Travels with Rhody

I’m writing this in Salt Lake City, about three-quarters of the way from Boston to San Francisco. Just two more days of driving to go. If you do all your transcontinental travel by plane, you forget how big the country really is—especially the western half of it.
Usually I’d be paying more attention to the scenery [...]

No self-respecting digital media writer can go on a road trip without documenting the whole thing digitally. Soon after I’d decided to drive from Boston to San Francisco to take up my new post as Editor of Xconomy San Francisco—and recruited my good friend Graham Gordon Ramsay to share the driving—we hatched a devious plan [...]

I haven’t been updating Travels With Rhody much lately, and today I can finally say why: I’ve been working behind the scenes to help launch Xconomy San Francisco, the newest city in Xconomy’s national network. (Props to Scott Kirsner at the Boston Globe for figuring this out a couple of weeks ago.) The new site [...]

Physicians like Atul Gawande (Complications) have written plenty about how medical malpractice lawsuits are an ineffective way to prevent medical errors. And lawyers and journalists have been talking for years about the flaws in medical malpractice law, and how the idea of “no-fault” malpractice compensation might be fairer for everyone involved in cases of iatrogenic [...]

I couldn’t be more gratified about the response that the Mass Mobile Month campaign has been generating in the local technology community. With 15 events on the docket between late February and early April, and with something like 25 supporting organizations signed up to help promote them, it’s looking like March 2010 will be the [...]

One of our big projects for the last week at Xconomy has been launching MassMobileMonth.com, a website collecting information about the unusually large selection of mobile technology events going on in and around Boston in March 2010. With help from more than a dozen organizations and companies around town, we’ve put together a detailed guide [...]

A side project that’s been occupying a lot of my weekend time lately has finally come to fruition. It’s an e-book version of the first 80 editions of my weekly Xconomy column World Wide Wade, which focuses on the intersection of digital media, Internet culture, entrepreneurship, and creativity. The book is called Pixel Nation: 80 [...]

I submitted my “World Wide Wade” column today, Tablet Fever: How Apple Could Go Where No Computer Maker Has Gone Before, to Slashdot, the news aggregator site for nerds. (I count myself as one of those, by the way.) When Slashdot accepts and links to your articles, it can bring tens of thousands of page [...]

In a presentation at the Boston Book Festival last weekend, Jon Orwant, a Google engineer involved in the company’s Book Search project, made a memorable and, I thought, quite perceptive remark about the e-book business.
“Think about the books you have at home and how you organize them,” Orwant said. “Some of you may not organize [...]

Got an unexpected scoop today while attending a session on the future of reading at the inaugural Boston Book Festival. Turns out that the Internet Archive and the One Laptop Per Child Foundation have been working behind the scenes for the last year to convert the 1.6 million public-domain books scanned by the Archive for [...]