Category Archives: Interviews

Interview With Brewster Khale On OpenP2P.com

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Here’s
an interview that was published last month in OpenP2P.com with Brewster Khale.

“Universal Access To All Human Knowledge” is a motto of Raj Reddy from Carnegie Mellon. I found that if you really actually come to understand that statement, then that statement is possible; technologically possible to take, say, all published materials — all books, music, video, software, web sites — that it’s actually possible to have universal access to all of that. Some for a fee, and some for free. I found that was a life-changing event for me. That is just an inspiring goal. It’s the dream of the Greeks, which they embodied, with the Egyptians, in the Library of Alexandria. The idea of having all knowledge accessible.
But, of course, in the Library of Alexandria’s case, you had to actually go to Alexandria. They didn’t have the Internet. Well, fortunately, we not only have the storage technology to be able to store all of these materials cost-effectively, but we can make it universally available. So that’s been just a fabulous goal that causes me to spring out of bed in the morning.
And it also — when other people sort of catch on to this idea that we could actually do this — that it helps straighten the path. You know, life, there’re lots of paths that sort of wander around. But I find that having a goal that’s that far out, but also doable, it helps me keep my direction, keep our organization’s direction. And I’m finding that a lot of other people like that direction, as well.

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Interview With Craig Newmark

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I interviewed Craig Newmark for a project in one of my graduate classes.
Here’s an excerpt (complete transcription below):

A: Craigslist, as I think about it more and more. What I’ve done, not consciously, but just implemented what I could of the philosophy that I guess I’ve adopted, not consciously, and that seems to be happening by many people on the Net. The deal is that, in the early 90’s, a lot of people, including myself, somehow figured that eventually the Net would change the way we do everything. That includes business, it includes socializing — the way we connect to people, plus online and in real life, and it might also change the world in terms of the way we govern ourselves, the way we get help when a country’s in trouble. I even felt that a little bit when I saw the ArpaNet in the early 70’s when I was at CASE tech. And this was pretty good.
And nowadays, after the bubble is over, we now see that the Net has started to change everything. It’s changing the way we do business in a number of areas. It’s changing the way we socialize in a number of ways, particularly dating and so on. The ubiquity of digital cameras has also accelerated online dating, and we’re now seeing, or beginning to see, the Internet changing the way we govern ourselves, at least in the U.S. The Net has strongly influenced the way the Dean people are doing their thing… another way to look at it is, in the early 90’s we had this technology we think is going to change the world. We had this bubble, which distracted a lot of people with a lot of money and, on the down side, the bursting of that bubble lost a lot of people jobs and lost a lot of people their retirement money. On the positive side, this world-changing, democratizing technology got developed a lot faster than otherwise. It got deployed a lot faster than otherwise. A lot of people go trained in that technology throughout the world who are, in my fantasy at least, now going around the world changing it. That’s not bad.
Q: Do you purposefully use technology to change the world?
A: That wasn’t my vision originally. I just wanted to connect better with people. To let them know what’s going on. To hear about what’s going on, and that worked pretty well. Doing this has helped me realize that we don’t save the world with big deal social activism normally. We change the world through many, many little acts of good will, and I just provided a platform where people can in fact implement many thousands or millions acts of good will. We’re not the only ones, but, you know, we do a good job of it, and we’re growing.

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Daily Show Interview With Walter Isaacson About Ben Franklin

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Walter Isaacson is a former chairman and CEO of CNN, the President of the Aspen Institute, and the author of A Benjamin Franklin Reader.
Franklin worshippers such as myself will get a lot of mileage out of this interview. There are some lovely descriptions of my man Ben hanging out and doing cool things up until the day he died.
It made me want to read the book.
This is from the October 22, 2003 program.

Interview with Walter Isaacson (Small – 15 MB)







The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

My Interview In Japan’s “Internet Magazine”

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This interview ran in the May 2003 issue of Japan’s
Internet Magazine. (The translation is a little choppy…)


 Title: XML Specialist Lisa Rein
CTO of Creative Commons who has another name as XML Queen – an interview with Lisa Rein
By Gohsuke Takama.
XML Specialist Lisa Rein is leading technical architect for Creative Commons, which Lawrence Lessig has introduced. We asked her about how she, a journalist/ musician/editor, became recognized by some as the ‘XML Queen.’

Q: What kind of work was that you did in the CreativeCommons project?
LR: My official title was ‘Techinical Architect.’ Basically I was the first CTO of CreativeCommons. I did basic reserach and designed architecture with development team. Larry (Lessig) already had an idea of building machine readable licenses, so my role there was to lead to accomplish (the project of) buiding XML licenses using RDF, that is based on right ideologies and is compatible and interoperable with many different systems.
Q: How did you get inerested in XML?
LR: It was in 1997. I was an editor of Netscape World magazine at that time. At a conference in April I met Chris Lilly of the W3C and asked him many questions. He happily answered me, and gave me the draft of XML standard, which was still under development. I had no idea what it was at the time, but got excited about the fact that a standard that everyone could use was getting realized.
Q: What was the situation surrounding XML?
LR: “The Web needs XML” was understood by everyone of the first XML WG, and they guided me. Tim Bray and the older generation who made HTML were very worried about the future of the web. But they also thought that if we can build a legitimate standard as quickly as possible, the web would keep going for a while.
Q: So are you self-taught in XML?
LR: No, not by myself. The whole world was a teacher to me. When I sent out questions in emails to experts all around the world for different themes, most of them replied to me with wonderful answers! I thougt that they felt happy to be asked by a person who really wants to learn that had a serious interest in the subject. Then, as I learned more about the subject more, I became more interested in getting actively involved.
Q: How did you start teaching XML?
LR: Since I was involved deeply, to spread XML to the world became my role. My teaching started in my local community college in Bellevue, WA, and then I also did consulting for corporations. But it wasn’t fun to teach students who were told to study by their bosses. Or, I should say, it sucked, and could not wait to go home every day. After that, I started teaching at UC Berkeley extension’s online seminars. In 2001, I had more teaching gigs as XML get into main stream, but several gigs were canceled in the middle of the course affected by ecconomic down turn.
Q: How did corporations and universities find you?
LR: UC Berkeley, via Craig’s List. Corporations, well, probably they searched on the web. They only wanted some big names. and around that time there were some people calling me the “XML Queen”. It was kind of like “hey everyone, here comes the queen to teach you XML” kind of thing…

Henry Kissinger On The Daily Show

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Henry Kissinger was a guest on
The Daily Show Monday night.
Pretty good interview. Henry was actually a funny guy. Jon had fun with him.
Hard to believe this is the same guy who ordered the assasination of a democratically-elected President in Chile in 1973 and secretly bombed Cambodia that same year (and got a Nobel Peace Prize for it).
But hey, life is strange.

Here’s another Daily Show clip on Kissenger from last December.
This is from the October 20, 2003 program.
Note that these videos aren’t using my new format strategy yet as I’m still learning the ropes of it and I have a ton of footage to put up that I generated before learning about it.

Kissinger On Daily Show – Part 1 of 2 (Small – 11 MB)

Kissinger On Daily Show – Part 2 of 2 (Small – 7 MB)

Kissinger On Daily Show – All (Small – 18 MB)







The Daily Show. (The best news on television.)