David Weinberger

Dr. Weinberger began his "career" in the late '70s teaching philosophy at New Jersey's Stockton State College for five years. (He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto.) During this time he maintained a steady freelance writing of humor, reviews and intellectual and academic articles, publishing in places as diverse as The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Smithsonian, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and TV Guide.

In 1985, he became a junior marketing guy at Interleaf where he helped launch the industry's first enterprise document management system and electronic document publishing system. In the early '90s, he was one of the five founders of SGML Open, now known as OASIS. He left Interleaf after 8 years, as VP of Strategic Marketing.

He founded the one-person strategic marketing company, Evident Marketing, in 1994. In late 1995, he joined Open Text as VP of Strategic Marketing. Open Text was an early search engine company (the first search engine used by Yahoo) and an innovator in intranet collaborative software.

After helping to take Open Text public in 1996, Dr. Weinberger returned to consulting, writing and speaking, participating in founding a couple of dot-coms, and serving on industry and company boards. In 2000, Perseus published the national best-seller The Cluetrain Manifesto, of which he is a co-author.

In 2002, Perseus published Small Pieces Loosely Joined to enthusiastic reviews.

In 2007, Times Books published Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder about the new principles of digital organization and their effect on knowledge and authority.

Dr. Weinberger currently writes too much, including too many weblogs, articles for Wired, Salon, USAToday, The Guardian, Release 2.0, and columns for KMWorld and Il Sole 24 Ore.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, he was Senior Internet Advisor to the Howard Dean campaign, consulting on Internet policy. In 2008, he was an advisor on Net policy to the John Edwards campaign.

In 2008, he is teaching The Web Difference, a course at Harvard Law with Prof. John Palfrey.

Current interests:

• We are changing the basic principles by which we organize our world. What effect will that have on our institutions and on our way of understanding ourselves and the world we share? David is looking at taxonomies, ontology, and the role of metadata.
• Social networks rely on making explicit relationships that are deeply implicit. What sort of damage does that do? Why do we think that the explicit is simply the implicit with the lights on?
• What policies and laws will enable the Internet to thrive as an open platform for ideas, innovation and connection?