Dr. Weinberger began his "career" in the late '70s teaching philosophy at New Jersey's Stockton State College for five years. (He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto.) During this time he maintained his steady freelance writing of humor, reviews and intellectual and academic articles, publishing in places as diverse as The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Smithsonian, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and TV Guide.

In 1985, after being denied tenure because the tenure quota was filled, and after an enthusiastic but well-mannered student demonstration in his support, he became a junior marketing guy at Interleaf, an innovative start-up with new ideas on how to create and structure documents. At Interleaf he helped launch the industry's first document management system and its first electronic document publishing system, years ahead of the Web. He left Interleaf after 8 years, as VP of Strategic Marketing.

He founded the one-person strategic marketing company, Evident Marketing, in 1994. He has consulted to a wide variety of companies, including RR Donnelley, Intuit, Sun Microsystems, Edelman PR, Microsoft, Yahoo, and the Christopher Reeve Foundation. He frequently advises innovative startups.

In late 1995, he joined Open Text as VP of Strategic Marketing because he saw an opportunity to help shape the way intranets are used. As part of the senior management team, Dr. Weinberger helped Open Text move from one of the first Web search engine companies (the engine behind Yahoo!) to market- and thought-leadership in Web-based collaborative software.

After helping to take Open Text public in 1996, Dr. Weinberger returned to consulting, writing and speaking, helping to found a couple of dot-coms, and serving on industry and company boards. In 2000, Perseus published The Cluetrain Manifesto, of which is is a co-author. It became a national best-seller.

In 2002, Perseus published Small Pieces Loosely Joined to enthusiastic reviews.

In 2007, Times Books published Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.

Everything is Miscellaneous
The Power of the New Digital Disorder

For thousands of years, we've organized our ideas the same way we've organized our laundry, separating them into neat piles. In the digital age, this unnecessary limitation keeps companies from getting maximum value from their knowledge, and frustrates customers.

In this talk we look at the four new principles of organization and how businesses are learning that they do best if they include every piece of information they can find and allow their customers to organize the information the way that works for them.

Web 2.0: The Myth and the Meaning

The term "Web 2.0" entered our vocabulary so quickly because we were eager to find a way to acknowledge the Web's rapid evolution. But it's important to separate the myth from the reality, and then -- even more crucially -- we should recognize what the truth about Web 2.0 means for business and culture.

• From hugely successful Web-based collaborative projects we learn that sometimes centralized control gets in the way of rapid growth.
• From online businesses that "mash up" information from many sources we learn that sometimes a company's information asset has the most value when the company lets it go.
• From social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace we learn that not only is the line between the public and the private changing, but their very nature is changing.
• From the popularity of social tagging we learn that customers are now in control not just of the content of product information, but the way that information is organized and accessed.
• From the amazing growth of blogging, we learn that sound of marketing - and politics - will never be the same.

In this presentation, David Weinberger goes far beyond the usual chatter about Web 2.0, and exposes its deepest meaning for our business and our lives.

What Blogging is Not

Business and the media have insisted on misunderstanding weblogs so seriously that they can't see what's valuable in them and how they are changing their basic relationship with customers and audiences. Despite what you may have heard, blogs are not like columns written by irresponsible people. The most important bloggers are not the handful with hundreds of thousands of readers but the tens of millions with only a few readers. And they're important not because businesses can do one-to-one marketing to them - it won't work and it will make your company look foolish - but because weblogs are a new type of social group.

If your business can get past the misunderstands this talk lays out, you have a way of building a new relationship with your customers that will see you through hard times - blogging is great for crisis management - and reward you in good times.

The War against Customers
What marketing can - and must - learn from the new connectedness

For a hundred years, marketing has been waging war against customers. It's time for a cease-fire.

The fundamental fact of marketing is that you're trying to get an unwilling customer to do something they don't want to do. That's why customers want to flee when they sense they're being marketed to. But suppose waging war against our customers ? "targeting" them via "strategies" "tactics" -- isn't such a good idea? And suppose customers simply won't stand for it any more?

The answer isn't to personalize and do 1:1 marketing. That's like switching from aerial bombardment to sending out hit squads. No, we need to change the basic model of marketing that pits companies against their customers.

The problem goes back to the basics. Traditional marketing views itself as a type of broadcast: a single voice gets to send a message to a mass of people. This made sense when the mass media were one-way. Back then, a company could control its market by selectively releasing information about its products. In fact, markets themselves are defined by this broadcast model, for a market these days is a demographic segment that is likely to respond favorably to a particular message lobbed at it.

But this old way of working has serious disadvantages: customers don't trust messages and generally don't want to listen to them. Now they don't have to. A staggering percentage of the US market has another medium open to it: the Internet. Although the Internet connects masses of people ? over 500,000,000 worldwide so far ? it is profoundly not a mass medium. It is all about groups of people with passions in common talking to one another in their own voice.

That makes the Internet the anti-broadcast medium: it's not mass, it's not one-way, and it's not controlled by companies that can pay to send out a message. The Internet is, in fact, a conversation among your customers who are discovering that they are a far better source of information about products and services than the companies ever could be.

This is the most fundamental shift in marketing since the creation of mass media. And it affects all marketing, on or off the Web.