Last week I sat down for an interview with the excellent Command Line podcast at Philcon and recorded a long talk on sundry subjects ranging from politics to creativity to all my forthcoming projects.
All About:
News
My latest Make: column, “Shortcut to Omniscience,” talks about the cognitive shift that Wikipedians undergo in order to collaboratively write an encyclopedia, and how that kind of fundamental, subtle change enables networked groups of people to do things that were previously considered impossible.
Here’s the thing about expertise: it’s hard to define. It may be
possible for a small group of relatively homogenous people to agree on
who is and isn’t an expert, but getting millions of people to do so is
practically impossible. The Britannica uses a learned editorial board to
decide who will write its entries and who will review them.Wikipedia turns this on its head by saying, essentially, *Anyone can
write our entries but those entries should consist of material cited
from reliable sources.* While the Britannica says, *These facts are
true*, Wikipedia says, *It is true that these facts were reported by
these sources*. The Britannica contains facts, Wikipedia contains facts
about facts.
The audiobook of my latest novel, Makers has been published by Random House Audio, strictly in DRM-free formats over the net (this means that Apple won’t carry it in the iTunes store, even though Audible was willing to carry it without DRM).
The reading is by Bernadette Dunne, a very talented actor. I just listened to this for the first time yesterday and I was blown away by Dunne’s reading. I’m a huge audiobook nut, and I’m incredibly glad to have professional audiobook adaptations of my books from Random House — and doubly grateful to them for supporting my commitment to DRM-free distribution. When you buy this book, you own it. The “terms of service” are “Don’t violate copyright law,” not “By buying this audiobook, you agree that we get to come over and kick you in the ass.”
The audiobook of my latest novel, Makers has been published by Random House Audio, strictly in DRM-free formats over the net (this means that Apple won’t carry it in the iTunes store, even though Audible was willing to carry it without DRM).
The reading is by Bernadette Dunne, a very talented actor. I just listened to this for the first time yesterday and I was blown away by Dunne’s reading. I’m a huge audiobook nut, and I’m incredibly glad to have professional audiobook adaptations of my books from Random House — and doubly grateful to them for supporting my commitment to DRM-free distribution. When you buy this book, you own it. The “terms of service” are “Don’t violate copyright law,” not “By buying this audiobook, you agree that we get to come over and kick you in the ass.”
Here’s the audio from my reading last week at the Harvard Bookstore, along with Q&A.
Here’s the audio from my reading last week at the Harvard Bookstore, along with Q&A.
Congrats to my wife Alice, on winning four British Interactive Media Awards! What a clever spouse — I’m a lucky, lucky man..
This weekend, I’ll be wrapping up my US/Canada tour for Makers, my new novel, with a weekend at Philcon, near Philadelphia. I’ll be signing books, doing a reading, giving a speech, and appearing on several panels. Hope to see you there!
Important note: I had previously announced a couple of readings tomorrow at the Philadelphia Free Library. It turns out that these are not open to the public (they’re for school groups, which no one told me until last night). Sorry about this, folks.
Philcon: Nov 20-22
The Crowne Plaza Hotel, Cherry Hill, NJ
http://www.boingboing.net/thumbs/makersthumb.jpg
This weekend, I’ll be wrapping up my US/Canada tour for Makers, my new novel, with a weekend at Philcon, near Philadelphia. I’ll be signing books, doing a reading, giving a speech, and appearing on several panels. Hope to see you there!
Important note: I had previously announced a couple of readings tomorrow at the Philadelphia Free Library. It turns out that these are not open to the public (they’re for school groups, which no one told me until last night). Sorry about this, folks.
Philcon: Nov 20-22
The Crowne Plaza Hotel, Cherry Hill, NJ
http://www.boingboing.net/thumbs/makersthumb.jpg
Ginger Coons did a great interview with me last week for Concordia’s paper The Link. Good meaty policy questions ahoy!
Enhanced Driver’s Licenses are being adopted in order to comply with newly-created American regulations on what constitutes an acceptable document for crossing the border. Doctorow did not view this as a sensible excuse.
“If all the other G20 nations were jumping off western democracy and landing in a boiling pit of fascism, would you jump with them? That’s not a basis for good governance.”
But it was not all doom-and-gloom from the sometimes-dystopian writer. Doctorow revealed that he had hope for the future of information policy.
“I would like to see a kind of information bill of rights that mirrored the UN Declaration of Human Rights and that was widely accepted as kind of rote by people, where you didn’t have to explain why privacy is important or why neutral networks are important,” said Doctorow, who has pushed for Internet activity to be free from censorship or surveillance by Internet providers or governments. “I think if we got that, everything else would become easier.”
