If Twitter is the new Walter Cronkite, Gov 2.0 is the new Camelot. As the optimism of JFK’s time brought the best and the brightest to Washington DC and Houston (for NASA), the Obama administration’s commitment to opening up government has attracted a large number of technologists to government for really the first time ever. This is not to say that the tech community hasn’t always been more than willing to sell to government – we always have and always will, but two recent conferences have confirmed to me what others have been predicting would hopefully happen, that not only is the government encouraging innovation from the private sector (or as Anil Dash joked this week “or what everyone else calls the world”), but a growing number of tech stars are putting aside riches or the hope of riches to serve (at least temporarily). At both SuperNova in San Francisco this week and the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon in Mountain View a few weeks ago – both a coast away from DC – I and other entrepreneurs got face-to-face time with a wide range of leaders in the federal government. We didn’t have to go through red tape, get on anyone’s calendar, or for that matter have to fly to DC – they came to us. At the Random Hacks of Kindness, we had the Administrator of FEMA speak to 50 or so crisis mappers for over an hour. At one point, he was wringing his hands saying “we don’t even know the questions to ask”. When the head of FEMA comes to a hacker’s garage in Silicon Valley to plead to the tech community for help, how can we not respond? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve decided that now is the time for me to finally have a full on, “this is what I think” blog. I’ve blogged before on the myRT Blog, and I do an occasional Twit, and I’ve done some fiction-based blogging in the past as well (long since taken down), and I’m going to start blogging again for my new position in SF, but I think that I’ve finally reached the point where I should be doing a catch all blog. A week from today I’ll be living in the Bay Area for the first time and I’ve heard that it’s a county statute that tech workers have their own blog, so I probably better get on it.
I know that it would be a much better exercise in SEO if I did a blog on one specific topic, completely rich in keywords and focused, focused, focused, and if I was planning on making a living at it, that’s certainly what I would do – but I’m not doing this for money. There are a variety of reasons why I want a place to bring all of my interests together on my own terms, but money is certainly not one of them.
So here’s what I’m hoping to blog about on as frequent a basis as I see fit:

• Web 2.0, social media, GIS, widgets, online video and internet marketing
• China (real specific, I know)
• Rock climbing
• Writing
• Chess
• Family
• Politics
• Climate Change
• Movies

I figure that if I’m going to talk about everything, I might as well talk about everything. It’s ridiculous of course. It probably won’t work and I wouldn’t recommend anyone to start a blog with the intention of trying to cover even a quarter of these topics, but we rarely heed our own advice, even regarding the most important of life’s decisions, and starting a blog certainly does not fall under that category, so here goes nothing.