The name...

...is a tip of the hat to The New Yorker, which has long used the label "Notes & Comment" for the brief editorials in the Talk of the Town section. If The New Yorker were being started today, I think Talk of the Town might well turn up as a weblog.

Who I am:

I'm one of the people who started Salon in fall of 1995 -- I was part of a group of refugees from the San Francisco Examiner, where I'd worked for nearly ten years as theater critic, then movie critic, then technology columnist. I was Salon's technology editor until 1999, when I became managing editor. I took a leave of absence from Salon in Nov. 2004 to write a book -- Dreaming in Code, due out in Nov. 2006 from Crown Publishers. In January, 2006, I returned to Salon in a new role -- as VP of New Projects I'll be helping Salon figure out its place in the conversational, participatory Web.

I published my first Web site in 1994 and have sporadically maintained a site over the years -- first at www.dmz.com, more recently at wordyard.com -- but haven't kept it terribly up to date since Salon absorbs most of my publishing energies.