I have a lot of thoughts about systems and how they work, and how we can teach systems thinking to others. Maybe one good place we could start is by capturing...

Today, in the New York Times, Paul Krugman shares a key insight that his headline editor summarizes as The Rich Are Crazier Than You and Me . While this is tr...

I've been saying this for a few years now, but it's worth recording here for the record: It's impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech CEOs an...

Mastodon and the fediverse are clearly taking off, bringing in millions of new users, and also organically inspiring a wave of technical innovation that dwarfs...

If a company is debating whether a user's account should be suspended, they've already failed to build a modern platform that follows best practices. Why are t...

Security reports from other sites are welcome. Why aren’t safety reports? One of the most fundamental triumphs of the last few decades of open source culture...

After a pause of a few years, Twitter announced today that they're going to resume allowing any user to request the blue verification checkmark for their acc...

In the early days of Twitter, there was a pleasingly low-tech tradition called "follow friday" (which people later denoted with the #FF hashtag), whe...

About once a year, I do a little digital reset to help make my online life a little more pleasant. I’m not advocating that anybody do the same as me, but I h...

People are wrong on the Internet every day; generally I don’t try to fuss about that too much. But when Sam Lessin, a former VP of Product Management at Facebo...

At this point, there's nothing novel about noticing that social media is often toxic and stressful. But even aside from those concerns, our social networks are...

Jack asked us for ideas on how to fix Twitter. A coherent plan for fixing Twitter would make millions of people happier, and pick up a billion dollars in marke...

More than a decade ago, the earliest era of blogging provided a set of separate but related technologies that helped the nascent form thrive. Today, most have...

There are lots of conversations that I have over and over, one-at-a-time on social media like Twitter that I wish was captured more definitively. Fortunately,...

Everybody’s got advice on what Twitter needs to do at its current crossroads. The answer might lie in revisiting the moment they first broke geeks’ hearts....

What it’s like to have the social network of a celebrity, without actually being famous I’ve got more Twitter followers than you. I’ve got more Twitter follo...

There’s an oddness to working on a project that most people don’t (yet) understand. And the last year (or years!) of working on ThinkUp has definitely been p...

What a delight to be interviewed by Bijan Stephens for Vanity Fair , especially as so much of the focus was on me as a dad and a person, rather than just the...

Much of my presence on social media, especially on Twitter, is predicated on the foilbes of parenthood. “Dad Tweets” are a venerable staple of the medium, as f...

We don’t do nearly enough to examine what it means when we perform common actions on our social networks. These aren’t just guttural, reflexive responses! Th...

I wrote a bit about why I only retweet women . As an exercise, let’s guess what stupid things I’ll hear in response! If we check off all these items, then we’...

Here's a fun registry of derby names that lets you see if your roller derby name is unique: http://t.co/ZU0TAxNN4O — anildash (@anildash) Dece...

Here's an extraordinary first-person from [@BurningNorth](https://twitter.com/BurningNorth) about seeing 3D for the first time, thanks to Nintendo: [http:/...

[This piece was originally written for CNN on the occasion of Twitter’s IPO.] The Internet is buzzing with news of Twitter’s initial public offering on Thu...

I spend so much time writing, and thinking, about technology and tech companies. And so much of it’s critical. I point the finger at how the apps and sites we...

Update: After this post was published, I had a chance to talk about Twitter verification at a live show of the Untitled Kondabolu Brothers Project, with Hari...

Last week, we announced the new beta release of ThinkUp (if you’re a geek or developer, try it out!) and one of the reasons I was most excited to talk about...

I sure do like talking to people! Here’s some recent conversations: MIT Tech Review offered up A Twitter Tweak or a Revolution in Online Discourse? as a...

Oh, hello there! I didn’t see you come in. Well, as long as you’re here, let’s look at some links around the web that I’ve found to be related to what we’ve be...

A few years ago, I wrote about the Law of Fail : Once a web community has decided to dislike a person, topic, or idea, the conversation will shift from critic...

Most users on the web spend most of their time in apps. The most popular of those apps, like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Tumblr and others, are primarily focused...

I know I usually try to be a thoughtful tech writer, but sometimes, holy shit you guys. Twitter, because of their API, actually was a real-time protocol to...

Back in 2009, I founded Expert Labs based on the idea that technology could help all of us better engage with our government and encourage policy makers to l...

Twitter’s Bootstrap framework for creating web sites and apps is the culmination of half a decade’s work by the web design community in creating CSS resets,...

Today, ThinkUp is out of beta and available for free . If you have a presence on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ and know how to run a PHP/MySQL app on a web s...

We’re twenty years in to this world wide web thing. Today, I myself celebrate twelve years of writing this blog. And yet those of us who love this medium, who’...

By request , a bit of explanation of how and why I favorite things on the internet. (Or favor them. Or like them. Whatever.) First, where do I favorite? On...

I’ve been waiting a year for someone to write about this, but my laziness has not yet paid off, so here are a few things that we all know about everybody’s fav...

In a remarkably fast evolution from what-if rumination on a blog to cutting-edge news dissemination, Alex Kerin’s idea last year of how to use Twitter to sha...

I love blogs. Nick Denton wrote over on Lifehacker about the pending redesign of Gawker’s blogs, with a lot of great insights into the leading edge of web pu...

Here are some articles that have recently gotten attention amongst media obsessives. They are all fundamentally flawed: A list of the Top 25 newspapers on...

There’s an odd tendency in web culture to see all features as obvious, even inevitable. While most of the artifacts of our computing experience have been inven...

In my blog here, I’m mostly a textual dude. I’ve made a few little video clips or animated .gifs over the years, but basically, I’m a writer. But today, today!...

Malcolm Gladwell gets started with “The revolution will not be tweeted” in this week’s New Yorker , condemning social media’s ability to enact real cultural c...

The new Twitter is here! The new Twitter is here! Besides sowing discontent in our household by giving me access to the new user interface before my wife’s acc...

Last week, Twitter announced its new advertising system , called promoted tweets. I was at Twitter’s Chirp conference as a speaker, so I got an up-close loo...

Just a few weeks ago I made a list of some places that I’m speaking or appearing in the coming weeks and months, and here’s an update on a few of those. I ho...

A few weeks ago when I started writing about what it’s like to be on Twitter’s suggested user list and the fact that nobody has a million followers on Twitt...

Last week, I wrote a bit about what it’s like to be on Twitter’s suggested user list . The response to that post has been really gratifying, and I wanted to s...

Update: We’ve got some results already! Joseph Scott at Automattic mentions in the comments that he’s added RSD support for the Twitter API to WordPress.co...

Humans create the web, but we’ve largely abdicated the act of organizing web content to software. That could change. Twitter this week made its new Lists...

Last week, I found this picture of a group dinner at Guero’s restaurant in Austin, TX, taken during South by Southwest in 2002. At the time, most of us...

There have been another spate of interesting conversations around the tech industry about what goals a tech company should have, and how they should achieve th...

A few weeks ago, I asked the people who follow my Twitter account to describe the difference between lemons and limes. My immediate prompt was because I wa...

I’ve long been a fan of playing the dozens , as is to be expected from anyone who loves language. Last night, in a fit of my usual insanity, I thought it’d be...

Sometimes if you do something very difficult, and you do it really well, the end result is that your achievement becomes completely invisible. I mentione...

Because my name and my big ole’ head are sitting on top of this page, it’s probably not making the self-indulgence any worse to collect a few links to some rec...

If you haven’t been following my Twitter account , you’re missing all the fun! In between going aggro on teakettles , taking an unseemly joy in crude wordpl...

Blogging’s been light because this part of March is the heart of the conference season for me, usually stretching for a few exhausting weeks on the road. My ne...

Today’s Blog of the Year Picks: Some Bits: Nelson’s Weblog and RC3.org . These two are just for me, some real old-school-blogging nerd picks. Some B...

I’ve found some interesting articles around the web recently that mention me or my blog, and while I don’t try to be comprehensive in linking to everything tha...

The sign of success in social software is when your community does something you didn’t expect. It’s easy to be cynical about new sites, especially when...