About

It would be nice if I had one career role. But I don’t. That would be too normal. So here’s what I play:

• Senior editor for Linux Journal, the original (and still the leading) Linux publication.
• Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. There I head ProjectVRM. I am also working on a book titled The Intention Economy: What Happens When Customers Get Real Power.
• Research Fellow at the Center for Information Technology & Society at UC Santa Barbara. There my current focus is on work toward a book titled The Giant Zero.
• One of the four authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the iconoclastic web site that became the best-selling book in 2000 and still sells around the world in many languages. A 10th anniversary edition is due out in June 2009.
• A radio veteran from way back (that’s where the “Doc” nickname came from). I sublimate that now by taking part in podcasts by others, including Steve Gillmor’s Gillmor Gang.
• A marketing, PR and advertising veteran. Most notably I co-founded Hodskins Simone & Searls, which was born in North Carolina in the late ’70s and grew in the late ’80s and early ’90s to become one of Silicon Valley’s top advertising and public relations agencies. (HS&S was absorbed by Publicis Technology in 1998.)
• A lifelong writer whose byline has appeared in OMNI, Wired, PC Magazine, The Standard, The Sun, Upside, The Globe & Mail, Release 1.0 and lots of other places, including (of course) Linux Journal. Some archives are collected at Reality 2.0, which is at my personal portal, Searls.com, which is also home to my consultancy, The Searls Group.
• A frequent speaker on any and all the above subjects. Here is my profile (now getting real old and in need of updating) at the agency that handles my gigs, Leading Authorities.

In 2005 I received the Google/O’Reilly Open Source Award for Best Communicator.

In 2007 I was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in IT by eWeek.

Since I’m always working on too many things, and will only stop when I’m dead, I want my epitaph to read, “He was almost finished.”

I can be reached by email through =doc. That’s my “i-name”. Using it keeps spammers from grabbing my email address. If that’s too complicated for you, just send an email to [my first name] @ [my last name] .com.

---

Disclosures: I consult, or am on the advisory boards of Ping Identity Corp., British Telecom, Socialtext, SpikeSource, B5 Media, PlanetEye and Technorati. Some involve equity. My other (pathetically small) stock holdings are in funds.

---

Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog