I once described myself, in a bio for a short-lived column on Hotwired's Packet "channel," as "your basic techno-cultural hack." Now I go by the more illustrious title of "senior technology writer" for Salon.com. I've also got a side gig as a contributing editor to Newsweek, and I've managed to write one book so far, "Bots: The Origin of New Species," so I guess I'm getting somewhere. But I still feel mostly like a hack, which is nice, since these days I write mostly about hackers.
In January, a Netscape public relations executive asked me if I'd been covering Web browsers for very long. I took some pleasure in telling him that I'd been on the beat since before Netscape existed. I've been covering the Web and writing for the Web since early 1994, which feels like an awfully long time by now, though it certainly hasn't yet become boring. In addition to being published in Web outlets like Web Review, Hotwired and Salon, I've also appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Nation, Wired, the Far Eastern Economic Review and a whole bunch of places you've never heard of.
I live in Berkeley, Calif., with my wife, daughter, son, dog, cat and a few fish. I like to garden, read science fiction, build things out of Lego blocks and cook really spicy Szechuan Chinese food. I'm having the time of my reporting life covering free software, and hope people will enjoy reading what I've got to say half as much as I enjoy writing it.
E-mail: aleonard@salon.com
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