Last week was full of new experiences. I got on a Caltrain for the first time, I got off of a Caltrain for the first time, I got stuck on a Caltrain for the first time, and so the list goes on. I also met my WebFWD IV cohort! Web What What? WebFWD is a […]
Being a Knight-Mozilla Fellow ruined my life. My fellowship ended three months ago; I still don't have a job, my wife and I haven't spoken in days, and none of my friends take me seriously. There is only one piece of advice that I have for anybody considering applying: ignore all the obvious reasons why […]
This short post is about counting to 24. If that doesn’t sound interesting to you, tu–oh who am I kidding, of course it sounds interesting! Twitter keeps asking me to give them money so that I can be popular. My brain tells me that this is an opportunity that they offer everyone — some kind […]
Over the past 24 hours I worked with an amazing team to start building a Siri for government. Well, Wolfram Alpha is more like it, but you probably have a better sense of what Siri is. The site is called CivOmega and it allows you to ask any question™ you want about civics. The system […]
I woke up this morning to an email on the Center for Civic Media mailing list asking about our thoughts on an article. If you follow that link you will see Alexis Madrigal chastising a small Reddit sub-community for attempting to collaboratively analyze photographs of the Boston bombing for clues. His post says, in so […]
The planets have finally aligned on one of my early assignments at The Boston Globe. The project is called Quizzler, and it is by no means going to change anything. It’s a quiz system—something the producers ultimately want because it will… more »
I made something awesome last week: Opened Captions. At face value it just looks like a live feed of C-SPAN’s Closed Captions. This alone is actually pretty cool if you think about it, especially if you are a deaf political junkie who sits far away from the TV and can’t read the closed captions. Of […]
Tell me if you’ve been in this situation: you’re chatting about online anonymity with your wife and the other Knight-Mozilla Fellows over a pizza in Florence. A quiet-spoken stranger who had been sitting across the room walks up to your table and… more »
Uh oh… I need to write a post about the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship and Chris Marstall already masterfully captured all my points last week! Thank goodness there are still a million reasons why OpenNews is awesome. By now you may have read four different accounts of my program, but if you make it through this one […]
I may have graduated, but I still get very good advice from my mentors. The most recent came from Ethan Zuckerman: “Dan, please try not to get fired in your first month. That would be really embarrassing for everyone.” His delivery reflected a hint of genuine concern. There are many reasons why he might have […]