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stevenberlinjohnson.com

The weblog of Steven Johnson.

The Book Is OutDecember 26 2008

Quick post from the JetBlue terminal to say that The Invention of Air should be arriving in bookstore shelves today, and we've started the official review season nicely with a great long writeup in the L.A. Times this morning.

More to come in the next day or so...

How To Use Twitter To Land An Interview With David FrostDecember 22 2008

A few months ago, I flew into London to give a talk at the Handheld Learning Conference, which had put me up at the Hoxton Hotel. I'd arrived late at night, and when I woke up, I realized that, for the first time in my life, I was waking up in London with no clear idea what neighborhood I was in. That seemed like precisely the kind of observation/query to share with the Twittersphere, and so I jotted down this tweet before heading out to find a coffee:

Waking up at the Hoxton Hotel in London --- strangely unclear as to what neighborhood I'm actually in...

When I came back from coffee, I discovered, first, from a batch of Twitter replies that I was apparently in the neighborhood where half my London friends lived and worked. And then I noticed the envelope that had been placed on my desk. I opened it up, and it turned out to be a note from a producer who worked with Sir David Frost. They had noticed on Twitter that I was in London, and said they were very interested in having me talk with Sir David about Everything Bad Is Good For You for his show on English-language Al Jazeera.

This was cool for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that it has given me to the opportunity to tell people, ad nauseum, that David Frost is following me on Twitter. (Even if it's not exactly true.)

Anyhow, we ended up having to do the interview by satellite, unfortunately, but the good news was that we got to talk about the new book instead (with a bit at the end about pop culture.) It aired over the weekend, and is now on the YouTubes. You can see it for yourself in the clip below -- I come on about halfway through. I look a little pained at the outset because I was straining to hear him on the earpiece, but I think it worked out all right, and he was very flattering in the intro. Talk about baptism by fire: the very first interview I did for Invention of Air was with David Frost. And I have Twitter to thank for it!

The System WorkedNovember 5 2008

A thousand important things have been said already about the milestone of our first African-American president (and perhaps just as important for future demographic trends, our first mixed-race president.) But I've been thinking about something else this morning: not just Obama's election, but the entire system that led up to this moment. We hear so often that the American political system is broken, but I think the last two years suggest that our national politics are healthier than we have been led to believe.

It starts for me with Bush's approval rating. You run the country with breathtaking incompetence for eight years; you defy the constitution and the Geneva Conventions; you let an entire city drown; you fail to ask for an inch of sacrifice from the rich during the greatest concentration of wealth in our country's history. You do all those things, and it turns out the American people pay attention: you become the least popular president since the invention of polling. Yes, it took too long for the country to realize how disastrous the Bush Administration was, but 9/11 left us with a kind of political post-traumatic stress disorder that made it too hard to turn on our leader in time to vote him out the first chance we had. But eventually the country woke up.

Then when the campaigns began, they were serious, engaged, and hard-fought. Voters consistently out-manoeuvred the media consensus at pretty much every turn. Giant financial advantages or na

StoryMaps!September 18 2008

It's an exciting day at outside.in: we're going live with our StoryMaps, the first of many tools that we're going to be offering local bloggers and publishers as part of our GeoToolkit. This is the StoryMap for stevenberlinjohnson.com:

Maps of blog posts or news stories are not new of course, but we think these StoryMaps are going to be very popular for a couple of reasons:

1. There's no need to add geo data manually to create the map. Just sign up for Geotoolkit, submit your feed, and we'll start detecting places in your posts automatically. (If we miss something, you can easily add place data with our feed management tools.)

2. For each place on the map, we include the place name and address, plus up to three stories from your archive, so you can see the history of what you've written about that location.

3. Users can change the time-scale on the fly -- seeing only the last week's worth of stories, or taking a big gulp and seeing six months.

You can already see StoryMaps live at some great local sites around the web, like DC's New Columbia Heights blog; NYC's superb local site, Gothamist; and Brooklyn's own Flatbush Gardener.

We're going to be adding ne

Social Traffic JamsSeptember 15 2008

I'm slowly getting my Brooklyn rhythm back, after six weeks on Shelter Island and a week in the UK, and one of the things that I've noticed very acutely over the past few days is something that my wife and I first noticed when we moved to Park Slope five years ago: you have to budget an extra ten minutes whenever you walk somewhere in this neighborhood, because you invariably run into people you know, people with whom you inevitably want to have a fun little neighborly chat. Yesterday morning, coming back from the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket with breakfast (green tomatoes!), I ran into one of my best friends from college out walking his dog. This morning, picking up pastries for the family at Colson Patisserie, I saw my college girlfriend with her two kids sitting outside in front of the bakery. So both days, I showed up fifteen minutes late with breakfast to a household of ravenous boys.

I've started thinking of these little incidents as social traffic jams -- you're trying to get from point x to point y, but your social network gets in the way.  I think they're probably pretty rare, at least in most environments that Americans now call home. They don't happen in car-centric cities and suburbs, for obvious reasons; you need public space and pedestrian speed of sidewalks to stop and have a chat with your neighbor. And at least in my experience, they rarely happened in Manhattan, because the extreme density of Manhattan forces people to enter into an implici