Bio

It would be nice if I had one career role. But I don't. That would be too normal. So here's what I play:

• Senior editor for Linux Journal, the original (and still the leading) Linux publication.
• Proprietor of Doc Searls' IT Garage, a sister site to Linux Journal.
• Research Fellow at the Center for Information Technology & Society at UC Santa Barbara. There my current focus is on work toward a book titled The Giant Zero.
• Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. There I head ProjectVRM.
• 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 radio veteran from way back (that's where the "Doc" nickname came from). I'm a regular on the Gillmor Gang podcast and on Steve Gillmor's Attention Deficit Theatre (which has no URL yet, but will). I also park the occasional personal podcast at doc.searls.com.
• A marketing, PR and advertising veteran. Most notably I co-founded Hodskins Simone and 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 OMNI, Wired, PC Magazine, The Standard, The Sun, Upside, The Globe & Mail, 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, which is also home to my consultancy, The Searls Group.
• A frequent speaker on any and all the above subjects. Here is my profile (now getting real old and in need of updating) at the agency that handles my gigs, Leading Authorities.

Since I'm always working on too many things, and will probably never stop, I want my epitaph to read, "He was almost finished."

I can be reached by email through =searls. That's my "i-name". Using it keeps spammers from grabbing my email address. If you have have an i-name too, enter it in the form you'll reach from that link. If you don't, leave that space blank and fill out the rest.

I consult, or am on the advisory boards of Jabber, Inc., Ping Identity Corp., British Telecom, Socialtext, SpikeSource and Technorati. Some involve equity. My other (pathetically small) stock holdings are in funds.

discuss

discuss

Is it the fact that we are by definition superior - obviously.

Or is it the fact that we "Think Different" - being a Brit I still cringe at the transatlantic grammar.

Or is it something to do with the warm, cuddly, conversational face the Mac - even the Unix based OS X I am using right now - presents to the user?

discuss

Anyway, Stewart Brand once told me that, on the whole, Mac users were more interesting than Windows users. Not that there weren't plenty of Windows users, but... the fact of Mac use made the user more likely to be interesting.

Something more interesting than that, I suspect.

discuss

Can I ask if you've tried to relate the "Art Theory" to today's market? Not just for Apple, but more generally? I believe we may be getting to the point where independent software developers are going to find it harder and harder to be relevant, pressed between closed end appliance boxes (Steve Jobs and the machine as envisioned Art) and customers with IT departments who roll their own based on components (called web services in this round) that are mainly about high granularity and customization.

Operating Systems either disappear (since from the user's point of view all he sees is an interface and a connection) or become all-encompassing, including much of the applications (appliance point of view).

What do you think?

Amy Wohl

Editor Amy D. Wohl's Opinions Wohl Associates 915 Montgomery Avenue Narberth, PA 19072 (610) 667-4842 amy@wohl.com www.wohl.com

subscribe to our weekly Opinions newsletter FREE by clicking here www.wohl.com/signup.htm

discuss

http://feedvalidator.org/check?url=http%3a%2f%2fpartners.userland.com%2fpeople%2fdocSearls.xml

It looks like you could lightly edit your post to work around the software issue.

Regards, Garth.

discuss

discuss

discuss

discuss

The fellow suggested you were consulted because they recognize the challenges with people trusting the service with banking and other financial data.

I can hope for the service to be available or for me to run into him at another party ;-)

discuss

I had a corrupt index, you and Cory *Doc*torow . Sorry about that.

discuss