Weinberger, David 1950-

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Weinberger, David 1950-

PERSONAL:

Born November 8, 1950, in Roslyn Heights, NY; son of Howard (a lawyer) and Sherry (a teacher) Weinberger; married Ann Geller (a teacher and scholar); children: three. Ethnicity: "Caucasian, Jewish." Education: Bucknell University, B.A., 1972; University of Toronto, Ph.D., 1978.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Boston, MA. Office—94 Westbourne Terr., Brookline, MA 02446. Agent—David Miller, Garamond Agency, Inc., 12 Horton St., Newburyport, MA 01950. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Stockton State College, Pomona, NJ, assistant professor, 1981-86; Interleaf, Cambridge, MA, 1986-94, became vice president of strategic marketing; Open Text, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, vice president of strategic marketing, 1995-97. Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization (Internet newsletter), publisher; National Public Radio, technology commentator; senior Internet advisor to the 2004 Howard Dean presidential campaign. Has served on various boards and committees, including the AIIM Emerging Technology Advisory Group, Seybold Conference advisory board, World Congress of Philosophy advisory board, Virtual Business advisory board, Xplor Business Strategies advisory board, as well as on the advisory boards of Microsoft, Yahoo, the Christopher Reeve Foundation, Tehnorati, Metacarta, the Information Architecture Association, Corante, BlogBridge, the Conversation Network, Social-Text, and Global Voices. Has lectured at Drew University, Emerson University, Bucknell University, and University of North Carolina.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellow, Berkman Institute for Internet and Society, Harvard University, 2004—; "Mover and Shaker of the Year," Mass High Tech Council, 2007.

WRITINGS:

Nuclear Dialogues, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1987.

Adventurer's Guide to Interleaf Lisp, OnWord Press (Santa Fe, NM), 1994.

(With Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, and Doc Searls) The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, Perseus Books (Cambridge, MA), 2000.

Small Pieces, Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, Perseus Books (Cambridge, MA), 2002.

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Times Books (New York, NY), 2007.

Columnist for Darwin, Knowledge Management World, and Intranet Design; contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Wall Street Journal, Economist, Miami Herald, Boston Globe, USA Today, and Guardian, and to online blogs and publications, including Salon.

SIDELIGHTS:

David Weinberger is an expert on emerging technologies and their power to affect business and management strategies in the twenty-first century. A commentator for National Public Radio and an independent industry consultant, Weinberger and some collaborators parlayed a successful Web site that advocated rethinking modern business philosophy into the book The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. Written with Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, and Doc Searls—all new-commerce industry professionals like Weinberger—the book offers ninety-five ideas about the Web, a paean to the revolutionary ninety-five theses of Martin Luther that launched Europe's Protestant Reformation. Weinberger and his coauthors suggest, for example, that interpersonal communications, not transactions, should be the driving force of commerce. The authors, as they do at the book's Web site, skewer modern management theory and marketing techniques. "Bold and irreverent to the point of being smart-alecky, [The Cluetrain Manifesto] makes a fun, thought-provoking read," asserted Wade Roush in Technology Review. Weinberger and his coauthors, Roush continued, "deserve kudos for highlighting how the Internet is changing the balance of knowledge and power in the marketplace, and how intranets are doing the same within the workplace." A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that, though their ideas sometimes stray from the point, "the authors occasionally succeed in making solid, clever points that reveal fundamental flaws in the structure of traditional businesses."

Small Pieces, Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web was described as being an "exceptionally readable and often funny treatise" by Booklist contributor Keir Graff. In this volume Weinburger blends his experience with his philosophy and comes to the conclusion that the main function of the Web is spiritual, not economic. He contends that while we inhabit cyperspace, we allow ourselves to be ourselves and interact with others who are similarly not attempting to attain some artificial ideal that we may feel pressured to achieve in the real world. Consequently, as we live our online lives, we are comfortable expressing emotions and true feelings. He also writes that the Internet frees us from demographics. Rather than being judged by secondary traits, such as age, race, geography, or economic status, we are judged on the real person we are in a virtual world that we can create to suit our own ideas and tastes.

Weinberger also provides a history of the World Wide Web and describes the enormity of the amount of information that passes through the infrastructure of the Internet. He notes that television viewing has dropped by nearly a third due to time spent online. As a Kirkus Reviews contributor noted, however, Weinberger views "the Web not as a medium of mass stupefaction like TV but as a new and intense form of social interaction. He concludes on the hopeful note that the Web can be a ‘place free of what's been holding back our better selves.’"

A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that what drives this book is Weinberger's "tendency to question," and wrote that the author "boasts an extremely likable mainstream intellectual persona, flashes of insight and genuine literary talent."

Booklist reviewer David Siegfried wrote that with Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, "Weinberger presents a thought-provoking and entertaining look at our rapidly evolving culture of data." Weinberger studies the way in which information of all sorts is organized. In the physical world, we have alphabetized and classified in consistent ways, but in the digital world information can be sorted and arranged in myriad ways and can be slotted into many different categories. An example is the way songs at online music sites can be selected by single or many criteria, including genre, artist, song name, or price. Similarly, at sites that offer information, a single keyword can give us more information than we knew existed on our topic, often leading us off in other directions.

Library Journal contributor Lucy Heckman strongly recommended this volume "to students and researchers of business, social sciences, education, and library science." EContent reviewer Michelle Manafy noted that the phrase "information wants to be free" is a reference to its cost. She wrote that after reading Weinberger's book, she felt "that even this idea should be reinterpreted as information wanting to be free of its bindings; broken loose from its filtered, interpreted value to be reshaped at the whim of the user in ways that are infinitely more valuable, if on an infinitesimal scale. Rather than offering information in the one way that will maximize its value to the masses, we loosen its strictures so that it can be remixed and reinterpreted by anyone."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 1, 2002, Keir Graff, review of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of theWeb, p. 1491; April 1, 2007, David Siegfried, review of Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, p. 11.

CioInsight, March 1, 2002, review of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.

EContent, September, 2007, Michelle Manafy, review of Everything Is Miscellaneous, p. 5.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2002, review of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, p. 244.

Library Journal, February 15, 2007, Lucy Heckman, review of Everything Is Miscellaneous, p. 128.

Publishers Weekly, January 24, 2000, review of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, p. 305; April 22, 2002, review of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, p. 64.

Technology Review, March, 2000, Wade Roush, review of The Cluetrain Manifesto, p. 108.