When my post vanished the other day, I e-mailed Trevor. Why, I said, was there only an early version saved under WordPress and couldn't he somehow rescue my wee bit of prose. (This is not the first time Trevor has had to retrieve files for me.) He wrote back that it wasn't saved in WordPress but,
I first got in touch with Daniel A. Bell in 2001, when we were working on the Encyclopedia of Community, because he had written on communitarianism and also lived in Asia, which we were struggling to provide some coverage of. I met him when I visited Hong Kong in August 2002 and he mentioned that he
The change in plans that took me to Albany on Tuesday was well worth it. I got to see Nelson Rockfeller's extraordinary monumental additions to the city (talk about an edifice complex), which include something that looks like a toilet, and a collection of state buildings that look like Stalinesque dominos standing in a row. Lewis
What a morning. I've just heard that the well-known sociologist Barry Wellman, with whom I've is giving the 8th annual Lewis Mumford Lecture on "What has the Internet done to community?" at SUNY Albany. He and his colleagues have urged me to come (Barry realized suddenly that we must be quite close to Albany--he's traveling from
Community is a key concept in much that we do, and I'm always puzzling over it, both in terms of how it works in our personal lives and on the local level, and especially as we explore online community building and social media. We talk about "community" a lot here, and it's actually a respectable term
If you're not a regular user of Flickr or Skype or Wikipedia, please take a look at this blog entry to get a sense of the discussion that evolving in the blogosphere. I was struck by four things in Jeff Jarvis's well-written and beautifully presented "Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? The crowd": 1. Extraordinary
Esther Dozier, the dynamic pastor of the Clinton AME Zion Church, needed a photo of David presenting his book about the church to her, so I went down (after an intense yoga class, the kind that demands a hot bath afterward, so I'm afraid I missed the service) to do a photo shoot. I've taken many
It's hardly surprising that I should find myself meeting people who work for the BBC. Global media, right? And a nonprofit corporation--that's also a good fit with Berkshire Publishing at the moment, and with the kind of publishing we do. It's interesting, though, to find out that the BBC suffers from the usual corporate ills: bureaucracy
Until last year, Camberwell, in south London, was my London neighborhood. I used to stay with friends and see other former neighbors and I could even wander into the Greek shop on Camberwell Church Street and have the owners ask how my kids were (after 10 years!). But my friends are divorcing, and I've become enamoured
I've been in DC for two days for meetings about China and sustainability. I love the fact that these things are so much the buzz, but DC is a world of its own. I said to someone yesterday that I sometimes feel like I'm visiting another planet, where everything is about policy and funding. At the
