Speaker details

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, co-author (with fellow Berkman Fellow David Weinberger and others) of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and one of the world's best-known and widely read bloggers. His work as a journalist, speaker and advocate of the Internet led to a Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award for Best Communicator in 2005. In "The World is Flat", Thomas L. Friedman calls Doc "one of the most respected technology writers in America".

Doc's long and varied professional history includes work as a newspaper and magazine editor, radio personality and marketing executive. His longest professional tour of duty was with Hodskins Simone and Searls — the advertising and public relations agency which he co-founded in North Carolina in 1978, and which went West to become one of Silicon Valley' leading advertising and public relations agencies. (HS&S was sold to Publicis Technology in early 1998.) Doc's marketing consultancy, The Searls Group, began as the public relations arm of HS&S. Over the years he has worked with Hitachi, Sun, Apple, Nortel, Borland, British Telecom, Motorola and other leading companies, in addition to many start-ups.

Doc became a Berkman Fellow in August, 2006. He has founded and is leading the Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) project at Berkman Center. VRM is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties.

His current projects include as well identity-related events (either sponsored by or involving the Berkman Center), and research toward a book on individual empowerment in networked markets -- and the role of that empowerment in the healthy growth of the Internet.

Doc has a B.A. in Philosophy from Guilford College, and is a Visiting Scholar with the Center for Information and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara.