I led the technology development of MediaCommons, a network of scholars, students, and other interested members of the public trying to shift the focus of scholarship back to the circulation of discourse. The project discussed at ArsTechnica, Chronicle for Higher Education, ZDNet and AcademicCommons.

The Institute for the Future of the Book created this project to investigate new approaches to writing in the networked environment, and to see what happens when authors and readers are brought into conversation over an evolving text. Working with McKenzie Wark, we launched Gamer Theory, a  widely reviewed networked book published by Harvard Press.

Lewis Lapham, editor emeritus of Harper’s Magazine, approached the Institute for the Future of the Book to help him and his colleagues launch the web component of this new journal, called Lapham’s Quarterly. We conceived of a project called Operation Iraqi Quagmire, that provided informed sources and scholars the ability to closely annotate the recently published Iraq Study Group Report. I developed the annotation technology, a WordPress plugin that later became CommentPress.

CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Working with the Institute, I developed the technology and continue to manage the source code and releases.

I am the sole writer of nailchipper, a blog about, well, whatever I like.

Lisa Vershbow, an accomplished jewelry designer of international reputation, asked us for a clean, attractive site that reflected some of the stylistic aspects of her work. We delivered the site along with a fully featured backend administration control-panel.

Mitchell Stephens, professor of journalism at New York University, in writing a paper titled Holy of Holies, wished to allow his audience to annotate his text with links and references. At the institute, we developed such a a system, and later developed it as CommentPress.

At Future of the Book we developed a forum for Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory called The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age