I was recently invited to guest-post at Freedom to Tinker, formerly Ed Felten’s group blog and now officially hosted by Ed’s Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton. Ed’s been a hero for ages (dating back to at least his voting machine work, if not to his Microsoft work) and so the invite was very flattering. I’ll be there through mid-November, and cross-posting headlines and snippets here.
My first post at FTK is on a topic that got interesting to me after I saw Clay Shirky speak at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference: Political Information Overload and the New Filtering. In a nutshell, I look at some of the new filtering mechanisms that are (or aren’t) helping us deal with the deluge of political information- information that was always being created, but is only now being distributed so widely that it feels overwhelming. Sadly, I’ve got no great insight, but I think it is an area that deserves more thought and design instead of the ad hoc evolution that is creating it right now.