Oct 2020 – Present · 5 yrs 7 mos · Brooklyn, New York, United States

Feb 2020 – Feb 2024 · 4 yrs

• I love writing for WIRED. I was a regular columnist for years then stepped back when I thought I was repeating myself.

Oct 2014 – Mar 2022 · 7 yrs 5 mos · The Internet

• I accidentally founded a network of thousands of people who enjoy using Unix to make web pages. More: https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf

Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 · 1 yr

Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 · 1 yr

Jan 2012 – Mar 2022 · 10 yrs 2 mos · New York, NY

• Happily writing short web and print pieces for some excellent editors.

Jan 2011 – Mar 2022 · 11 yrs 2 mos

• Serve on the advisory board for this remarkable web startup.

Jan 2011 – Jun 2021 · 10 yrs 5 mos · New York, NY

• Instructor, Content Strategies, in MFA Interaction Design program. In this class we anatomize the secret artifacts of the information age, with an emphasis on the human effort that produced them. For example: What's inside a PowerPoint file? What are the pieces? Can we mine them, extract from them, or generate them? Who defines the standards that make up our world? And subjects more abstract: What kind of stories can we tell with a relational database, versus a hierarchical database, versus a graph database?
• I've been involved with this program from its beginnings and have watched it take shape over a decade. It produces excellent product managers.

Mar 2010 – Mar 2012 · 2 yrs

• Contributed.

Feb 2005 – Mar 2010 · 5 yrs 1 mo

• Designed and built http://harpers.org, website with 250,000-page archive with tens of thousands of regular users. Java/XSLT. Kept costs to $0.07/per page, several orders of magnitude less than competing products from other publishers; as a result maintained profitability. Edited for the print magazine and for the web. Wrote and edited the Harper's Weekly Review. Launched multiple website features.
• Launched [http://harpers.org/index], a 25-year searchable version of the Harper's Index; made each line tweetable/sharable. Django/SOLR.
• Developed interest in editorial analysis and reuse. How does one discover patterns in a large corpus, and from those patterns create products (or, in a different context, creative art)? Tools at hand: search, semantic indexing, natural language processing, machine learning, creative thought.

Mar 2010 – Jun 2015 · 5 yrs 3 mos · 156 Fifth Avenue, Penthouse 1, New York, NY

• Very happily worked with this team on large, complex media strategies that are delivered not as PowerPoints but as live, working frameworks. Ongoing relationship.

Mar 2010 – Jul 2014 · 4 yrs 4 mos

• A microconsulting web firm with partner Al Rotches, entirely focused on increasing conversions on the web.

Mar 2010 – Sep 2010 · 6 mos

• A variety of taxonomy and overall strategy work with this pioneering content strategy firm.

Jan 2005 – Sep 2005 · 8 mos

• Wrote and published novel "Gary Benchley, Rock Star," (Penguin/Plume), 2005.

May 2003 – Dec 2006 · 3 yrs 7 mos

• Frequently appeared on national radio program to an audience of 12,000,000 -- http://tinyurl.com/paul-ford-npr

Jan 2003 – Dec 2004 · 1 yr 11 mos

• Contributed articles on XML, the Semantic Web, and various aspects of markup; see http://www.xml.com/pub/au/192

Jan 2003 – Dec 2003 · 11 mos

• Codified the marketing language across feature sets and product lines using an innovative grid-based templating system.

Jan 2003 – Dec 2003 · 11 mos

• Codified the marketing language across feature sets and product lines for Yamaha synthesizers. This was kind of a cool project--optimizing for translation and reproducibility across a vast range of products each of which was slightly different than the other.

Jan 2001 – Mar 2022 · 21 yrs 2 mos

• My work here has resulted in national radio coverage and press interviews; serialized narrative ("Gary Benchley, Rock Star") was bought by Penguin/Plume and published as well as optioned for screenplay. http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/paul_ford/

Jan 2000 – Sep 2001 · 1 yr 8 mos

• All manner of work for an artificial intelligence research firm in Savyon, Israel.

Oct 1999 – Jan 2005 · 5 yrs 3 mos

• Copywriting, information architecture, strategy, etc.

Jan 1999 – Jan 2000 · 1 yr

• Strategized brandishly.

Oct 1997 – Present · 28 yrs 7 mos

• Wrote many things.

Jan 1997 – Jan 1999 · 2 yrs

• Strategized seniorly.

Jan 1996 – Jan 1998 · 2 yrs

• Strategized.

Jan 1995 – Mar 2022 · 27 yrs 2 mos · Greater New York City Area

• I'm a pretty well-established writer on culture and technology, although I'm writing less now that I've started a business. I'm the author of what must now be thousands of: magazine articles (Harper's, Elle, New York Times Magazine, New Republic, Businessweek, NPR, The Message on Medium, The Morning News), email newsletters, blog posts, tweets, etc., etc.. I'm writing a book about web pages for FSG—it's late, alas. I wrote an entire issue of Bloomberg Businessweek on the subject "What Is Code," and it won the National Magazine Award for best single-topic issue.