by which electronic systems communicate, or, if you're very lucky, about the way in which data can be formatted for use across multiple systems... Posted July 05, 2012

Knowledge is serious business. People can spend their lives tweezing apart tiny micro-organisms or living in swamps swatting away mosquitoes and venom-dipped snakes in order to uncover a single fact. Few serious knowledge workers are in it for the money. Their sacrifices are real and are made in every aspect of human life: the social, economic, social, domestic. And not infrequently the consequences can save or fail to save lives. Posted May 28, 2012

Some of the data in these clouds is going to turn out to be inaccurate, but with so much of it openly available, and with the ability to link up data sets, the inaccuracies turn into the equivalent of rounding errors... Posted April 29, 2012

Not all things that claim to be facts are facts. Some statements about the world are false. What's true and false is not up to us. Facts matter. Posted March 31, 2012

If you want to see the future - and who doesn't? - the place to begin your search is now. If you want to see the future of education and knowledge, take a look at how software developers learn. Posted March 01, 2012

I don't make predictions except when they're already true. So, here's one: The concept of knowledge is on its way out. Posted February 01, 2012

The rise of the digital is changing just about everything about curation, mainly for the better but not entirely... Posted January 01, 2012

Posted October 29, 2011

The Net does not get framed so much as frames everything else. Posted September 29, 2011

Posted September 01, 2011

Posted July 05, 2011

At a high enough level of abstraction, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a great idea. But, then, most things are. The question is whether it will be able to go from abstract to concrete... Posted May 28, 2011

The real question isn't whether the Internet taken by itself forces certain effects on us, but whether the Internet (plus we users) has determinative effects... Posted May 01, 2011

I thought I loved the Cloud. I thought I was ready for the Cloud. I thought I could handle the Cloud. Then I got a Google notebook. And now I'm not so sure...Google sent out the notebooks so we could see an early version of its Chrome operating system in action... Posted April 01, 2011

The Internet optimists—like me—early on thought that the open, easy connectivity the Net provided would affirm some beliefs about the basic social nature of humans... Posted March 01, 2011

Is the Net really different from what came before? I'm going to say yes. The question is why... Posted February 01, 2011

Posted January 01, 2011

Posted October 29, 2010

Posted September 29, 2010

We have a very clear idea of what knowledge looks like in this culture, especially at its high end. At its low end, the picture gets fuzzy... Posted September 01, 2010

Books are complex. Let's hope someday our standards live up to them... Posted July 03, 2010

People hate all sorts of software because it's hard to use, under-featured, or just plain irritating. But they hate PowerPoint for deeper reasons—for what it does to meetings, for what it does to social interaction, for what it does to how we think. Yet that blind fury can bring us to forget that PowerPoint took us a big step past where we were... Posted May 28, 2010

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We have been in the Age of Information. What comes next? More exactly, what will we call what comes next?... Posted October 28, 2009

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Posted June 01, 2009

The Google Book Search settlement is huge, complex and overall a big step forward. But it's also quite scary. The world of print is about to change, mainly for the better... Posted May 01, 2009

Posted April 01, 2009

The Semantic Web's value will grow as it becomes as inconsistent, ambiguous and imperfect as our own collective knowledge is... Posted March 01, 2009

Posted February 02, 2009

"...now we slap the "wisdom of the crowd" or "crowd sourcing" label on everything, as if to say: "Nope. You got your assumptions wrong. Get 'em right, and we can build the world's greatest encyclopedia, replace network TV and find lost cufflinks... Posted January 02, 2009

We will look back and be amazed that we were ever content with having a handful of newspapers, just as we used to have only three networks... Posted November 03, 2008

We are very confused about the meaning of the word "information." And that's for two good reasons... Posted September 29, 2008

My Kindle from Amazon is fun. It's usable. And when I use it in a public place, it makes me a geek magnet, the way a puppy attracts smiles and small talk. But the Kindle is a big, big step away from showing us what real e-books will do for us.... Posted August 31, 2008

Posted July 11, 2008

Posted May 30, 2008

I'm sorry if you're the guy who says things like "I'm totally in favor of equality for women. That's why I don't see why we have to give them special breaks" when it comes to promotions or hires. Or maybe it's not women. Posted May 01, 2008

Posted April 01, 2008

Education. Government. Media. Business. Science.That's the Jeopardy answer to the question, "What are five institutions whose value comes to a large degree from providing authoritative knowledge?" Posted February 29, 2008

Posted February 05, 2008

My friends and colleagues John Palfrey and Urs Gasser are writing a book about the difference between "digital natives" and "digital immigrants." John and Urs are both at Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and both are excellent thinkers, writers and researchers. This is likely to be a book that starts a long and well-grounded discussion. It's also likely to be a big hit. Posted December 28, 2007

Longtime KMWorld columnist David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, recently discussed his new book with Hugh McKellar, KMWorld editor in chief. Posted November 01, 2007

We all go wrong, and have done so literally since Adam, unless I'm wrong in thinking there was an Adam, or in assuming there's anything true of all of us, or if I got the meaning of "wrong" wrong. Posted November 01, 2007

There are at least 500,000 cameras in the city of London, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal, which also reports that you're recorded on average 300 times a day there. Every station has had cameras since the 1990s. Yet life hasn't changed much. Why not? Posted September 27, 2007

I'm years late getting to Jack Welch's Jack: Straight from the Gut. I had to read it for a project I was working on recently, and I'm glad I did, but not so much for what he says. Posted August 31, 2007

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Posted December 28, 2006

It’s a sign of my late-blooming maturity (my 56th birthday is coming around but I still dress as if I’m going to summer camp) that I agreed to participate in a conference with the CIA... Posted October 27, 2006

The solution to information overload is more information ... so long as that more information is metadata. We didn't drown in information the way the info fear mongers predicted in the early 1990s because the information... Posted September 29, 2006

I've been crawling through a book my favorite college professor gave me a couple of years ago. It's very hard because no topic causes philosophers to tangle themselves up quite so much as does knowledge. You get a philosopher trying to know knowledge and you will soon be lost in a circle of meta-knowing that spawns its own language before cycling into unknowability. Posted July 07, 2006

...Web pages almost always tell us what the destination of the link is about, and often what we ought to think about it. So, when Tim Berners-Lee issued the call for the Semantic Web, it wasn’t because there weren’t enough meaningful phrases online. Posted May 26, 2006

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Posted February 24, 2006

"There's always been information," said a member of an information architects mailing list I audit. I think that's probably not true, and it has implications for what we think our businesses are made out of. Posted February 01, 2006

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Knowledge is a question, not an answer Posted July 06, 2000

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Q: What's the opposite of gravity? A: Levity. Posted May 30, 2000

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Want to know what knowledge sounds like? Listen to people talk. Posted May 01, 2000

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To speak and, perchance, to listen Posted March 06, 2000

Posted March 01, 2000

“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.” — King Lear Posted February 28, 2000

Managing the unmanageable Posted February 21, 2000

The short answer for why we do it Posted February 14, 2000

David Weinberger responds to a book review Posted February 11, 2000

ClearType is an intermediary step that will make your text-based knowledge literally clearer. Posted January 31, 2000

I have nothing against Libertarians except that many of them seem drawn to it because it gives them a point of view that lets them utter statements they think are controversial but which are merely wrong. Posted January 15, 2000

The pod people are taking over. Posted January 10, 2000

Beware the word "merely" and its cousins "simply," "just" and "only." They are among the most political of words. And they're assassins. Posted January 03, 2000

Posted January 01, 2000

Posted December 20, 1999

At this auspicious time, we are all required by local statute and industry injunction to pontificate about the future. So, permit me to make my year-end, century-end and millennium-end forecasts. Posted December 13, 1999

Lurking is the art of staying silent while conversation happens all around you. Off the Web, lurking is sinister. On the Net, lurking is the best way to enter a conversation.. Posted December 06, 1999

Posted December 05, 1999

To heck with tacit knowledge. (Go for tacit documents instead.) Posted November 22, 1999

The Internet is full of misinformation, lies, statistics, and altered photographs. The famous are slandered, the gorgeous are compromised, the unknowns make up stuff just to be noticed. We all know that. Posted November 15, 1999

If people had brands, you'd think they were awfully shallow. "Hi, I'm Arnie, the Place for Puns," "Hello, I'm Alicia, the Melodious Voice Gal." So why is branding any better for companies? Posted November 09, 1999

Posted November 01, 1999

At the recent KMWorld '99 conference in Dallas I was able to spend some quality time with two of the key people behind a fascinating site, www.iqport.com. Posted October 25, 1999

On the Web, all information is communication. Posted October 18, 1999

Please raise your hand if you're a software vendor and you've ever once said that your "solution" delivers the right information to the right people at the right time. Add ten points if you ever added, in a knowing tone, "...and in the right way." Now Posted October 12, 1999

I've griped about Microsoft's Digital Dashboard (DD) before, but, heck, the right to gripe endlessly about the rich, powerful and obnoxious is the very basis of democracy. Posted October 01, 1999

Posted October 01, 1999

"The Web Isn't Transforming Business Documents ... It's Killing Them" Posted September 27, 1999

The following article appears in the most recent issue of the Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO) newsletter, authored by David Weinberger. Go read the whole thing on the Web, it's worth your time. Posted September 20, 1999

Posted September 01, 1999

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Posted September 01, 1999

The dark side of standards development, brought to you by Jetform and UWI.com. Posted August 01, 1999

Posted August 01, 1999

The breakthrough companies look for from KM won't come from "knowledge assets." Posted July 01, 1999

Easter Eggs aren't just fun distractions -- they're a sign of humanity. Posted June 01, 1999

Almost all moral reasoning is based on analogies, not principles. Posted June 01, 1999

Here's a list of do's and don'ts for writing press releases. Posted June 01, 1999

Microsoft's Digital Dashboard is little more than a slick deception. Posted June 01, 1999

Not everything is a portal, says David Weinberger. Life just isn't that simple. Posted May 01, 1999

Don't we know that KM is about more than just picking technologies? Posted May 01, 1999

Mass marketing is getting automated -- is that good or bad? Posted May 01, 1999

Make your mission statement reflect your people. Posted May 01, 1999

Posted May 01, 1999

The portal craze both helps and hurts KM, and that's good. Posted May 01, 1999

People get work done when they collaborate freely, despite what you may think. Posted April 01, 1999

Communities are forming on the Cluetrain, stopping at a corporation near you. Posted April 01, 1999

What's the biggest secret in Business? David Weinberger clues us in. Posted April 01, 1999

Using widgets from Minneapolis, David Weinberger builds a relationship between data, information and knowledge. Posted March 01, 1999

XML will cause us to write forms, not free-flowing documents, according to David Weinberger. Posted March 01, 1999

To make your company smarter, make better mistakes, says David Weinberger. Posted March 01, 1999

Knowledge sharing is an exercise in storytelling, says JOHO editor David Weinberger. Posted February 01, 1999

Sound it out: companies competing in the Web era had better learn to speak the language. Posted February 01, 1999

Content means nothing if you don't know how to find it or what to do with it. David Weinberger explains. Posted February 01, 1999

What we call knowledge often doesn't involve information or "know how" -- it's just ideas. Posted February 01, 1999

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