About

TEDxMidAtlantic

For the past 15 years, my focus has been social tools and their impact on media, business, and society, but in recent years, I have shifted to working as a futurist, tracking the tectonic forces driving business, media, and society into an unclear and accelerating future. I divide my time across research, writing, and public speaking.

My approach to work has grown from my background as a programmer and developer, and in combination with my natural tendency to look over the near horizon to envision adjacent and nascent technologies, I have come to think of myself as a ‘socialogist’, advocating new societal and business policies based on the rise of social tools, with a healthy dose of social criticism and future studies in the mix.

I started my career as a software researcher working in programming tools and software environments. I have served as adjunct computer science faculty, an inadvertent entrepreneur, an software analyst, a newsletter editor, a columnist, president of a blog media company, and mostly as a commentator and advisor. I have served in other roles and appointments, far too many to enumerate.

I have presented at numerous conferences and events worldwide, including Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, GigaOM Net:Work, Reboot, Next, Mesh, Shift, Lift, SIBOS, Defrag, SxSW, and TEDxMidAtlantic. 

I am working on a book about the future of social business theory and practice, called Beyond Social: The Rise Of The Emergent Business.

I am the lead researcher for social business and the future of work at GigaOM Research. My writing here is my own, and does not reflect the views or opinions of GigaOM.

A more visual version of my bio can be found here.

About

Web anthropologist, futurist, author. My focus is the future, and the tectonic forces pushing business, media, and society into an unclear and accelerating future. more.

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GigaOM Research analyst and curator.

Also writing beaconstreets.com.

Contact me. or ask me a question.



My Vizify profile.

Socialogy

  • John Hagel | John offers up some great insights, like the fact that passion is lower the larger that businesses get.

  • Euan Semple | A chat with my old pal, and the author of Organizations Don't Tweet, People Do

  • Will McInnes | The author of Culture Shock and managing director of Nixon/McInnes

  • Jennifer Magnolfi | An interview with the woman who said, 'Work is not a place you go, it's a thing you do'.

    • Hot Now

  • What Drives Us? | A draft chapter of my book, discussing motivations, Maslow's hierarchy, and fluidarity.

  • Socialogy: Interview With John Hagel | I Speak with Joh Hagel about the innovation at the edge.

  • Complex organisation arises from webs of interaction among causal factors | So, it turns out that DNA is, in fact, a great metaphor for business culture, but only after you realize that DNA is not a few hundred off-on switches, but instead a universe of unknowable complexities, that we can interact with, and understand at some abstract cartoonish level, but not control, and never fully comprehend.

  • Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy’s Last Safe Haven | Paul Ford

  • Innovators Get Better With Age | Companies make a mistake by relying too much on the innoations of the young, because Nobel laureats don't come into their prime until their 50s.

    • Oldie

  • Infodemics | 2009 | Passing incomplete or inaccurate information about some risk event can make people take actions that increase the damage of the event itself.

    • Lynx theme created by Andrew Stichbury for Tumblr.