Printable Biography of David Weinberger

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He's the co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the bestseller that cut through the hype and told business what the Web was really about. His latest book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, has been published to rave reviews hailing it as the first book to put the Internet in its deepest context. He's a frequent commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. He's written for the "Fortune 500" of business and tech journals, including The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Miami Herald, The Boston Globe and Wired. Journalists from The New York Times, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, InformationWeek and many more turn to him for insight. He is a columnist for Darwin Magazine and Knowledge Management World, and writes an influential business technology newsletter and a daily "weblog." He was a philosophy professor for six years, a comedy writer for Woody Allen for seven years, a humor columnist for Oregon's major daily newspaper, a dot-com entrepreneur before most people knew what a home page was, and a strategic marketing consultant to household-name multinationals and the most innovative startups. He's got a Ph.D. in philosophy and has been appointed a Fellow at Harvard's prestigious Berkman Institute for Internet & Society.

He is also one of the most entertaining and acclaimed presenters around. Dr. David Weinberger turns this remarkable range of experience and knowledge to the most important question facing every business today: How is technology changing the way my employees, partners and customers are putting themselves together, and how is that changing the basics of my business? The answer will surprise you. Dr. Weinberger began his "career" in the late '70s teaching philosophy at New Jersey's Stockton State College for five years. During this time he maintained his steady freelance writing of humor, reviews and intellectual and academic articles, publishing in places as diverse as The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Smithsonian, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and TV Guide.

In 1985, after being denied tenure because the tenure quota was filled, and after an enthusiastic but well-mannered student demonstration in his support, he became a junior marketing guy at Interleaf, at that point an innovative start-up with new ideas on how to create and structure documents. At Interleaf he helped launch the industry's first document management system and its first electronic document publishing system, years ahead of the Web. He left Interleaf after 8 years, as VP of Strategic Marketing.

He founded the one-person strategic marketing company, Evident Marketing, in 1994 and within two years counted among his clients a wide variety of companies, including RR Donnelley, Intuit, Sun Microsystems, Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 and CSC Index.

In late 1995, he joined Open Text as VP of Strategic Marketing because he saw an opportunity to help shape the way intranets are used. As part of the senior management team, Dr. Weinberger helped Open Text move from one of the first Web search engine companies (the engine behind Yahoo!) to market- and thought-leadership in Web-based collaborative software. After helping to take Open Text public in 1996, Dr. Weinberger returned to consulting, writing and speaking, helping to found a couple of dot-coms, and serving on industry and company boards. In 2000, Perseus published The Cluetrain Manifesto which became a national best-seller. In 2002, Perseus published Small Pieces Loosely Joined to enthusiastic reviews.

Dr. Weinberger currently writes too much, including 3 weblogs, articles for Wired, Salon, USAToday, Esther Dyson's Release 1.0, and many more. He is working on another book that he doesn't want to talk about yet. During the 2004 presidential campaign, he was Senior Internet Advisor to the Howard Dean campaign, consulting on Internet policy. In 2004 he was made a Fellow at Harvard's prestigious Berkman Institute for Internet & Society. Dr. Weinberger earned his doctor of philosophy in philosophical studies at the University of Toronto. His undergraduate degree, summa cum laude, with honors, is from Bucknell University. Dr. Weinberger has been appointed to the AIIM Emerging Technology Advisory Group, the Seybold Conference Advisory Board, the World Congress of Philosophy Advisory Board, the Virtual Business advisory board, and the Xplor Business Strategies Advisory Board. He serves on the Board of Directors and Advisory Boards of several innovative companies.  

Programs:
Everything Is Miscellaneous, Messiness Is A Virtue, And You Don't Want To Be The Last To Figure It Out: Four New Principles For Organizing Information

The Information Revolution That Wasn't And The One That Will Be:

The dot-com learning era has come to this - one of Woody Allen's gag writers will share his insights about the state of technology in business. Okay, so he's also a Harvard Fellow, commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered," philosophy professor and columnist for Darwin and KMWorld magazines. Come and hear his take on how the new wave of technology is taking business apart and putting it back together. Businesses can no longer control their customers or partners or employees by selectively releasing information. Learn how your marketing, training, management and supply chains are going to have to be reinvented. Conversational values are replacing organizational values - instead of being held together by rules and roles, companies are being organized around who is speaking to whom. This speaking together produces new Knowledge and leads to new learning - often times outside of the training room.

The Cluetrain Manifesto: Everything You Know About The Web Is Wrong:

What is the Web for? We don't know, yet the adoption rate is steeper than for any technology since fire. We can only understand the way the Web has swept through our culture by seeing that it is making us a promise that goes far beyond that of "frictionless" ecommerce and better "shopping experiences." Ecommerce occurs within a new context that the Web is creating, a context of very personal relationships in which we connect in new ways...and re-discover our voice. Against this stand too many businesses with a blinkered interest only in techniques of management and control, not recognizing that the Web is subverting them. Businesses that enter the Web speaking in the old voice of committee-spawned Corporatese make themselves irrelevant at best and laughable at worst. But, if businesses recognize the depth of the change and are ready to listen to their markets and their employess, there are opportunities for succeeding not only in the traditional ways but in new ways we haven't yet begun to comprehend.

The Real Web - A Guided Tour:

If you read the media accounts, the Web seems to be about electronic catalog shopping, stolen music, and pornography. So what's the fuss? David Weinberger will take your audience on a tour of the Web, showing screenshots of the sites that he thinks explains the lure of the Web and its tremendous importance to just about every aspect of our culture. From Amazon's review pages ("where children grow up assuming that they can speak and the world will listen") to BlueMountain Arts ("an ugly-looking site that became #1 in its category because it looks like real humans made it"), Dr. Weinberger will show your audience that the Web is a new public world based on heart and the sound of the human voice - and even more important than we'd thought.

Marketing In The Age Of The Web - Learning To Talk...Again:

It's no accident that marketing uses the language of war: marketing campaigns, strategies, tactics, etc. Marketing aims at getting an unwilling public to do what the marketer wants. The chief weapon has been the control of information, selectively broadcast to selective demographic slices defined by what they have in common. But now we have the Internet. Customers have discovered that they themselves are the best source of information about companies and products. We speak to one another in authentic, human voices, expressing our point of view as individuals. In other words, we're the opposite of what shows up in demographic slices. With the recovery of our voice comes an epochal change in the traditional power relationship. In this direct, forceful and funny presentation we look at the new dynamics of the market, and at some companies that have figured this out...and some who haven't.

Unmanaging Your Knowledge: What Knowledge Management Is...And Isn't:

Knowledge management (KM) became all the rage because, for all our data and print-outs and spreadsheets, we still don't understand what's going on. So, we hope we can identify some special type of "super information" that will make sense of the rest of the information. In this skeptical look at KM, I maintain that our information doesn't make sense to us precisely because it's built to be managed. Getting more information isn't going to help. And if we insist on managing our "knowledge," it will suffer from the same deficiencies as the information that isn't nourishing us. Instead, we need to see that the Web is transforming information - its nature, how we gather it, how we evaluate it. This profoundly transforms how we make decisions, how we work together, and even what it means to be an expert.

The Future Of Documents:

The only thing today's Web-based documents have in common with the paper-based ones of ten years ago is that they're still usually rectangular. And the changes are just beginning. This is a huge change because of the importance of documents and books to our culture. It affects everything from the nature of expertise to how documents are turning into video games.