Co-founder and board member at CUSTOMER COMMONS

I am an author and journalist best known for two books — The Cluetrain Manifesto (co-authored with Chris Locke, David Weinberger and Rick Levine) and The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge. I was also editor-in-chief of Linux Journal, where I'd been on the masthead since 1996, until it ceased publication in August 2019. Since 2006 I have run ProjectVRM at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where I was a fellow from 2006 to 2010. In that capacity I have fostered pioneering development of VRM (Vendor Relationship Management, aka customertech and me2b) tools and services. Think of VRM as the customer-side counterpart of CRM (Customer Relationship Management), only broader than that. VRM provides individuals with both independence and means of engagement. The economic thesis VRM developers work to prove is that free customers are more valuable than captive ones. I have high faith that this will prove out in the same marketplace that will be transformed by it. Toward that goal I co-founded ProjectVRM's nonprofit spinoff, Customer Commons, and serve on its board. Also on the academic front, I study the intersection of Internet and infrastructure, and the decline of over-the-air broadcasting: work that has been ongoing since 2006 through my fellowship at the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara. I am a visiting scholar with the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, and from 2012-2014 I was a visiting scholar with the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. My primary avocation is photography, much of it aerial. More than 70,000 of my photos are published on Flickr, nearly all with permissive Creative Commons licenses to encourage their re-use by anybody. As a result, more than 1,200 of those photos have appeared (none by my doing) at Wikimedia Commons, the primary photo base for Wikipedia articles, and accompany countless other published works. Specialties: Writing, consulting, speaking, leading projects, photography, making connections.