Cory Doctorow's Blog

Nice, short profile in today's Wall St Journal about pursuing a career in the nonprofit sector:

For those who are interested in doing the same, he stresses the importance of volunteering for a cause first. "Your best bet is to join up with a cause pro bono or part time," he says. "You have to be realistic and see the value of each experience."
Among the various types of nonprofits, some of the most visible are community-based organizations that provide direct services such as Meals on Wheels...

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0 comments Published on November 28, 2009 21:39 | 1 view

Data-viz for the text of Anda's Game

John did a wicked-cool set of data-visualizations of the text of my story Anda's Game: "I picked terms for the trees that were relevant to the themes of the story - gold, for in-game items and Fahrenheit, which is a clan in the story."

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0 comments Published on November 26, 2009 23:21

Guardian column: Peter Mandelson is putting the Analogue Economy first

My latest Guardian column looks at Peter Mandelson's new "Digital Economy Bill," a sweeping piece of proposed British legislation that would give Mandelson broad powers to act as the Pirate-Finder General, with the implausible aim of reducing UK file-sharing by 70 percent in one year.

Mandelson argues that Britain's Digital Economy will be based on the contrafactual premise of a steady decrease in computer speed, drive capacity, technical competence, network versatility and network ubiquity...

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0 comments Published on November 26, 2009 11:47 | 2 views

Why does Mandelson favour the Analogue Economy over the Digital?

The Guardian

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0 comments Published on November 26, 2009 11:46

To Go Boldly, WITH A LITTLE HELP plan on Starship Sofa podcast

The lovely folks at the Starship Sofa podcast recorded audio versions of my recent short story To Go Boldly (published in The New Space Opera 2), as well as the Publishers Weekly article describing my forthcoming short story collection With a Little Help.

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0 comments Published on November 26, 2009 00:01

Wide-ranging interview with the Command Line podcast

Last week I sat down for an interview with the excellent Command Line podcast at Philcon and recorded a long talk on sundry subjects ranging from politics to creativity to all my forthcoming projects.

MP3 Link

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0 comments Published on November 25, 2009 23:58

Wide-randing interview with the Command Line podcast

Last week I sat down for an interview with the excellent Command Line podcast at Philcon and recorded a long talk on sundry subjects ranging from politics to creativity to all my forthcoming projects.

MP3 Link

View full post on Cory Doctorow's website »

0 comments Published on November 25, 2009 23:58

How Wikipedia uses facts-about-facts to do the impossible

My latest Make: column, "Shortcut to Omniscience," talks about the cognitive shift that Wikipedians undergo in order to collaboratively write an encyclopedia, and how that kind of fundamental, subtle change enables networked groups of people to do things that were previously considered impossible.

Here's the thing about expertise: it's hard to define. It may be
possible for a small group of relatively homogenous people to agree on
who is and isn't an expert, but getting millions of people to do...