I’ve been trying to do more things that are unfamiliar or slightly out of my comfort zone lately. Here’s a quick roundup:

• I got to participate in Rhizome’s venerated Seven on Seven conference, where I teamed up with Kevin McCoy to create monegraph. It’s a system that uses the block chain technology which underpins Bitcoin, but puts it to work in service of artists, so that they can verify that a digital work is an original, with a verifiable provenance. I describe the context of the work in A Bitcoin for Digital Art, my first piece for Medium’s “The Message” collection, and we also showed it off with a demo at the most improbable of venues, TechCrunch‘s Disrupt conference. The response overall has been great, as you can tell from the monegraph tumblr.

A Bitcoin for Digital Art

• The White House’s working group on Big Data and Privacy released its report, which is surprisingly thoughtful and appropriately nuanced in its consideration of the issues. As danah so aptly summarized it, “[T]he conversation around the “big data” phenomenon tends to get quickly polarized – it’s good or it’s bad, plain and simple. But it’s never that simple.” It’s no surprise danah’s take was so thoughtful; her Data & Society Research Institute was one of the most valuable contributors to the White House report. In my role on the board of the DSRI, I got to moderate a panel with Kate Crawford, Steven Hodas, Alondra Nelson, and Shamina Singh. The conversation was incredible, and so it’s no surprise that our panel was cited in the full report from the White House. You can watch the panel here:

• Over on The Awl, it’s “How to Avoid Raising a Monster” which takes a look at my, uh, parenting style. This includes the question, “Can you … provide some more examples of when you’ve been especially tempted to do things that wouldn’t be found in any guidebooks on how best to raise a child?”
• On PolicyMic, a nice piece on 23 Ways Feminism Has Made the World Better for Men includes my least insightful comment ever: “Sex is fun!”
• Coming up this fall: I’ll be speaking at PopTech in October. If you know that conference, you know why I’m geeked out about the opportunity, especially given that John Maeda as host has chosen “rebellion” as the theme for the event.
• Oh, and Prince finally retweeted one of my tweets, but elided my name and then removed the tweet entirely a brief while later, as he is prone to do. But still, fun for me!
• And as always, the ThinkUp team has been rocking with a whole range of fun and ridiculous new insights in the app. If you haven’t seen ThinkUp lately, you haven’t seen it. You should probably sign up and give it a try.