Technology and the Public Interest
Books, essays, and commentary from John Palfrey
Essays
Notes from AI Action Summit in Delhi, India, February 2026
Reflections on AI, governance, and the public interest from the AI Action Summit in Delhi.
Read essayConcord Free Public Library 150th Anniversary Celebration
Remarks on libraries, civic institutions, and the enduring importance of public knowledge.
Read essayInvesting in the Arts—in Chicago and Beyond
Thoughts on philanthropy, culture, and why investing in the arts matters for public life.
Read essayCommentary from John Palfrey
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Why is Spam Such a Hard Problem, Still?
Eric Savage, (VP of technology at StyleFeeder), has a great, clear, simple post on Russian spam.
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GoLoco.org
Robin Chase, the founder of ZipCar, has a long-awaited next act: GoLoco.org. Some Digital Native creators have posted an amusing YouTube video to introduce the concept. If you’ve loved being a ZipCar user, as I have, GoLoco just might be for you.
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Corporate Citizenship on a Censored Net
JZ and I have an op-ed in CNET on the need for companies to work together on a code of conduct related to Internet censorship and surveillance, as Google, Microsoft, Vodafone, TeliaSonera, and Yahoo! are doing.
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Charlie Frentz's First Post and "Last Words"
Charlie Frentz, Harvard College student and Berkman intern as well, recapped his summer with BzzAgent with his “first ever blog post.” Read also the great comments his post generated. Charlie’s clearly a natural born blogger, as well as entrepreneur. I read his inaugural post from Shanghai, a city buzzing with entrepreneurship, where Charlie would no…
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StyleFeeder's New Personal Shopper
My good friends at StyleFeeder (in which I have equity; see my disclosures) have today released their Personal Shopper. As seen on Mashable. It’s very cool; I love it; it is social shopping brought to IM. Imagine shopping with your friends in real-space, only together online. And, in related news, big competitor Kaboodle just got…
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CNET Touches on Blogs and Copyright Issue
It’s extraordinary to me that, several years into the blogging-and-RSS phenomenon, we still have the issue of a lack of clarity around the permissible re-use of user-generated content, as reported by CNET’s Elinor Mills (“Please don’t steal this Web content“). Fair use is part of the answer; Creative Commons licenses are another part of the…
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Paths Not Taken
EZ’s blog is always worth reading, but I found today’s post about the SDP particularly touching and revealing. He writes: “I will admit, I still find something a bit disorienting about trying to advise PhD students. It’s become increasingly clear to me that I won’t be able to convince myself to return to school and…
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Bravo to YouTube and CNN
Tonight’s debate on CNN for the Democratic presidential hopefuls was a big step forward for the way campaigns are covered. The producers deserve a lot of credit for the innovative format they introduced. The videos they chose were terrific: authentic(-seeming, anyway) voices from ordinary voters speaking directly to candidates. The final video, about “the candidate…
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Sunshine Hillygus on Internet and Campaigns
Prof. Sunshine Hillygus is presenting about her study of the persuadable voter here at SDP 2007. She has a book coming out with Princeton University Press shortly on her research. I asked her what the most surprising/biggest finding of her book is. She said that she is trying to get away from the question of…
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Internet Filtering Session at the SDP 2007
This morning — at the Summer Doctoral Program in Cambridge, MA — we’re taking up the topic of Internet filtering and the work of the ONI (and what we’ve written about in our forthcoming book from MIT Press, called Access Denied). Some of the questions that students raised about the topic and after reading our…