Meet David Weinberger

Speaker: David Weinberger

David Weinberger, Ph.D. is one of the most respected thought-leaders at the intersection of technology, business and society. He is a co-author of the bestselling book, The Cluetrain Manifesto (Perseus Books) - which InformationWeek called "the most important business book since [Tom Peters'] In Search of Excellence" - and Small Pieces Loosely Joined. His work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Wired, Salon, The Guardian and many others. He is a commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and "Here and Now" and is a columnist for KMWorld and Darwin Magazine.

Dr. Weinberger has been an active participant -- working for, founding and consulting with companies — from F500’s to early-stage start-ups — in the new market space. Oddly, he has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto and taught college for six years. He is an active weblogger and was Senior Internet Advisor to the Howard Dean presidential campaign. He speaks around the world about the Web’s impact on business and culture. David was recently accepted as a Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto.

In his recent publication, Everything is Miscellaneous, Weinberger reviews the impact of the net on knowledge.

“As businesses go miscellaneous, information gets chopped into smaller and smaller pieces. But it also escapes its leash--adding to a pile that can be sorted and arranged by anyone with a Web browser and a Net connection. In fact, information exhibits bird-like "flocking behavior," joining with other information that adds value to it, creating swarms that help customers and, ultimately, the businesses from which the information initially escaped. We’re seeing the same trend in industry after industry, including music, travel, and the news media. Information gets released into the wild (sometimes against a company’s will), where it joins up with other information, and the act of aggregating adds value. Companies lose some control, but they gain market presence and smarter customers. The companies that are succeeding in the new digital skies are the ones that allow their customers to add their own information and the aggregators to mix it up, because whether or not information wants to be free, it sure wants to flock.”