We create the stories of the connected society

The biggest surprise from yesterday’s unveiling of Apple’s iPad was that print publishers and journos weren’t terribly excited. “Waiting to be surprised. That hasn’t happened yet,” said Jim Roberts, the only New York Times wonk who didn’t confuse Steve Jobs with Moses. Valleywag has a good take on Print Media’s Big Tablet Letdown.
Our [...]

New technology spawns new ways to tell stories. That’s the exciting part of Apple’s new tablet, an old idea whose time has apparently come.
Now comes the hard part: creating the content and designing the experience for the next wave of consumer devices that deliver our stories. We’re about to discover whether incumbent publishers and [...]

Before we’re swept away (oops, but that seems to have happened already) by the unveiling of Apple’s tablet we ought to pay homage to technologies before the iPad and visionaries before Steve Jobs.
The original messiah machine: the Mac Plus. Introduced in 1986, this little beauty brought a revolution in publication design. It came standard with [...]

The internet is a wondrous anomaly, a technical and creative achievement grander than the Tower of Babel, an infinite tangle of knowledge, ideals, data, entertainment, beauty, trivia, terror, news, noise, hubris, despair. It’s a cultural blender, a mixmaster archive crammed with visions, twits and everyday things.

A new design for Craigslist – better, easier and pure fantasy.

“Today is a good day to do big things,” Amanda said when she was eight. It was so profound that I wrote it down and saved  it. That was more than 20 years ago. She’s lived up to her words, but I seem to have let them slip over the years.
Today I was given two [...]

Designer Jonathan Harris explores new territory.

Back in the September, I wrote that “one of the fundamental tasks of design and business is to stand between revolutions and life, to help people deal with change.” That was the premise of The Right Brain Rules, a strategic vision and a portfolio of assets for creating value into the future.
Allison Arieff goes beyond  by [...]

We Media members, readers, fans and friends are invited to breakfast and a conversation with Fast Company magazine founder Alan Webber and best-selling author Dan Pink.
When: 8 am – 10 am Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Where: The Ritz-Carlton, Tysons Corner, 1700 Tysons Blvd. McLean, VA USA
To register: Click here.
The Washington Board of Trade has extended its [...]

Over on my Fast Company Experts blog, I have issued a challenge.
Here is what I wrote:
I have come to the conclusion that most (maybe all) business and strategy books are useless. They over-generalize. They offer little value. I go in with such high expectations, based on reviews and descriptions, and am almost universally disappointed.
For [...]

A few months back we asked each of our 2009 Game Changers Awards finalists to write about their projects, what they have learned along the way and what’s next. (Here’s the rest of the series). Somehow, amidst the flurry of conference preparations, this one slipped through our crack(ed) editorial process. But it’s important, so here [...]

Bernie Madoff’s prison Twitter page, via jean’s blog. Priceless.

From The Economist: “A piece of the American experience has faded away. Fisher-Price, the toy company that used to market them, has just eliminated almost all the View-Master titles that have been a staple of young lives for almost 70 years.”
I first discovered the world in 3-D on a paper disc and a plastic viewer. [...]

My daughter Amanda took the above photo in Nepal. The picture on the right is of my new granddaughter, Elizabeth Jane. I thought of them as I discovered The Girl Effect, a project from the Nike and UN Foundation that stunned global leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The big idea: unlocking the [...]

I like to play with word mashups that impart new meaning and metaphors, but sometimes you’ve got to be careful when you apply them to a URL. Like: www.newstools.org
New stools? A furniture-maker’s site? Horticulturalist’s? Bishop’s? African chieftan’s? Informant’s? Or gastroenterologist’s?
Creative capitalization helps: NewsTools. The site highlights the work of the Journalism That Matters community at [...]