I spent much of last fall at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government as a Fellow at the Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy. While there, I researched issues related to journalism, trust and credibility – and in particular what role emerging social media might play in add...

Today I had a fun lunch with Web developers at Shift (not all of whom work there). It was a follow-up on a short discussion at Kiwi Foo about columns on the Web. My goal was to brainstorm with some Web developers/graphic designers/user experience people about ways to display lots of text on large sc...

The severe economic crisis now gripping the United States — and hence the entire world — has been labeled by the Paper of Record as the “financial equivalent of 9/11.â€� In its severity and overall impact, the comparison may hold true. But when it comes to media coverage, a far better ...

This article is also accessible on the Harvard School of Public Health’s blog Health and Human Rights . In 1995, after producing a successful weekly TV program about apartheid in South Africa against all odds, we broadcast an edition of a new series that explored revolutionary ideas about huma...

Since Jonathan Watt is in town I thought we'd better do something fun with people from the office, so today we skipped out and my dad took us for a day trip in the family boat. We went to Brown's Island --- a small volcanic island which is very close to the city but hard to get to, as no ferries go ...

Jonathan Watt arrived in Auckland on Saturday to spend some time at the office on his way to the SVG WG meeting in Sydney. To help him adjust to the antipodean time shift, I took him with my family for some time outdoors in glorious summer weather. Tim Terriberry, who works on the Theora codec, was ...

The checkin-needed queue is quite large these days. Here are a few tips for getting your checkin-needed patches landed quickly: Produce your patch using "hg export" so it includes a commit message and your user identification. This not only makes the committer's job easier, it also means you're more...

While people are working hard to nail down layout bugs for the Firefox 3.1 release, there's also exciting work happening on the trunk for post-3.1. Benjamin Smedberg landed a big patch to make nsIFrame stop pretending to be reference-counted. It also replaces QueryInterface with a similar API called...

We just got back from our Christmas boat trip with extended family. It was fantastic. I've created a custom Google Map showing the places we visited. The weather was mostly very good although on Tuesday it rained a fair bit (especially Tuesday night) and strong south-easterly winds kept us holed up ...

Ever since Bernie Madoff with all the money — fifty billion-with-a-b, apparently – the journals and airwaves have all been abuzz with references to his alleged securities fraud as a “Ponzi scheme.â€� But few accounts have delved into the back-story of who “Ponziâ€� actually was, what he ...