Update, or a missing person report

I just received a kind inquiry via email from a reader who wondered what had happened to this blog.

It’s a fair question.

It’s been a challenging few months, professionally and personally, and I’ve been less productive than I would have liked. I’ve also found that I’ve written much less since I started teaching at MIT. I’m a slow writer – posts here that aren’t transcriptions of other people’s talks are usually the result of a couple hours research and 3-4 hours writing… and there just aren’t a lot of days in my calendar that have 4-6 free hours available. I miss being able to write as much as I used to, but I’m enjoying other aspects of my life: teaching, advising, collaborating with students and staff.

So here’s the plan going forward: I’ve got a bunch of pieces I hope to write in the next few weeks. Most will be published in three places – here, on FOLD.cm (where they’ll have bonus images and links) and on Medium, using IFTTT to syndicate my RSS feed to my Medium account. (Hat tip to Dave Winer for tipping me off to this trick – a good recipe exists here – and for putting forth the argument that everyone should have multiple places to publish their content, rather than locking themselves into a single platform.

In the mean time, here’s a piece I wrote recently for The Guardian on advertising and surveillance. And if you really miss me, here’s a brief interview I did with the Beta Boston section of the Boston Globe, talking about my media diet and about the writing cabin I’ve been building.