As any modern general knows, victory is not a solution to problems; it's the start of them. When I hear all the talk about Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, AOL and NewsCorp, I think of generals discussing strategy: We'll invade -- I mean, buy -- such and such a territory. We'll annex...

I leave it to others to report from TED: The people are wonderful, the talks are extraordinary, and the food and arrangements are generous. (And I don't think I've heard the words Web 2.0 once on the main stage...)

Here I'd like to focus instead on the business model...

...or why Facebook and user-managed-metadata are more interesting than Microsoft, Yahoo! or (current) Google combined.

While the spotlight in the online world focuses on Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, the long-term news is happening closer to home - where users interact among themselves through the Web and through online social networks....

Have you made your New Year's resolutions yet? My advice: Don't bother.

Most New Year's resolutions seem to be driven more by remorse than by determination... and they are usually the same resolutions you had a year ago. Remember?

But I'm not arguing against self-improvement, just for...

I am grateful for all the usual things - health, family, enough money and access to do what I like (including weightless flights, a trip to meet election monitors in Kyrgyzstan courtesy of the National Endowment for Democracy, watching Zulu dancers shielded from the rain with a...

Worthy of note: an earmark exploration tool, courtesy of the Sunlight Foundation.

I'm on its board of directors; it's a wonderful organization devoted to letting us watch the people whom we elect and whose salaries we pay. What are they doing on our behalf -- or not?

You can read a short version of what this is about at Mediapost or even see it, courtesy of Nicholas Givotovsky, on YouTube. Basically, it's a recap/expansion of the comments I gave at the FTC "ehavioral marketing" Town Hall and the talk I plan...

Well, the contest is now in swing, and you can read all about it here and here.

Folks! We need videos! Please go to http://youtube.com/group/cookiecrumble. People don't understand how cookies, let alone behavioral targeting, works. So disclosure statements mean nothing to them. This...

This post is a pointer to a set of Flickr photos http://www.flickr.com/photos/edyson/sets/72157602060974418/ from my trip last week aboard Airship Management's blimp, cruising around New York City. If you see/saw a white blimp cruising around the city, it's probably the one I was on.

The company is based...

Last week I participated in Matthew Holt's and Indu Subaiya's Health 2.0 conference, which attracted more than twice the number of people they had anticipated (about 500) and left many more turned away. So, clearly, something's in the air.

People are excited. There were two drug-interaction companies -...

Hi Jeff -

This is in response to Jeff Chester's comment to my previous post - where he says it is "inappropriate" for me to be involved because of my connections with the marketing world. (I'm also linked nformally to TRUSTe and to the EFF, for what it's worth.)...

This post will be the first of several on the topic of cookies, behavioral targeting, spyware and disclosure statements. In fact, it's the second; here's the first.

I have long been fretting about users and their control of their own data. They are paranoid about their own privacy...

The Economist recently published a piece about the impact of the genome on the insurance industry.

This was all very interesting, but I felt it didn't quite tackle the real issue: Once we know a lot, we will have to be more explicit in what medical care...

Last weekend in Bangalore I met with K. Ganesh and Srini of TutorVista.

Everyone has heard of big banks and large tech companies outsourcing work to the masses in India, but TutorVista serves a different kind of clientele. Founder K. Ganesh (K. is a place-holder for...

Just a short one: I'm proud to announce that Eventful's Demand function is now an app on Facebook. (I'm on Eventful's board.)

I'm speaking tomorrow at the Web 2.0 NY conference.

What's new and exciting is pretty clearly Facebook ... Everyone from Marc Andreessen to Josh Kopelman so here are some notes for my opening comments before a Q&A. If I get good questions, I'll probably have...

"It turned out to be necessary to check the authenticity of their airline tickets," Colonel Volodin said in a telephone interview reported in the New York Times. He was talking about why Garry Kasparov and some 17 other people had been coincidentally detained in Moscow, and thus unable to...

The title alone may be enough to put you to sleep! but please read on: This post is a generalization of advice I'm giving to outfits in three areas: personal information as in personalized search or advertising cookies, space travel and medical information. And of course there are others...

You...

The last installment about the Simonyi launch tour. NOTE: He and the other two cosmonauts landed safely on Saturday; see www.charlesinspace.com.

The launch was really amazing - a fest of engineering, spectacle and raw energy. By contrast, the visit to Mission Control (TsUP in Russian) was...

[the final Simonyi tour post is coming very soon now; it's in fact-check currently.]

Dina Kaplan of blip.tv, Astro Teller of BodyMedia, John Hagel formerly of McKinsey, Matt Cohler of Facebook, Steve Starr from Revver and I were sitting around at Dialog yesterday and Dina came up with the...