David Weinberger, Ph.D., is a senior researcher at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. His twisty career began as a philosophy professor for six years, and then took a sharp turn when his many years as a freelance journalist and humor writer led him to a job in a high tech start-up as a marketing writer. That put him in a position to observe the early rise of the World Wide Web.  He went on to become a Marketing VP and strategic marketing consultant to companies working at the heart of the Net revolution. 

In 1999 he was a co-author of the seminal work in Internet business, "The Cluetrain Manifesto", and then wrote "Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web," a work that brought his philosophical training to bear on the question of the Net's significance. In 2004, he became a Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center where he wrote "Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder," a book about the profound changes in how we understand the organization of the things in our world; it is dedicated to librarians. This led to becoming co-director if the Harvard Library Innovation Lab where for almost five years he worked with technologists and developers, including on a networked platform for the Harvard Library. His most recent book, "Too Big to Know" (2012), looks at  the networking of knowledge. Dr. Weinberger has written many times for Harvard Business Review and Wired, and his work has appeared in journals as diverse as Scientific American, The Atlantic.com, The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Slate, Salon, Smithsonian, USAToday, CNN, and TV Guide. He was a Shorenstein journalism fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, has been an advisor to presidential campaigns, and was a Franklin Fellow at the U.S. State Department 2009-2011.

He is currently teaching at Harvard Extension, is at the Berkman Klein Center, and is working on a book about how machine learning and the Internet are changing our basic ideas about how things happen (Harvard Business Press, Feb. 2019).


Read his interview with Database Trends & Applications magazine.