My good friend Eric Smith, whose successes in publishing and audience have kept me motivated, wrote some very flattering things in celebration of his own birthday, mostly about how we love to faux battle by way of our respective geek blogs Geekadelphia and Technically Philly. An excerpt: … Without realizing it, Chris had finally given [...]

The Founding Fathers would have loved and leveraged social media but been fearful of its future implications on privacy and speech issues, said a host of experts at an event on the impact of new communications patterns. Earlier this month, I moderated a panel on the subject at the National Constitution Center featuring Jennifer Preston, [...]

Near the close of the OpenDataRace, a popularity contest for data sets that affect nonprofit missions, I was asked onto NewsWorks Tonight, the daily, local drive-time news radio show from NPR affiliate WHYY. We recorded the segment last week and it aired Monday. Read more about the contest here, see the data sets and register [...]

The Philadelphia Daily News today ran a cover story celebrating 10 of the city’s ‘rising power players,’ in celebrating the close of this year’s State of Young Philly, and I am proud to say I’ve been included. Find the story online here, and my section here. Go buy a copy. I was included for being [...]

One of seven White House Urban Entrepreneurship forums across the country was hosted at Temple University in Philadelphia Monday, and, in addition to Technically Philly being a media sponsor, I served on one of a dozen panels. Find the Livestream and Technically Philly coverage of Philadelphia Mayor Nutter’s address here. I was on a panel [...]

To promote the amusing book Broetry, which is a collection of poems from the “bro” perspective, Geekadelphia and Quirk Books held a Broetry Slam at National Mechanics, a bar in Old City Philadelphia. Attendees were encouraged to come with a broetry of their own to compete for a crown and a swag bag of great [...]

For Story Shuffle 7, held in a fine rowhome in the Newbold section of South Philadelphia inside a beautiful and eventually stormy night, I told the story of my first hitchhiking experience in South Dakota. My lesson: trusting in strangers is a great risk that often comes with great reward. Check out all the stories [...]

NewsWorks Tonight, the daily, local, drive-time news radio program on NPR-affiliate WHYY in Philadelphia, invited me on for a segment that aired Monday about the launch of OpenDataPhilly.org and other new data initiatives. Though I was sure to note during my interview that OpenDataPhilly was built by development shop Azavea, unfortunately that was cut in [...]

This weekend, I spent at least 30 hours in a windowless room of Drexel University for Random Hacks of Kindness Philadelphia, an international globally-minded hackathon brought to Philly by computer science PhD student and West Philly homeowner Mike Brennan. It was actually a total hoot. Number of Views:258

The inaugural Philly Tech Week, made official by City Council, has come and gone. All told, my fellow Technically Philly co-founders and PTW co-organizers helped bring together 65 events, from more than 50 groups that attracted more than 3,000 people (we’re still tallying) in the first six day-event that we first suggested in the summer, [...]