Esther Dyson and Steven Levy, Newsweek; Author
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[Start of Audio]
Andy Plesser: You’re kind of a free agent now, which is very exciting. What’s next for you and what are you up to?
Esther Dyson: Well, I’m going to continue to do what I was doing, which is shepherd ten startups on whose boards I’m on, and I’m on the Board of Sunlight Foundation and a couple of non-profits. And I’m posting photos at Flickr, and I’m blogging for Huffington Post. I’m pretty busy, but I don’t do video. I’ll leave that to you.
Andy Plesser: How did this kind of come to be with the Huffington Post?
Esther Dyson: Well, I know Arianna, and I thought it would be – I wanted to reach an audience that wasn’t just a bunch of geeks, basically, and it seemed like a nice venue.
Andy Plesser: That’s great, and what are you gonna be writing about?
Esther Dyson: Whatever I please – IT, policy space, IT and healthcare, travels to Russia, sort of the intersection of policy and IT and a lot of different areas, and then – that’s the great thing about a blog. It can reflect your interests.
Andy Plesser: Can evolve. Steven, you’ve started your blog fairly recently, time to the launch of the book. How’s that been going and how is blogging different than sort of traditional writing that you’ve done as a journalist all these years?
Steven Levy: It’s a lot of fun. It’s really different, and for the first time in 30 years, the stuff I write is not edited by anyone else. I just put in all myself and put it up there and get to manage the comments myself and do all that stuff, and it’s pretty interesting after you see who’s linking to your blog, and I haven’t been all that active in promoting it, but some nice people link to me.
So the other question is, since it’s my blog, gee, I’m writing about the iPod, but what if I want to write about the movie I saw the other night? I guess I could do that. I haven’t done that.
Esther Dyson: What a great party you went to.
Steven Levy: Yeah, but I guess, really, what I’m thinking is maybe I should blog about my cat because that’s a popular thing. I don’t have a cat, but I could make one up.
Andy Plesser: Yeah. Well, Esther, it must be interesting after sort of doing this very incidence of very high-level newsletter to have sort of a much – kind of an open palate in the sense now. You can sort of write about what you want and connect with different audiences.
Esther Dyson: I could always do that in the newsletter. The real adjustment is the shorter form, and I still check my facts, so blogging should be instant, but I actually will write about somebody, and then send it to them and say, “Did I quote your correctly,” blah, blah, blah.
Steven Levy: People used to have to spend thousands of dollars to read Esther’s wisdoms. Now, they get it for free.
Esther Dyson: I know, and I’m so happy because it means more people can read it. It’s really painful to write for just a few hundred people.
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Esther Dyson , Steven Levy, Jimmy Guterman, Release 1.0
