Let me make myself perfectly clear.

“Information wants to be free.”
I design tools that deal with the consequences.

I want to see the web help us come to a better understanding of each other and the world we inhabit together. To that end, I have been helping companies turn good ideas into clever products for over fifteen years. My focus is design, but my contribution frequently extends into product strategy, software engineering and brand development. I love working through the perceived boundaries between these disciplines.

In July 2010, I joined Google, where I work on Search. Google acquired Metaweb, where I had worked for four and a half years on Freebase, a massive, collaboratively-edited entity graph of people, places and things, made accessible to all through a powerful API and Creative Commons licensing. It's exciting to see that project grow to Google scale.

I also work with The Long Now Foundation on projects including Long Bets, an arena for making long-term bets about the future. Other clients have included Kevin Kelly, Applied Minds, Cartesis SA (acquired in 2007 by SAP) and Sega.

Right now, I'm interested in:

personally-motivated civic engagement, and tools that will help it spread;
attention literacy and intimacy gradients, or how we decide who we pay attention to and who we want paying attention to us;
data visualization of large structured datasets;
JQuery and emerging server side JavaScript frameworks, especially Node;
personal and community branding;
artifacts that can't be mistaken for products.

I want to give you my undivided attention, but I can’t stop thinking about the light in here.

I tend to complicate moments of intimacy with cameras. My friends and lovers tolerate this with an astonishing patience that I'm very grateful for. I try hard to take decent pictures of them in return.

I also take a lot of pictures of machines, especially old cars and industrial infrastructure. I haven't figured out what story I'm telling with these, but it has something to do with how we decide the individual fates of all these machines that we've spared no expense to create, and how we choose which will be meticulously restored, grudgingly maintained, or mercilessly forgotten.

There are about a million words in the English language. We chose Home.

When kristie dahlia and I got married in 1999, we changed our last names to Home. We have some pretty unconventional ideas about home and marriage. We live in a TIC called hartford.st in the Castro district of San Francisco, with Dan Haskovec, Jennifer Lynch, their daughters Hazel and Oona, Todd Elliott, Judith Zissman, dog Lyle, and cats Oh, Po, and Boogie.

I'd rather help throw the party.

You might have seen me getting my hands dirty at EG, TED, TEDMED, Burning Man, SF Embassy, SXSW, Chillits, bianca's smut shack, or Thursday Night Dinner. Next time you see me out somewhere, come say hello!

Value judgements are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
John Cage

With tools we crave intimacy.
Brian Eno

Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.
Paul Valery

There is a pleasure in staying home to adjust each physical detail so that wherever the eye falls, there is harmony. Then go outside and do the same.
Jenny Holzer

Eroticism is the driving force behind everything in the world.
Luigi Colani

Most of the wonderful places in the world were not made by architects but by the people.
Christopher Alexander

Good designers make trouble.
Tibor Kalman

Let me make myself perfectly clear.

“Information wants to be free.”I design tools that deal with the consequences.

I want to give you my undivided attention, but I can’t stop thinking about the light in here.

There are about a million words in the English language. We chose Home.

I'd rather help throw the party.

“Information wants to be free.”
I design tools that deal with the consequences.