through the flames Check out my latest article iPhoneography: We’re Just Getting Started. In this short piece for the Pink Line Project, I provide some tips on how to best use your iPhone as a camera (hint: don’t use the flash) and advance the notion that the iPhone is the Polaroid of our age. BookmarkRead… Read more »
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart starts off as a hilarious farce, an inventive look at the future gone wrong. All your paranoid fears about the Department of Homeland Security are well-represented as a bureaucratic error throws Lenny, the book’s narrator, into absurdist peril. But the novel is much deeper than that. It’sRead… Read more »
Check out Something Found in the Ashes in the Washington Post. It’s my op-ed about the lessons I learned from the November fire in my apartment building. Bookmark to: Original post
Are government bloggers citizen advocates or are they PR staff required to parrot the agency line? I’ve been thinking about that in reference to the growing controversy about “naked scanners” and groping by agents of the TSA. Despite the countless stories by those who have been groped at TSA checkpoints, “Blogger Bob” of http://blog.tsa.gov insistsRead… Read more »
So, late one afternoon, my building caught fire. My apartment was fine; other people weren’t so lucky. I got the call around 6:30 PM. “Oh, Joe, I think your building is on fire.” It was a friend of mine, John Hanshaw, who lives nearby. He could see my apartment building and said that it wasRead… Read more »
Will open government lead to a more rational electorate? That’s the contention of Clay Johnson, the former director of Sunlight Labs, a community of open source developers and designers dedicated to making government more transparent, accountable and responsible. He recently spoke on a panel at Digital Capital Week, a ten-day festival in Washington, DC focusedRead… Read more »
What do fire dancers have to do with technology? Attendees at the opening night party of DC Week had a chance to find out. Digital Capital Week (DCWEEK) is a 10 day festival in Washington, DC focused on technology, innovation and all things digital in our nation’s capital. DCWEEK takes place in venues throughout WashingtonRead… Read more »
Government web sites are public records. They exist to help citizens, not promote executives. They should not be used to advance individual agendas. Yet, frequently, the first act of a new administration is to wipe out evidence of the prior leadership. This is more than just changing the names on the “About Us” page. Articles,Read… Read more »
Too much exposure to USAJOBS has really turned me cynical. Despite news reports on the need to recruit thousands of new employees, the main federal jobs site is a usability nightmare, unfathomable to even people who work on web sites, like me. While the site has few defenders, some have argued that it has toRead… Read more »
I wrote about this on my personal web site but thought that the GovLoop community might be interested. In a nutshell, an artist found a photo I took and used it to help him finish a painting. He was able to do this because I had my photo online and I had assigned it aRead… Read more »