Doc Searls

Doc Searls is a fellow at both the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara. At the Berkman Center he heads ProjectVRM, which is at the center of a growing international community developing Vendor Relationship Management tools -- which will make customers both independent of vendors and better able to engage with them.

Doc is also --

- Senior Editor for Linux Journal, where he has been covering open source software and business trends since 1996.

- One of the world's earliest and most widely-read bloggers. J.D. Lasica, author of Darknet and proprietor of OurMedia, calls Doc "one of the deep thinkers in the blog movement."

- Co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which stirred up a storm of comment when it was posted on the Web in 1999 and became a bestselling business book in 2000 -- and continues to sell well. Today Cluetrain is sourced in almost 700 other books: a number which, according to Google Books, increases by about a book per day. (An updated 10th Anniversary edition is due out in July, 2009.)

- A business consultant who has been working with companies in Silicon Valley and around the world since the 1970s.

In The World is Flat, author and New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman calls Doc "one of the most respected technology writers in America."

In 2005, Doc received the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award for "Best Communicator."

For many years Doc has also studied the linguistics of telecom -- and how hard it is, even for Internet radicals, to walk a new walk while they're still talking old talk. Escaping from the old-talk trap will be the subject of his talk at eComm.