Doc Searls

Doc Searls is a lifelong journalist, author, businessman, broadcaster, photographer, and a pioneering blogger.

As an editor with Linux Journal for twenty-three years (finally as editor-in-chief), Doc was influential in getting the world talking about and implementing both Linux and open source. Doc's byline has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail, and many other publications. He is co-author of the bestselling (and meme-making) Cluetrain Manifesto (Basic Books, 2000, 2010), and author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), which is now ten years ahead of its time.

Besides Linux Journal and freelance work, Doc has written more than a hundred-fifty pieces since 2007 inveighing against privacy-violating tracking by the advertising business and its dependents in publishing. (Note: TWiT is not one of those dependents.)

He is co-founder and board member of Customer Commons, a nonprofit spun out of ProjectVRM which he started as a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society (and which is still hosted there), a fellow with the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara, a visiting scholar with the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, and a business veteran who co-founded and served as Creative Director for Hodskins Simone and Searls, which for many years was one of Silicon Valley’s leading technology advertising and marketing agencies. He co-founded and co-organizes the Internet Identity Workshop, a highly influential and productive open space conference that has been going strong since 2005, meeting twice yearly at the Computer History Museum.

His nickname, Doc, was acquired when he worked in radio. For several years, he hosted the FLOSS Weekly live show and podcast for the TWiT network. He co-hosts the podcast Reality 2.0.

As a photographer (who started in the newspaper business), Doc has now published more than seventy-five thousand photos online, most of which are permissively licensed to encourage use by others. Today hundreds of those are found in Wikipedia articles, while his two collections on Flickr have received more than 17 million views.