Biographical Information
David Weinberger is the author of the book Everyday Chaos and has long been affiliated with Harvard's Berkman Klein Center.
Articles by David Weinberger
When AI’s eyes are smiling
08 Jul 2024
As of now, GenAI doesn't learn from the knowledge it creates any more than a paint-mixing machine learns more about colors every time it's used.
Will AGI be intelligent?
02 May 2024
AGI's holistic approach not only could enhance the accuracy and reliability of its decisions, but it would also mirror the interconnectedness of the real world.
Was the web good for knowledge management?
13 Mar 2024
So, yes, the web enables everyone with an internet connection and the freedom to use it to contribute to our new, global, contentious, and contradictory knowledge space. But I did not foresee the dark side because of an optimism born of privilege.
The five ages of data
08 Jan 2024
Perhaps this latest phase in the history of data will bring us to accept inexplicable complexity as a property of the world. We could view this as pure chaos, but thanks to having lived through the past four ages in rapid succession, we might instead recognize that chaos as being rich with endless mysteries we will never uncover completely.
Truth, lies, and large language models
02 Nov 2023
The good news is that the problem of chat AI's proclivity for hallucinating is well-recognized by the organizations creating these marvels, and they realize that it is a danger to the world and to their success, not necessarily in that order of priority. Until that problem is solved, chat AI engines need to lose their self-confidence and make it crystal clear that they are the most unabashed and charming liars the world has ever seen.
What are your chatbot’s pronouns?
07 Sep 2023
We don't have pronouns by which we can address inanimate objects because we haven't had any occasions to have actual conversations with them.
The ChatGPT ways of knowledge
12 Jul 2023
These two types of knowing—understanding the world and understanding knowledge—are, in some important ways, at odds in AI-based chatbots.
Tags, AI, and dimensions
08 May 2023
Tags have become so common that they've faded from consciousness since 2007, although sometimes a clever hashtag pops up.
AI’s new type of knowledge
08 Mar 2023
This way of knowing works pragmatically for some very complex systems of the sort we find in the real world. But, oddly, itseems not to work so well in some artificially simple systems.
Knowledge as I remember it
09 Jan 2023
The web transformed the role of knowledge by making it instantly available but not inherently reliable.
Getting more confused about regulating social media
03 Nov 2022
Out of the mix of commercial greed, politics, and genuine desires to make the world better, we'll try many ways to "fix" social media. But I think it may take a couple of generations, affected by what we do, for us to begin to agree about what's right and wrong.
What ‘sentient’ AI teaches us
07 Sep 2022
As Gary Marcus says, a large language model is just a "spreadsheet for words" that lets it act as a massive autocompletion system that knows how words go together but has not the foggiest idea how those words connect to the world.
AI’s ways of being immoral
07 Jul 2022
The most powerful ML can require the resources of wealthy organizations. Such organizations usually have at best mixed motivations, to be charitable about it.
Artificial intuition
04 May 2022
Maybe the rise of machine learning will so transform our model of intuition that we'll start to trust it much more.
Restructured reading
04 Mar 2022
In a book, not knowing how you got to a page would be a sign of a failed structure. On the internet, that can be a sign of a deeply rewarding intellectual expedition.
Why predict?
05 Jan 2022
Predictions can be used to try to get to the bottom of something in the present. That's often the case with arguments about what the web will do to us and society.
The state of knowledge
05 Nov 2021
The new norm is for us to learn in public and to share what we have learned.
The knowledge Zoom
08 Sep 2021
In choosing to disclose something about one's personality and interests—even though it's kept literally in thebackground—people are acknowledging that personality and personhood matter to the discussion.
The end of books?
08 Jul 2021
The structure of knowledge is dense, and our paths through it are carved not just by itscontours but by our interests and concerns.
The privilege of free speech
05 May 2021
The best counter to a bad idea was not to suppress it but to put forth a better idea or so we believed. That belief and the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of free speech resulted from the Enlightenment commitment to reason.
Bureaucratic knowledge
08 Mar 2021
The knowledge of bureaucrats comes from living at the nexus of strategy and implementation, the nexus of best practices and human values, the nexus of multiple departments with their independent goals, and at the nexus of wishes and reality. That makes their voices worth listening to.
Writing as empathy
11 Jan 2021
Communication is about revealing something about the world that the other person hasn't noticed—and often hasn't been able to notice because their ideas get in the way.
A little eternal knowledge is a dangerous thing
05 Nov 2020
Even if our business knowledge were as eternal and omnipresent as Newton's laws, we'd still have to apply that knowledge to a world that is unfathomably complex and ever-changing.
Data is never just data
04 Sep 2020
As with all tools, data has uses because of complex contexts that include other objects, physics, social norms, social institutions, and human intentions.
Links then and now
07 Jul 2020
Broken links used to be like potholes. Now there are entire neighborhoods that are gone.
Approximately causal
14 May 2020
Science will not give up on hypotheses. But it already is becoming more willing to accept results based on the sorts of statistical analyses performed by machine learning. And it may be thatwhen science does rely on theories and laws, we will recognize that no matter how ironclad they are as generalizations, their application to a world of confetti will always and necessarily render them approximate and probabilistic.
250 Columns later
09 Mar 2020
Knowledge management has indeed become a multi-threaded discipline, embracing just about everything related to knowledge.
The challenge of emergence
03 Jan 2020
Traditionally, we humans have succeeded at building complex structures by breaking plans down into a multitude of simple, predictable, knowable causes and effects.
Journalism’s new landscape
01 Nov 2019
What's happening to news is a microcosm of what's happening to knowledge overall.
Bring back blogging
06 Sep 2019
The case for internal blogging within a corporate environment is strong and the risk is far lower because the participants are vetted and known.
Behind the scenes of Everyday Chaos
08 Jul 2019
Machine learning builds up a model that connects data points in complex, multi-dimensional ways, usually without yielding the sort of general principles we're accustomed to reasoning from.
Rewriting the world
08 May 2019
Traditional computing upholds the traditional method of applying general rules to particulars. With machine learning, you skip the generalized abstraction and feed in the particulars.
Without a doubt
28 Dec 2018
Given that the future is deeply uncertain, from the tiniest of decisions to the largest, we should love carefully calculated probabilities, for they are the way we deal with a world that has no interest in conforming to our projections or desires. They let us rationally prepare for things not going our way. Any strategist or planner worth her salt is getting as good a read as she can on the nature and magnitude of what she cannot predict.
When knowledge isn’t enough
31 Oct 2018
If knowledge is a tool intended to enable us to make decisions that are more likely to protect us and advance our shared interests, then it is clear that knowledge can fail us. Each domain has at least informal rules about what counts as evidence.
Computers, Internet, AI
10 Sep 2018
If the early computers reinforced the existing world-view, the Internet upended worldview after worldview. We learned that control doesn't scale: If you want to build something really, really big, you have to get rid of the centralized management functions. We learned that customers joined in conversational networks know more about a business' products than the business does. We learned what a democracy is like when everyone truly has a voice, even when those voices are telling lies and tearing down democratic institutions.
Signs, causes and machine learning
02 Jul 2018
Machine learning systems can look at data without instructions about how we think the pieces go together. The AI finds correlations and assembles them into webs of connection.
The good, the bad, the networked
01 May 2018
Most would agree that their perception of the Net, along with the general public's, is far darker than it was even just a few years ago.
Knowledge is a tool
08 Mar 2018
There's some knowledge you know you need, but there's far more knowledge you don't know you'll need.
The search for explanations
22 Jan 2018
We got to here-wherever we are-because of innumerable things that happened and a larger number of things that did not.
Local values of a global net
30 Oct 2017
Even in regressive regimes that block sites and ideas, Internet apps are implicitly showing people the value of the free—or at least relatively free—flow of information.
Representing the world
14 Sep 2017
The rejection of representationalism is being hastened by the rise of new technology— machine learning—that is refuting some of our old common-sense ideas.
The future of predictability
03 Jul 2017
We believe the future is determined by a set of scientific rules operating on a set of data too vast to be perfectly comprehended.
The news is no more
29 Apr 2017
By now I assume we're all tired not only of hearing fake news, but also of hearing about fake news. We've seen how it arises and spreads due to flaws in the structure of the Internet. We've heard lots of proposals for how to fix the problem, most of them implausible.
The social life of info
31 Mar 2017
The knowledge that lets a business succeed exists in the minds, hands and conversations of the people doing the job
Reclaiming our attention
01 Mar 2017
The Internet is the perfection of the art—and now science—of attention capture and monetization.
The space is polluted, but it's also far vaster than any attentional space we've ever had.
Humor and truth
30 Dec 2016
I've spent all day counting and can report that there are approximately one million different explanations of what makes something funny, possibly because there are lots of different ways things can be funny.
Data and sense
30 Oct 2016
Data has become a property of the world like its sounds or smells. It is being gathered raw in many cases.
When we don’t want to know
01 Oct 2016
For credit scores, FICO carefully assembles models that would make sense to a human and that exclude proxies for protected classes.
Pokémon GO is our future
01 Sep 2016
We don't know what people will build because they haven't built it yet. But they will.
What works is how things work
01 Jul 2016
What we build is based on what we've already understood about how the world works.
Is the Internet making us stupid?
31 May 2016
You with the Internet is much smarter than you without the Internet.
Re-decentralize knowledge
29 Apr 2016
It's a grand decentralized Web except for the commercial entities that exert tremendous power over what we see of it.
Extending the mind
31 Mar 2016
We think out in the world with tools. This is distinctive of our species and helps to explain our evolutionary advantages ... Only humans (as far as we know) use tools to think.
The good old days of news
01 Mar 2016
Now that we are deep into the backlash against the Internet, let's pile on by reminiscing about the Good Old Days of knowledge before the Net. Shall we? We shall, taking the news as our example!
Justifying knowledge
31 Jan 2016
Note that the knowledge that Plato and Socrates are talking about ... is knowledge that leads to right action.
The we of knowledge
30 Dec 2015
This column marks a turning point: Hugh McKellar, who has edited this column from its beginning, is retiring. Hugh is a superb editor and a warm, supportive friend. I will miss my monthly interaction with him, and KMWorld will miss his clear eye and his constant focus on what matters. Thank you, Hugh. We will stay in touch.
What’s greater than knowledge?
29 Oct 2015
I've long been irked by the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom pyramid that is so often casually embraced as if its truth were obvious. I disagree with its implication that knowledge is a filtering down of information.
Seeing past your glasses
01 Oct 2015
A bubble is really just a coherent set of beliefs. Beliefs need coherence or they're not beliefs. They literally make no sense. I could not believe that flowers are beautiful because their DNA has evolved to attract insects unless I also believed in DNA, natural selection, insect-based pollination and the results obtained through scientific research and equipment.
Sympathetic Knowledge
01 Sep 2015
All reading starts off sympathetic. If you're reading what someone wrote, it's because you want to understand what she means. That's an act of sympathy right there.
Dissolution of metadata
03 Jul 2015
The idea of metadata used to be easy. It was a type of shadow object that trailed the "real" object of which it was the metadata. Getting right which information to put into that shadow object wasn't easy, but the concept itself was clean, clear and usually rectangular.
Technology affects us
28 May 2015
The term "technodeterminism," like "utopian" or "wild-eyed socialist," is rarely used by the people to refer to themselves. But I'm willing to accept the characterization … so long as I then get to claim a moderate form of it.
Algorithmic prediction
28 Apr 2015
If you want to know what a particular pattern will be after a hundred iterations, you'll have to do the hundred iterations. You can use a computer to do this and it will spit out the answer, but it too has to step through the algorithm a hundred times.
Interrupting thought
31 Mar 2015
Sometimes these days when we talk about "going meta" about a topic, we mean what we used to call "being reflective" about it. Both ways of talking imply the value of interrupting the normal course of thought and taking a step back.
The end of headlines?
01 Mar 2015
It can take a while to realize that Inside.com is a news aggregator without headlines. It turns out that headlines were yet another bad bad choice imposed on us by the limitations of paper.
Markets and networks
30 Jan 2015
Airlines have strong incentives to make normal travel hell. That's the argument Tim Wu makes in a post on The New Yorker site Dec 26 ("Why Airlines Want to Make You Suffer," .) He's right not only about airlines but also about the Internet, and about knowledge.
Digital meta-literacy
31 Dec 2014
"Meta" sounds like you're going up, but in fact it means going down: looking underneath beliefs and the evidence for those beliefs to see the assumed context, values and processes that make them seem credible. That's why it's good to go meta. In fact, the pursuit of truth—on or off the Net—almost always leads to the meta.
Minds need hands
29 Oct 2014
The example I know best is the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. It's a university research center, so you'd assume it's very thinky. And it is. But from its inception, it's had a commitment not only to research but also to building software. For a university research center, that's just weird. But, it turns out, wonderful.
The MVP process then and now
29 Sep 2014
The MVP process strikes us as attractive not only because bits make it feasible, but also because we've come to believe that a technology that isn't changing every six months is failing. Yet, in the almost 20 years it took Ford to introduce a new model, 15 million Model T's had been sold. And during that entire stretch, never once did Henry Ford put on a black turtleneck and tease an audience with what would be new next month.
Amazon vs. The Librarians! The Fight of the Century!
01 Sep 2014
But many of us believe—I do—that we have a cultural and societal interest in expanding our horizons. A librarian is likely to help us to that end.
The right to be forgotten
03 Jul 2014
I understand why the top European court has insisted that Google remove links upon request. We'd all like some things on the Web to be forgotten. There are a few things I myself wouldn't mind having removed....
Thingy words
28 May 2014
If you use the word "content" to talk about stuff on the Web, my friend Doc Searls is likely to give you a stiff talking-to. People don't write content. They write articles, poems, songs, etc.
Just enough over my head
29 Apr 2014
For being over your head to work, you have to be just enough over your head. Too far and you can't understand enough of what people are saying to make sense of it.
The future of books
31 Mar 2014
Twice in the past two weeks I've felt compelled to say that I think books have no future....
Moving beyond credentials
01 Mar 2014
Expertise now extends beyond the individual experts. It occurs within networks of conversation. Networked expertise enables us to extend knowledge far beyond the brains and books of individuals....
Hogwash or science—Tags are messy and useful
31 Jan 2014
Tags work, but imperfectly, which is how anything that works works.
Unexpected expertise
31 Dec 2013
We're now seeing social media in which thousands may participate, and millions may audit with the option of jumping in.
Bad comments are your fault
29 Oct 2013
Let me put this more bluntly: If the comments on your site's content are broken, it's your fault...
The history of technology
29 Sep 2013
The history of technology is not just the history of technology. It takes more than technology to explain technology.
What the Web hides from us
01 Sep 2013
The Net hides our physical being. Online all we get are some words or images. Worse, frequently those words and images have no context beyond themselves. When you are with someone in physical space, you cannot avoid the fact that the person is a complete being who is literally coming from somewhere and will be going somewhere else.
A limit to business intelligence?
05 Jul 2013
The extent to which businesses protect their data assets is the extent to which business is limiting its own intelligence.
Technodeterminism
28 May 2013
"...a technodeterminist—someone who believes that the Internet has its effects independent of our action and behavior. "
The failure to attribute
29 Apr 2013
"We quote phrases and the like because we value them, whereas the name of the author almost always has no value to us."
The efficiency of partisan news
31 Mar 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.
Academic writing
01 Mar 2013
"But knowledge isn't a big pile of facts..."
Progress and knowledge
31 Jan 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..."
The knowledge platform
31 Dec 2012
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.
Understanding big data vs. theory
30 Oct 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.
Your business needs scholars
29 Sep 2012
"These experts within your business show all the signs of scholarship, except that scholarly papers are not their ultimate output..."
How meaning stuck ...
01 Sep 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.
Interoperability as a worldview
05 Jul 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...
Why is the Web so funny?
28 May 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.
Where facts become data
29 Apr 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...
The problems with facts
31 Mar 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.
Learning like a developer learns
01 Mar 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.
Who cares about knowledge?
01 Feb 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.
Curating abundance
01 Jan 2012
The rise of the digital is changing just about everything about curation, mainly for the better but not entirely...
Letting data out of its box
29 Oct 2011
Framing the Net, or being framed?
29 Sep 2011
The Net does not get framed so much as frames everything else.
The wisdom of impractical knowledge
01 Sep 2011
Open data commons for business
05 Jul 2011
DPLA: a good idea that has a shot
28 May 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...
The human drive of tech
01 May 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...
The Cloud way of life
01 Apr 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...
Revolution and the Net
01 Mar 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...
Explaining the Net’s dominance
01 Feb 2011
Is the Net really different from what came before? I'm going to say yes. The question is why...
Structure is coming back
01 Jan 2011
The amateur ecology
29 Oct 2010
The underutilized resource beyond lists
29 Sep 2010
The long form of webby knowledge
01 Sep 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...
Waiting for the fluid book format
03 Jul 2010
Books are complex. Let's hope someday our standards live up to them...
A lot to hate ...
But PowerPoint brings order to unruly thoughts
28 May 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...
Authority as a market
01 Apr 2010
The Internet and peace
01 Mar 2010
Bringing on the info overload
01 Feb 2010
The future is a gimmick
01 Jan 2010
What attribute best describes the Internet age?
28 Oct 2009
We have been in the Age of Information. What comes next? More exactly, what will we call what comes next?...
What’s wrong with Craigslist?
29 Sep 2009
Transparency: the new objectivity
28 Aug 2009
Your help with the new expertise
03 Jul 2009
The beauty of mesh networking
01 Jun 2009
Pros and cons of the Google book deal
01 May 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...
Knowledge and understanding
01 Apr 2009
The dream of the Semantic Web
01 Mar 2009
The Semantic Web's value will grow as it becomes as inconsistent, ambiguous and imperfect as our own collective knowledge is...
Resolutions: folders, wisdom and Tabasco
02 Feb 2009
What crowds are wise at
02 Jan 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...
The Leave It to Beaver media
03 Nov 2008
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...
The ambiguity of information
29 Sep 2008
We are very confused about the meaning of the word "information." And that's for two good reasons...
Waiting for the e-book
31 Aug 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....
The great debates
11 Jul 2008
Cerfing complexity
30 May 2008
When double standards work
01 May 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.
Online libraries are not libraries at all
01 Apr 2008
What’s wrong with being right?
29 Feb 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?"
The commoditization of knowledge
05 Feb 2008
Digital natives, immigrants and others
28 Dec 2007
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.
Good and bad ways to go wrong
01 Nov 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.
Everything is Miscellaneous
01 Nov 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.
Privacy, norms and politics
27 Sep 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?
The adversity of knowledge
31 Aug 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.
Unclear and indistinct ... and uncertain
12 Jul 2007
Libraries in the age of social knowledge
30 Apr 2007
Knowledge we value requires forgiveness
01 Apr 2007
Ontologies and abstractions
01 Mar 2007
The real difference between the two 2.0s
01 Feb 2007
Open science—good fit for the digital age
28 Dec 2006
Conversation and the cult of expertise
27 Oct 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...
Metadata and understanding
29 Sep 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...
The philosophy of business knowledge
07 Jul 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.
The case for two semantic webs
26 May 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.
Does information need architects?
26 Apr 2006
The Landscape of Language
27 Mar 2006
Truth vs. authority
24 Feb 2006
Was there always information?
01 Feb 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.
Four former truths about knowledge
01 Jan 2006
Creating informed consumers
01 Nov 2005
Alphabetical order
01 Oct 2005
The BBC’s low-tech KM
01 Sep 2005
An equal and opposite reaction
01 Jul 2005
The size of topics
01 Jun 2005
Anonymously yours
01 May 2005
Trusting Times
01 Apr 2005
Blogs and the values of journalism
01 Mar 2005
Blogs and the values of journalism
01 Mar 2005
The virtue and vice of audio
01 Feb 2005
The silence of the Web
01 Jan 2005
All hail Foo
01 Nov 2004
Free Dewey!
01 Oct 2004
Reading Aristotle
01 Sep 2004
Things I know
01 Jul 2004
When a window isn't a window, just a pane
01 Mar 2004
The slippery slope of learning
01 Jan 2004
People smart
01 Nov 2003
Tacit emergence
01 Oct 2003
Model knowledge
01 Jul 2003
The truth of weblogs
01 Jun 2003
Knowledge Newspeak
01 May 2003
Sorting truth from bluster
01 Apr 2003
The Net as rhetoric
01 Mar 2003
Knowledge and anonymity
01 Feb 2003
Distributed fairness
01 Jan 2003
The arrogance of knowledge
01 Nov 2002
Knowledge transformation
01 Oct 2002
The 99 cent KM solution
01 Sep 2002
Knowledge abundance
01 Jul 2002
Postmodern knowledge management
01 Jun 2002
Bodily knowledge
01 May 2002
M&M's and mixed nuts
01 Apr 2002
M&M's and mixed nuts
06 Mar 2002
Business science and business religion
01 Mar 2002
Word avatars
01 Feb 2002
Computers, conformity and KM
01 Nov 2001
Putting the author back in authority
01 Oct 2001
The importance of writing badly
01 Sep 2001
The importance of writing badly
30 Jul 2001
To err is you, man
07 May 2001
Solid SOAP and its buddy UDDI
26 Mar 2001
XHTML and the sixth day of creation
12 Mar 2001
Friends on the Web
05 Mar 2001
What is truth?
26 Feb 2001
Small pieces loosely joined: An experiment in embarrassment
12 Feb 2001
The problem with professionals
29 Jan 2001
How to write a real good business plan
15 Jan 2001
Personal criticism
03 Jan 2001
The peer-to-peer future of document management
18 Dec 2000
Secrets in a day-lit world
04 Dec 2000
Lessons from the campaign
01 Dec 2000
The new common sense
28 Nov 2000
Inaccurate knowledge
20 Nov 2000
Searching for trust
06 Nov 2000
How to write a real good PowerPoint
30 Oct 2000
KM's complex questions
16 Oct 2000
Lessons from the debates
02 Oct 2000
The metaphors of technology
01 Oct 2000
Webs and brains and comparisons
25 Sep 2000
The inverse rule
11 Sep 2000
Random knowledge
01 Sep 2000
The danger of knowing
28 Aug 2000
Technology as metaphor
21 Aug 2000
The great chain of knowledge
14 Aug 2000
Random knowledge
07 Aug 2000
The question of questions
01 Aug 2000
Tribal knowledge
24 Jul 2000
Truth is over-valued
17 Jul 2000
The question of questions
06 Jul 2000
Knowledge is a question, not an answer
If I were CKO
26 Jun 2000
Number mysticism
19 Jun 2000
Three days to a smart company
01 Jun 2000
The new gravity
30 May 2000
Q: What's the opposite of gravity? A: Levity.
Goodness management
22 May 2000
Document architecture
15 May 2000
Awesome tech
08 May 2000
Trade shows? Gotta love/hate 'em
05 May 2000
Three days to a smart company
01 May 2000
Want to know what knowledge sounds like? Listen to people talk.
The physics of buzz words
24 Apr 2000
Faith in technology
17 Apr 2000
Trade shows? Gotta love/hate ’em
09 Apr 2000
Geek Speak
03 Apr 2000
Tragedy and sitcoms
01 Apr 2000
The Seven Stages of Web Grief
27 Mar 2000
Business’ hardest lesson
20 Mar 2000
Strangers on the Web
13 Mar 2000
Are there conversations?
06 Mar 2000
To speak and, perchance, to listen
The visual display of knowledge
01 Mar 2000
Tragedy and sitcoms
28 Feb 2000
“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.”
— King Lear
Web Denial
21 Feb 2000
Managing the unmanageable
The Joy of e-mail
14 Feb 2000
The short answer for why we do it
Cluetrain a must read so says its author
11 Feb 2000
David Weinberger responds to a book review
THE VISUAL DISPLAY OF KNOWLEDGE
31 Jan 2000
ClearType is an intermediary step that will make your text-based knowledge literally clearer.
Libertarian Conversations
15 Jan 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.
INVISIBLE PCs
10 Jan 2000
The pod people are taking over.
The Politics Of Merely
03 Jan 2000
Beware the word "merely" and its cousins "simply," "just" and "only." They are among the most political of words. And they're assassins.
Are there conversations?
01 Jan 2000
Predictions, Lists And Violence
20 Dec 1999
Millennial Forecast: Continued Ignorance
13 Dec 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.
All Hail The Lurkers
06 Dec 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..
The Undernet
05 Dec 1999
Tacit Knowledge
22 Nov 1999
To heck with tacit knowledge. (Go for tacit documents instead.)
Internet White-Out
15 Nov 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.
Branding and Knowledge
09 Nov 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?
The "right" solution
01 Nov 1999
IQPORT.COM
25 Oct 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.
Communicating Information
18 Oct 1999
On the Web, all information is communication.
The "Right" Solution
12 Oct 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
Hermetic Dashboard, Hermetic Microsoft
01 Oct 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.
Pornographic intranets
01 Oct 1999
David Weinberger speaks:
27 Sep 1999
"The Web Isn't Transforming Business Documents ... It's Killing Them"
Convergence or Hole?
20 Sep 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.
Jetform and the Standards Game
01 Sep 1999
Traffic and commerce
01 Sep 1999
How to be smart
01 Sep 1999
The spontaneity of voice
01 Sep 1999
Pornographic intranets
01 Aug 1999
The Forms of Marketing
01 Aug 1999
The dark side of standards development, brought
to you by Jetform and UWI.com.
The Knowledge Conversation
01 Jul 1999
The breakthrough companies look for from KM won't come from "knowledge assets."
Messages in Bottles
01 Jun 1999
Easter Eggs aren't just fun distractions -- they're a sign of humanity.
Flash! Press releases don't work
01 Jun 1999
Here's a list of do's and don'ts for writing press releases.
Microsoft's Digital Dashboard Deception
01 Jun 1999
Microsoft's Digital Dashboard is little more than a slick deception.
Floundering Morals
01 Jun 1999
Almost all moral reasoning is based on analogies, not principles.
Zero-to-One MARKETING
01 May 1999
Mass marketing is getting automated -- is that good or bad?
The desktop is a portal
01 May 1999
Not everything is a portal, says David Weinberger. Life just isn't that simple.
Let me count the KM ways
01 May 1999
Don't we know that KM is about more than just picking technologies?
Re: mission statement
01 May 1999
Make your mission statement reflect your people.
KM: Why do we care?
01 May 1999
The portal craze both helps and hurts KM, and that's good.
01 May 1999
The portal craze both helps and hurts KM, and that's good.
Business' Big Secret
01 Apr 1999
What's the biggest secret in Business? David Weinberger clues us in.
Ride the Cluetrain
01 Apr 1999
Communities are forming on the Cluetrain, stopping at a corporation near you.
Webby Collaboration
01 Apr 1999
People get work done when they collaborate freely, despite what you may think.
Filling out forms for XML
01 Mar 1999
XML will cause us to write forms, not free-flowing documents, according to David Weinberger.
The lowerachy of business intelligence
01 Mar 1999
Using widgets from Minneapolis, David Weinberger builds a relationship between data, information and knowledge.
The Importance of Being Wrong
01 Mar 1999
To make your company smarter, make better mistakes, says David Weinberger.
Metadata is monarch
01 Feb 1999
Content means nothing if you don't know how to find it or what to do with it. David Weinberger explains.
Idea Management
01 Feb 1999
What we call knowledge often doesn't involve information or "know how" -- it's just ideas.
Narrative Knowledge
01 Feb 1999
Knowledge sharing is an exercise in storytelling, says JOHO editor David Weinberger.
The Turing test for business
01 Feb 1999
Sound it out: companies competing in the Web era had better learn to speak the language.
Tips for strategic IT planning
01 Oct 1998
KM & the human element
11 May 1998
DM: as foundational as the slab under your house
16 Mar 1998
DM: as foundational as the slab under your house
16 Mar 1998
1997 BAI Retail Delivery Conference: Serving banking's new consumer
16 Mar 1998
Ready to start a technology project: A best practices review can help you get centered
23 Feb 1998