A redeeming thing about a crisis is that it brings out good things in people. The debt crisis has delivered an onslaught of good writing made particularly visible by the coincidental and exponential development of Internet publishing. Having enjoyed the luxury of time to read some of it the past few days and having personally joined the Internet publishing world, I’m drawn to comment. Continue reading ‘Reconciling Shirky, Noonan, Glassman, a Marine, and two Op-Eds’
I’ve spent today installing a new comment manager at paulwilkinson.com, and have decided to convert from using categories plus pages to categories. So here’s my old “Ranching” page in the form of a post. Continue reading ‘Rancho Oroblanco’
Instead of individuals searching for authenticity, we are ‘intraviduals’ defined by shifting personas and really cool electronics, which help us manage ‘the myriad data streams, impulses, desires and even consciousnesses that we experience in our heads as we navigate multiple worlds.’
Wow. Instead of navel gazing, I’m heading out to check my navel oranges.
It will be awhile before the content starts rolling, but if you’re possibly interested in what it is when it does, just use one of the tools to the right. They’ll all be updated periodically, the RSS and Twitter feeds most often. And if you have questions, feel free to leave them as comments on this post.
This may be a tad circular, but good conversation is remarkable.
As journalist, lawyer, radio producer, policy director, and adviser, I’ve talked with a lot of fascinating people to elicit information. Then came the business of organizing, simplifying, and publishing the information, whether for readers, viewers, listeners, clients, or government officials. As a press secretary, my job was finding out what reporters wanted to know and tracking it down; as a reporter, it was finding out what editors thought readers wanted to know and tracking it down; as a lawyer, it was finding out what might come back to bite my client and protecting them. In every case, delivering the facts and suggesting policies and rules to apply to the facts was relatively easy. The more challenging parts were ascertaining facts in the first place and convincing people to deal with them.
That’s conversation’s highest and best use. The first half or so of my career was pre-Internet. The second half has been during the development of the Internet. Some say we’re in the post-Internet era. Conversation was by far the predominate tool of the first half. It’s been the most productive tool in the shed (or the most powerful weapon in the arsenal) in the second half of my career, too, but the Internet changed how conversation happens, and it’s changed how people deal with facts, too. Continue reading ‘Why this Site?’
, a book I’d be tempted to buy if my plan weren’t to work through the backlog on my shelves before getting the latest 
for future reading. (The technology should be even better by then.) Here’s how the Times sums it up:
